AAX Samplers

[Dave Modisette]

Looking for suggestions. The Xpand2 is nice but I'm needing more articulations in the Brass and Woodwinds. Short Falls, long falls, shakes and that sort of thing.

What's the best one to look at?

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Dave Modisette

Looking for suggestions. The Xpand2 is nice but I'm needing more articulations in the Brass and Woodwinds. Short Falls, long falls, shakes and that sort of thing.

What's the best one to look at?

Depends on what specific instruments and music styles you're encountering. For general brass and winds there's East West Play engine libraries in Symphonic Orchestra and Hollywood Orchestra series. Strictly symphonic there's Vienna Symphony which has it's own playback engine. There's also Chris Hein Horns available from Soundsonline and that is Kontakt engine IIRC. Hein has sax which doesn't show up in a lot of libraries. Another good library is Sample Modeling Sax Brothers which is another Kontakt engine library. Something to keep in mind is that sax doesn't tend to show particularly well in library lists because strictly speaking it's not classically considered brass or winds but a reed instrument and I've yet to see a library that has that subsection of instruments. And that's funny because there are other reed instruments that fall into those two categories!

A lot depends on whether you want to go outside of using xpand2 to another vi. The EW stuff is excellent (I have some of their libraries) but tends to love having a fast disk system (preferably ssd) for optimal live performance. Something that will really help with brass and winds is using a breath controller along with the mod wheel to bring out the expressiveness possible in these libraries. Strict keyboard or note by note entry from a computer keyboard will give you a nice sound but not the best.

[ronwasserman]

Kontakt. It's the only way to go imho.

Then you can get libraries like this: http://www.spitfireaudio.com which are so astoundingly great. There are MANY others as well with your specific needs that are creating stellar libraries.

Absolutely blows Structure and Play away.

Again, just my two cents.

[groundcontrol]

^^^ What he said 100% ^^^!!!

Also do check out: Project SAM, LASS, 8Dio, Cinesamples & Soundiron for top notch scoring tools.

[Dave Modisette]

Kontact seems to be the leading candidate. I'll have a look at that platform.

I'm only using it for studio use so I don't think that I'm going to run into hard disk issues.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Dave Modisette

Kontact seems to be the leading candidate. I'll have a look at that platform.

I'm only using it for studio use so I don't think that I'm going to run into hard disk issues.

That doesn't matter. If you want good performance and I'm sure you do, a fast data delivery system is a must, either a fast spinner os an ssd. This isn't Sonar that will allow you to get away with just about anything and still run. If you don't have a fast delivery system then you'll be sorely disappointed with whatever library you get.