Gypsy - first thoughts

[Mr. Tunes]

so East West Gypsy arrived today, as per usual from soundsonline it was shipped fedex so there wasn't much of a waiting time. I got dinged $60 in taxes at the door though.

well hmmm, i can't say i'm floored by this purchase in any way. there are some impressive attributes and surely i'll be able to make good use of this, but it's not like RA at all. from what i can tell, EW probably spent too much resources on putting RA together, and eventually it's price got lowered to half, so it seems like on Gypsy they knew the price point out the gate and decided to not give away as much as RA did. this is unfortunate cause if you don't like the 13 instruments supplied here you'll find yourself a little high and dry. On the flipside of course, you know what instruments are here, you can listen to the demos and decide if you need this. I myself have a great interest in music of the balkans and really needed this.

iLok authorization went over quite smoothly compared to when i once had to do that with the Waves Ren bundle. unfortunately though you can't try any of the instruments out before authorization which is something I know the IK libraries let you do(for like a week is it?). If i was given that option I likely would have sent the library back(meh i say that but i never return stuff often - i usually spend a long time researching purchases).

I loaded the Play engine into Cubase 4 and the first thing it did was crash. I wasn't suprised so I installed all the updates including the gypsy library updates on soundsonline.com and the next time I loaded it it was fine. The interface is quite interesting, pleasant to look at, but it takes a bit of time to figure out how exactly it works. Not very hard but on one tune I was doodling I hit the Replace option on a sample thinking it would just swap out that one patch but replace means it will replace the entire set of patches with the one you selected, with no undo from what I can tell. Great way to ruin a session in two seconds flat.

I'm using a very recently built machine, it has 2 gigs of ram in it and intel core2duo 4300. The reverb is fine for like one patch but since this is a convolution verb it doesn't hold up well on multiple patches. sounds nice from what i can tell so far. there's also a delay, a steep filter(not sure if i can change the pole) an adsr and ADT(dont know what this means yet), also some options for your stereo field. All in all the more I was playing with these things the more my system resisted. Eventually it got to the point where putting a reverb on a patch made the thing spatter and cry, flipped the verb off and sound was back to normal.

After about 5 patches getting loaded my machine couldn't take it and it definitely needed a restart. I will have to learn more about memory management on this one. I found on RA i was able to push it pretty far. The play engine is flashier in appearance than the kontakt player, from what i can tell it sounds better(that also has to do with the samples you're loading), but all in all it seems far more cpu intensive than its predecessor.

So the sounds - the violin is awesome! there's this legato patch it comes with and it's totally great. the guitars sound great as well, but the accordions... ummmmm yeah. from what i can tell it's going to take a lot of work to get these things to really huff and puff with life-like quality. the quality of the samples themselves are nice, but yeah not many performance options on these. i'm quite disappointed from what i can tell so far, but i'll have to give it a more thorough workout to make this decision 100%. 4 instruments out of the 13 are accordion and yeah i'm quite upset. on the bandoneon they didnt even sample a set of intense chord gusts or anything to get that gypsy feel.

trombone is interesting and also has a legato sliding patch, but i'm not sold on this at all yet. i have no clue why they left clarinet out of this instrument. the patch selection is grim to begin with and then they dont even give you a clarinet. cimbalon sounded interesting but i already have a lot of stuff like that already. and as a guitar player i wasn't thrilled that i knew this was going to be the strength of the library, but it will come in very convenient to have your django, flamenco and classical guitars all nicely mic'd and ready to go for your tracks. oh and the round robin stuff i tried so far sounds good.

[Rabban]

Thanks for the review!

I, too, was interested in Gypsy (as well as Voices of Passion and StormDrum 2). Was holding off purchasing them until I heard from people about the new Play engine.

My machine is getting a little long in the tooth (3.4 GHz P4) but it has served me well for the last 3 years and I am not about to upgrade until late next year or the following year. I have heard that the Play-engine libraries were CPU intensive and was worried that it would cause problems on my "obselete" and "out-dated" computer.

Seems some of the instruments are hit-or-miss...

Again, Mr. Tunes, thanks for your opinions and review of Gypsy.

Cheers, mate.

Rabban

[Mr. Tunes]

hey rabban, yeah if you're on an older machine i think you can expect that this library will work in very limited proportions, ie no reverb, few instruments, lots of bouncing etc. cause yeah it's quite intensive on my computer which i have found recently to be a beast with writing music yet gypsy makes it feel feeble.

i'm still considering voices of passion, that one would probably be easier to work with cause it's not a huge ensemble maker like gypsy or fab four is. you can get your sound out of it and move on whereas gypsy you'd be a bit more tied to the original instance of the vst being there.

and again i wouldn't want to be absolutely quoted on the hit or miss aspect to the samples, people who know accordion samples from the past are likely to be impressed, but i thought they were going to take this one to the next level. accordion and trombone are not easy instruments to replicate digitally as well cause of the air flow they use in real life.

i would welcome any tutorial videos by the company to see how they intended the samples to be played. that way i could be tempted to shut my lid a bit on criticizing the playability of the samples.

[Rabban]

Thanks for the feedback.

hey rabban, yeah if you're on an older machine i think you can expect that this library will work in very limited proportions, ie no reverb, few instruments, lots of bouncing etc. cause yeah it's quite intensive on my computer which i have found recently to be a beast with writing music yet gypsy makes it feel feeble.

I have been happily bouncing-to-tracks for years so it is no big deal for me, but, yeah, I fugure that I would have some big limitations on my current setup.

and again i wouldn't want to be absolutely quoted on the hit or miss aspect to the samples

No problem. I did not mean to imply that I am holding you solely responsible for judging the samples as possibly hit-or-miss. I have heard a few criticisms about the Play-engine sample libraries (some on Sounds on Line forums) and from users on other forums. I was looking forward to the accordian, though, since I am doing a mockup similar to the simple accordian/piano opening of DeVotchka's song, "How It Ends", which can also be heard on the trailer music for the movie "Everything Is Illuminated".

[griels]

Have to say I was impressed by the violin sounds I heard in the Gypsy demos, although the Garritan Strad can do some mean gypsy style fiddling (check the demo pages).

Myself, I picked up VSL Solo Strings (Giga) on sale recently and am very happy with it (especially the legato patches), and while it doesn't offer the degree of playability of Garritan or Gypsy, it's great for small string sections and the odd unexposed solo. With a lot of programming you can get it sound good unexposed too, just takes a long time to select all the relevant articulations. I think there is a K2 script for VSL which does VSL VI Matrix-like stuff - got to check that out.

Regarding Accordions, not something I've investigated to any great degree, but I'm rather fond of Peti VST. Doesn't offer all the creaking and groaning of the real thing but would probably work nicely unexposed.

Voices of Passion sounds very interesting but I've heard reports the legato sounds a little synthetic. The demos on the webpage sound good but consist mainly of stock phrases I gather.

Interesting that the performance is bad - perhaps it's optimised towards running in an x64 host? (not that there are many practical options for this other than Sonar IMO).

[Mr. Tunes]

I was looking forward to the accordian, though, since I am doing a mockup similar to the simple accordian/piano opening of DeVotchka's song, "How It Ends", which can also be heard on the trailer music for the movie "Everything Is Illuminated".

hah well now you're reminding me that a weird piano would've rounded this collection off alongside the clarinet. anyways i'll work through it fast and i'm sure i'll be happy with it when i put it to good use soon. the violin is weepy and sad it's very realistic.

Interesting that the performance is bad - perhaps it's optimised towards running in an x64 host? (not that there are many practical options for this other than Sonar IMO).

well now it all makes more sense to me. i hope they release a lofi version of this plugin if that's the case.

[Rabban]

Griels, thanks for the link to Peti VST. Will give the demo a go tomorrow.

Good luck and happy playin' with Gypsy, Mr. Tunes. Hope you are able to find it usable (at least most of the instruments) in your projects.

[Yossarian]

from what i can tell, EW probably spent too much resources on putting RA together, and eventually it's price got lowered to half, so it seems like on Gypsy they knew the price point out the gate and decided to not give away as much as RA did.

I don't think that's the case. EW's pricing policy seems pretty consistent: introduce new VSTi and, when early sales (mostly to professionals that don't care too much about price but want to use the sounds before they get "old") taper off, have a group buy which lowers the price to almost half. Then, some time after the group buy, the price is permanently lowered to "group buy level" or thereabouts. Seems to have worked pretty well for them so far.

/Yoss

[Mr. Tunes]

from what i can tell, EW probably spent too much resources on putting RA together, and eventually it's price got lowered to half, so it seems like on Gypsy they knew the price point out the gate and decided to not give away as much as RA did.

I don't think that's the case. EW's pricing policy seems pretty consistent: introduce new VSTi and, when early sales (mostly to professionals that don't care too much about price but want to use the sounds before they get "old") taper off, have a group buy which lowers the price to almost half. Then, some time after the group buy, the price is permanently lowered to "group buy level" or thereabouts. Seems to have worked pretty well for them so far.

/Yoss

right well they could've easily made Gypsy a larger package and charged a higher price for it, but it seems as if they wanted to do a bunch of cool libraries at once and sort see what flies. i mean the fab four demos sound like there's a lot to pick from in that library, and Gypsy is sort of like this "here you go freaky film composers, we'll give you something special for you but not make it too crazy".

It's good, but most of the instruments in this collection are of similar calibre to RA and there's like such a shorter list compared to it. They could've sampled big horn sections doing wild stuff and all sorts of different instruments that have a cute sound.

i have felt and still do feel in a hard place cause the library was geared towards my interests and they reeled me in pretty fast but i'm not overly joyous of the results so far.