Philharmonik or GPO

[Squids]

I hardly think Devon's posts were "aggressive" considering that there are also two bonafide esoundz "sales pitches" in the same thread...

Btw I'm a happy esoundz customer...just sayin'

You know, I really like reading what Luca said. He has some great points. No matter how you slice it these samples are never going to be as good as the real thing. But, they are captures of the real thing and they can be used as flavors in your music... but what IS the flavor? That's the key part that is so hard to describe in a spec. Perhaps the aspect of it that many of Philharmonik's sounds were recorded in the Dvorak hall in Prague where Dvorak himself performed. There's some character there! Then you have a very accomplished musician, a picky one doing it for the love of it and for himself, conducting the sample sessions and not behind the console but RIGHT IN THE FACE of the musician pushing them to give them some FEELING!

I've done a lot of sample sessions and with orchestral players as soon as you take them out of the context of music you are in a volatile situation where if you go too far one way for consistency you can get sterile performances and if you go the other way you can get incosistencies... especially if you are hell bent on going for a certain "spec".

In the end, whatever sounds good sounds good. There are times where I want a million velocities and there are times where one or two is just fine (because you also have other ways to change the volume and timbre anyway). But, having something emotional in the instrument sample itself proves to be very inspiring and does the magic sometimes. If it is like a note plucked out of The New World Symphony or something it can MAKE a piece of music sound beautiful.

I think if one is doing classical music mock ups or fully simulating an orchestra for film scoring and needs every variety of mood then they MUST have Philharmonik in their set up but surely have other things too (like you guys have mentioned). But, if you are doing other styles of music such as pop, rock, jazz, alternative, electronic then Miroslav Philharmonik could be all you need. It layers into those styles of music so well! The funny thing is that on KVR most people do those styles of music, not classical anyway! So, believe me, Miroslav Philharmonik (regardless if you have or want to get GPO) is a VERY VERY nice addition to your set up and chances are you will agree with me when you start to use it... in a musical context it speaks louder than any words I can say or anyone else. You hear it in your song, or your client does or whatever you are doing and when you get that big "YEAH that sounds great" thing from it then you know whether it was worth it or not. That's all that matters.

[atmajian]

Hello, everyone! The orchestral plug-in comparison discussion topics have always been my favorite and always very helpful, and so I am, as always, very thankful to everyone giving their perspectives and thoughts on the matter.

I myself usually work with real orchestras and for a long time used external samplers for mockuping and it is just lately that I have been using orchestral plug-ins as tools for previewing of what will happen.

From that perspetive, I can say that, for me personally, Philharmonik is all I need for now, as I am always more interesting in getting the life, color and evocation from my mockup sketching than big precision and perfect level simulation, as you can never get that anyway. I've tried GPO and it is great too in many different ways, but for expression and the feel or an instrumentalist, I have to give Philharmonik the lead.

First of all, I think we have to differenciate the module and the library - Miroslav Vitous' sample has always been taken as a typical "european" philharmony, and in perfect honesty, it does sound like that. Miroslav clearly asked for classical type of performace from the players during recording sessions, and as much as that maybe gives a "classical" feeling, on the other hand it delivers a unique life, lush and beauty to the sounds, something I'm not sure is present in other libraries.

The only thing I'm having problems with are strings, with regard to high notes, i.e. violas and violins ... From what I can say after a lot of sound sculpturing, it takes some time before you configure high strings presets for all types of musical events, and some fancy orchestrating ideas to mask the giveaway limitations string samples sometimes have. But, on the other hand, with enough time spent on shaping of their articulation and expression types, they can deliver exactly what is necessary for almost every type of orchestral music, and that is the string warmth, harmonics and fullness.

Philharmonik as a module, on the other hand, from what I can hear from experienced plug-in users, has maybe the best and the most intuitive user interface ever released among plug-in applications, and the Sampletank engine that Philharmonik is powered by is widely recognized as one of the most powerful among its competitors, and truly offers some great sample tweaks.

All in all, GPO has a lot of many times mentioned qualities, but Philharmonik with Vitous' samples still stands as library category for itself.

Now, with the first year of Philharmonik on the market behind us, I decided to post a demo of this plug-in praised by so many and would really appreciate the thoughts of all you other Philharmonik users on this library and module.

This is a 6-minute suite of a score I recently did for a theater play, originally performed by a real orchestra. I thought the work was done, but then I got an idea of trying to see how the same music would sound like performed by Philharmonik that I purchased, like I said, for sketching reasons primarely. So I decided to take the original orchestrations, rearrange them, re-orchestrate the original score and to make a mockup by using Philharmonik as a sole resource. And, to make things more complicated and representative of Philharmonik's quality, I decided to do a couple more unusual things:

First of all, use only one module for the entire suite, recording it figure by figure, and then glueing them together.

Secondly, use raw samples from the library, i.e. without any sound shaping or tweaking, and with the Attack and Release time in ENV1 being the only parameter changed according to the needs of the patch.

And, finally, to try doing everything in 24 hours, that is perfoming parts on the keyboard, editing events and everything that follows.

This was all for pure demonstration reasons, to see how Vitous' samples sound with their default sound settings (i.e. most natural).

Therefore, I also left out the entire mastering process, patching only Philharmonik's Reverb with its default settings in send mode.

This was all, again, for pure test reasons. Instead of shaping every single part for every figure, I deliberately used default settings and tried to make it in a hurry, as most mockupers have to, just to see how far clean and unmodified Miroslav can go.

So, here is the result, in the URL on the bottom.

I would be very grateful for all your comments.

P.S. Please, don't listen to it in lo-fi.

Thanks in advance!

[url]http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemus ... dID=644479[/url]

I'm really sorry, I can't seem to make a direct URL link, so please paste the address in the address bar. Sorry again for the inconvinience.

[s_sibs]

Nice mockup atmajian. I have Philharmonik and agree with everything you said about it. I don't do ochestral scoring (I do mostly pop/rock stuff). Philharmonik is more than enough for my need.

[jacobh]

Nice tune atmajian! Not a bad mockup either.

[atmajian]

Thank you very much. Imagine how it would sound if I sculptured the sounds.

[Chester Desmond]

atmajian, that was a very good example of the "raw" power of the Philharmonik..thanks very much for doing that, shows a lot more than official demos where you don't know just how much massaging was done.
I'm also trying to make the decision between GPO and Miroslav (although I will also look into some of the others mentioned here) and 2 things that I seem to understand from this thread and other sources are:
1) Miroslav is more emotive (the samples themselves)than GPO if viewed from a performance perspective ..ie GPO would have less stylistic colouring, like vibrato for example, in the samples.
2) which leads to the idea that Miroslav might be a little more friendly towards an untrained person (like myself) who wants to compose mostly for fun without having (or indeed knowing how) to focus on the use of articulations and controllers to make the samples sound more real..
Am I sort of correct in these 2 assumptions?
I won't be doing a lot of realtime performance, but more stringing passages together and my "Style" uses a lot of long droning notes and atonal dark passages. I also like violent starts and stops and shrieking high notes from the violins (I am big fan of Penderecki if that helps) so I am looking for something that will allow for that kind of thing if possible.
Any comments would be more than welcome.

[lavoll]

slightly OT, but the film i mentioned might be getting some millions extra for post, so my score might be rerecorded with a symphonic orchestra that will be fun.

[Ildon]

and a jazz pianist was just in my studio to record a christmas gift.. his choice for the strings after hearing them all: The Roland JV orchestral expansion board, and especially patch 1 Warm violins hehe. (but with a helping of eastwest on a cello solo part).

so for me theres definately no "best". just variations on a theme.

Haha, are you serious? That's cool. I also like the warm violins patch. You can find a much better version of that patch in Edirol Orchestral (or at least it sounds that way.)

I haven't used Philharmonik, but I'm pretty happy with GPO, but it's got a few quirks. GPO does sound very sterile and to me it sounds pretty lo-fi, so I don't use it as much as I use Edirol Orchestral and Dimension Pro, believe it or not.

Just a word of advice: if you see MOTU Symphonic Instrument, avoid it like the black death.

I would check out Peter Siedlejkhaahaa's Classical Orchestral too, that one sounded great.

[Kim Lajoie]

I'm also trying to make the decision between GPO and Miroslav (although I will also look into some of the others mentioned here) and 2 things that I seem to understand from this thread and other sources are:
1) Miroslav is more emotive (the samples themselves)than GPO if viewed from a performance perspective ..ie GPO would have less stylistic colouring, like vibrato for example, in the samples.
2) which leads to the idea that Miroslav might be a little more friendly towards an untrained person (like myself) who wants to compose mostly for fun without having (or indeed knowing how) to focus on the use of articulations and controllers to make the samples sound more real..
Am I sort of correct in these 2 assumptions?

You understand well. The key about the Miroslav collection is the sheer beauty of the sounds themselves. You can certainly just sit down and just play, and sound great. The included ensemble patches are particularly good for this. I use them for initial sketches before writing individual parts, and they sound so good I have to really think about whether I want to keep the sketches or not.

I won't be doing a lot of realtime performance, but more stringing passages together and my "Style" uses a lot of long droning notes and atonal dark passages. I also like violent starts and stops and shrieking high notes from the violins (I am big fan of Penderecki if that helps) so I am looking for something that will allow for that kind of thing if possible.
Any comments would be more than welcome.

Be aware that Miroslav Philharmonik doesn't have a particularly "aggressive" sound - it's more of a lyrical, emotional sound. So maybe it's not the #1 choice if you're all aobut shrieking violins.

-Kim.

[DevonB]

Be aware that Miroslav Philharmonik doesn't have a particularly "aggressive" sound - it's more of a lyrical, emotional sound. So maybe it's not the #1 choice if you're all aobut shrieking violins.

-Kim.

As the way I used to look at the libraries back 10 years ago, Miro was the soft, emotional library and Peter Sl... ya, however you spell his name.. was for the more 'aggressive' pieces. The "Shrieking" violin parts are going to be in Violin FX banks, if a library has an effects bank. Some do, some are nice to work with, some I've found to be pretty much worthless and unuable for myself. I'd have to go digging back through my libraries to find who had a good shrieking bank. I *THINK* GOS did, but I will NOT swear by it.

Devon