Real Sounding Strings Please!!

Please help me know if any of U have found the "pure" violin and cello sounds. NO synths will ever create the real thing, eh? Samplers? Downloads? Virtual Strings?? Thanx in advance for reply's... ...JT

go to marcati.com and check out Miroslav Vitous's Virtual Orchestra. Bring your checkbook (full library is about 3800 bucks) Also check out Advanced Orchestra from east-west sounds. Also for Strings..the Kirk Hunter library. They are all good but offer different qualities. Miroslav is the more "emotive" library and was sampled in large hall setting with virtual stereo placement..exactly where they sit. The other libraries are "dryer" and..more of a "studio quality". They are miked closer up. Most goes I know..use ALL of the above libraries and mix them together. Great article on this at soniccontrol.com. It compares all the libraries. I bought the Miroslav "mini" cd..which is basically an overview "mono" looped version of the main libraries. It was about 349. If you want it real..its gonna cost you. But, its worth it.

DCORNUTT---You are TOO cool man--Thanx...JT

I own a kurzweil k2000 and a korg triton. Although I have to tweak both judiciously to achieve my desired sound, I would break it down like this...... Love the orch and strings available for the kurz, all the "natural-real inst. sounds", and the Triton is my fave for dance hiphop techno stuff right out of the box. I use the kurz sampler all the time, and still havent sampled much on the Triton. Im a man of conveinence, and I know the kurzweil inside and out, I have just been lazy with the triton with certain details I am comfortable with on the k2000s. In a nutshell, buy the Kurzweil.......

I like Roland, Emu and Kurzweil strings, in that order. Which one I prefer at any given moment depends on the song. They all take a bit of tweaking (usually "attack," I've found) to get a natural sound, depending on the passage. Some passages require more tweaking than others. ------------------ - Michael

G., I have been impressed with the Korg Triton sampler/synth keyboard's strings. You might check 'em out if you haven't already. Jim T.

The strings I'm talking about (Miroslav, etc) are of a real orchestra sampled in great detail..then..put together in different formats...Kurz being one of them. The program ROMs in most synths are very limited in size. If you consider that most ROMs are 8 to 16megs for your whole synth/sampler...you can imagine that the amount of actual sampled material in the sounds..is very minimal, looped, and keymapped across large sections of the instrument range. Some of the Miroslav samples are 30 megs or more..for ONE instrument..playing at ONE dynamic..and there are 9 different dynamics of violin alone! This material is not looped..but instead..includes exquisite natural releases (the entire attack, sustain, vibrato and release). Further..the timbre of the instrument changes as you go up the register, or down, as there are more samples under each note..with fewer breaks in register. I have certainly heard some good attempts at strings..on most synths you mention. I have always liked the strings on my Kurz, its the brass/woodwinds that seem less convincing to me. But, after playing with the Miroslav samples for just an hour...I couldn't even listen to the strings on my Kurz anymore...they sounded very "synth like" compared to the Miroslav strings. This isn't even getting into the brass/woodwinds..where..the instruments actually "tune"..slight variations in pitch (controlled thru MP..monopressure). 3 violins sounds like 3 violins. In the Miroslav Lib..3 violins..or 11 violins are actually 3 or 11 different violin samples..not one..doubled. This becomes important because..if you have the same violin sample dupped many times..youll get phasing problems. The draw back to all this is simply cost. Not only in money..but..in convienience and..polyphony/ram issues. But I have to say..after trying many different synth/sampler strings..that none of the premanufactured ROM's can even come close to the realism of these libraries. That said, not everyone really needs this. If you are just laying out a synth pad for something..its overkill to spend 3800 bucks and have to bounce to disk just for a few violin parts. But, when you have to have it as real as it can get...then..this is the way to go. In my mind, we are talking about 2 different things entirely. The synth/strings of built in ROM programs of Kurz, EMU..etc..are entirely different animal..than the sample CD's you can buy for them. When I was speaking of Kurz sounds good..etc..I was simply speaking in terms of the sound quality of the hardware itself...not the included sound ROM's per se. The Sample CD's are available in different formats. Mirolsav is available for anything. Advanced orchestra is available for Akai and EMU samplers. Just wanted to clear that up. dcornutt