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Personal Orchestra (GPO)

Strings / Orchestral Plugin by Garritan
MyKVRFAVORITE66WANT7
$149.95

Personal Orchestra (GPO) has an average user rating of 3.83 from 6 reviews

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User Reviews by KVR Members for Personal Orchestra (GPO)

Personal Orchestra (GPO)

Reviewed By nexussynth [all]
September 19th, 2004
Version reviewed: 1.0.2 on Windows

I have been using the Garritan Personal Orchestra since it came out last year. In fact, I'm told I'm the first customer, so I have a lot of experience with this. Just let me say up front that I have been waiting most of my adult life for such a product to come along with as much control and sound quality for so little money. Really, its THAT good!
GPO requires that you put in the work to get the most realistic sounding performances of your music, but gee, its not THAT much work! You can be up and running in an hour and though some quibble about the brass being thin, you just apply some eq and reverb and it will sound VERY realistic indeed. My advice is to make heavy use of the excellent 'overlay' patches which use more aggresive samples which also make very good solo instruments by themselves.
Though I use SONAR for my sequencing, I have to use the VSTi version 'wrapped' by Cakewalk's own very good wrapping program. This is to eliminate a 'tempo change bug' problem NI has with ALL their players, including Kontakt. So just don't bother with DXi and you'll be fine.
The strings come from the very excellent Garritan Orchestral Strings collection, but with less sampling and articulations. Really though, for 90% of orchestral composing you won't miss them. But you get really good solo strings that have enough patches to make your own ensembles, and this points up a VERY important aspect of 'GPO' versus other libraries: you approach scoring with GPO just as you would for a real orchestra. You make up your chords and unisons with many solo instruments as a real orchestra is made up of many solo players in ensemble. This adds much subtle variety to unison lines as unlike 'pre-sampled' unisons in other libraries, the attacks and releases and other artifacts of performance aren't locked in and repeated identically for each note. This is something that should not be overlooked and is the personal philosophy of Gary Garritan regarding orchestral mock-ups and in my experience, it works!
There is less of a bombastic instant gratification with this library then others because there are not a myriad of articulations and sampled-in concert hall ambience. GPO does include a fine VST reverb you can use. I prefer to use some other excellent reverbs I have but that is nice because you can get a truly intimate sounding space with this library which has been difficult with those others offering 'built-in' ambience and release trails, etc.
My favorite sections is the woodwinds which I find so well done that often you can forget you are listening to a sampled orchestration. The demos on the Garritan website bear this out and were not 'juiced up' to mask defiencies in the samples. Really.
There are issues with Mac users and Logic, but this is appearing to affect many other sample developers as well.
The bottom line for me is sound quality and ease of use, one of which I got with my old Gigastudio setup but not the other. GPO makes orchestral music fun!
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