Specific GPO and EWQLSO questions.

[ceenda]

Well, I completely forgot about the EWQLSO Gold Orchestra Group Buy and missed it.

So, I'm now looking at Garritan Personal Orchestra and EWQLSO Silver. I don't want to start a vs. vs. vs. affair as there are already threads about that which I've been looking through today. But I have a few questions for owners of both packages. I would've posted this on Northern Sounds forum, but I know a few people here own both.

1 - Can you change the keymapping on instruments in GPO? I know that the keymapping is there to keep the samples in the range at which they were sampled, but supposing I want a string playing at C0, can I manually extend the keymapping down to C0 using the GPO Kontakt player? I've read that you can do this in EWQLSO Silver's Kompakt player.

2 - Is there any truth to the comments that the bass in GPO is not particularly "OOMPH!", for want of a better word? Surely this can be resolved with some bass boost and a bit of EQ adjusting?

3 - EWQLSO Silver demos have more of that Film Soundtrack style feel to them. Can the brass section and percussion in GPO, if handled well, achieve that kind of effect?

4 - I already have some choir sounds in the form of Peter Siedlaczek's Extended Classical Choir. However, I really like the sound of the EWQLSO choirs included in the package. Is that any real reason to go for EWQLSO instead of GPO?

Dolphin music has them both around the same price, but GPO is about £20 cheaper.

[zircon]

1 - Can you change the keymapping on instruments in GPO? I know that the keymapping is there to keep the samples in the range at which they were sampled, but supposing I want a string playing at C0, can I manually extend the keymapping down to C0 using the GPO Kontakt player? I've read that you can do this in EWQLSO Silver's Kompakt player.

I haven't messed much with keymapping myself, but I think that because GPO's sample player is pretty stripped down, you probably wouldn't be able to do it there. However, you CAN load the GPO library into the full version of Kontakt, and from that you can do just about anything you want.

2 - Is there any truth to the comments that the bass in GPO is not particularly "OOMPH!", for want of a better word? Surely this can be resolved with some bass boost and a bit of EQ adjusting?

I've never experienced any problems with the bass in GPO. I usually prefer using the ensemble "Basses Lush" patch in GPO to my QLSO Gold bass ensembles because it sounds good without taxing my RAM. EQ will definitely fix any perceived deficiencies, I'd say.

3 - EWQLSO Silver demos have more of that Film Soundtrack style feel to them. Can the brass section and percussion in GPO, if handled well, achieve that kind of effect?

Well, part of the reason Silver has that feel is because of the natural reverb from the recordings. GPO doesn't have that out of the box, so even if you sequence the instruments well, you're going to get more of a small-ensemble, chamber music feel unless you start using some effects processing. With the bundled Garritan Ambience reverb plugin, however, you should have no problem making the GPO sounds "big". In particular, I feel that the GPO percussion is easily adjusted to that film-score sound. The brass, unfortunately, isn't so hot, but I'm sure a skilled person could work with it.

www.zirconstudios.com/Kefka%20Mix.mp3

Take a listen to that, if you will. I attempted to create a Danny Elfman-style film score feel. It's *mostly* GPO, with some free samples for some of the ethnic percussion and QLSO Gold for the marcato string hits. I think I may have layered the GPO bass with the free Cadenza Strings soundfont.

4 - I already have some choir sounds in the form of Peter Siedlaczek's Extended Classical Choir. However, I really like the sound of the EWQLSO choirs included in the package. Is that any real reason to go for EWQLSO instead of GPO?

I'd say no way. The Classical Choir isn't the best thing I've ever heard, but it's WAY more usable than the VOTA parts included in Silver. The Silver choir samples are very limited in that they're loud, don't have many velocity layers, and have a lot of vibrato. In my opinion, they are only usable for a few select purposes. If you really like that apocalyptic sound, you might as well buy VOTA so you can get the extra choirs/articulations and the word-building utility so you can at least have flexibility.

Dolphin music has them both around the same price, but GPO is about £20 cheaper.

They're really two separate beasts. As you may have gathered by now, I own both QLSO Gold (got it in the group buy) and GPO - but I did buy GPO first over Silver, without knowing about the Gold buy. I think that GPO is much more flexible than Silver in a lot of ways, and it also comes with useful utilities and a less buggy sample-player.