Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra

I'll start off with what I consider to be among the best in the free orchestral sample library category. Sonatina has samples fitting what you'd expect from an orchestral pack, including:

Strings (2 violins, violas, celli and basses all in pizzicato, staccato and sustain), choirs (male, female and mixed);
Brass (horns, trombones, trumpets, tubas all with staccato and sustain);
Woodwinds (flutes, clarinets, oboes, piccolo, cor anglais, bassoons and contrabassoon most with solo and sustain);
Various Percussion (such as timps, cymbals, tamtam, chimes bass drum, snare and more);
Concert Harp;
Grand Piano.

This pack's quality is really what makes it so great, all the sounds are excellent, with no weak links and a richness and realism to the sounds which you usually have to cough up for. Some examples of the sounds can be heard in this youtube video:

Sample

The strings in particular sound great, and even though I now use EWQL I still prefer to use the strings from this pack on occasion. The piano is a little weak and I feel I've found some better free pianos but there' nothing particularly wrong with it. The harp is a nice addition with a rich sound to it. The percussion is the same as the piano; good but could be better. The brass is also great for a free sample. I've always found brass to be the most difficult section to find good free samples for, as big epic cinematic ones do require time and effort to create and largely because of that good ones are seldom free. However, the brass here is quite good among the best brass freebies for sure with the horns especially being very effective.

Here's a little sample of my work where I used this pack (almost) exclusively

Here's the download link for Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra

You will also need this SFZ player in order to use the library

Simply save the SFZ player as a VST plugin and use it to open the SFZ files from the SSO library. A common error is that adding more than one instrument creates static. If this occurs, copy and paste your SFZ player and save it as sfz1 sfz2 sfz3 etc. and then use a separate one for each instrument.

Hope this helps,
Gareth.

Introduction

This is my first post on this blog (or any blog for that matter), so I thought I'd write a little about myself and my intentions for, and reasons behind creating, this blog.

The aim of this blog is simple: To bring together as many free samples, soundfonts, VSTs and other musical compositional tools as possible.

Here's a little on my background: I have been writing music since the age of twelve, when I first started to learn the guitar. A natural progression from that was to learn to play the bass guitar and the drums, followed by (albeit very basic) piano.

Having played in bands for a few years I eventually decided to put all my focus on writing soundtrack music (movies, video games, trailers, you get the idea), however when I first started out with basic software I found myself spending hours and hours on forums and looking through dozens of pages of google results. Being on a tight budget I was mainly looking for free samples or plugins.

Having spent the last 2 or 3 years looking out for these elusive freebies, I decided to make this blog and share some of the best free music samples/plugins I can find, to save other musicians from spending the excruciating hours I did searching for them. I don't consider myself an expert, and I don't claim this blog/list to be fully comprehensive, there's a lot of stuff out there and I'm simply trying to save others the time it took me to find the free aspects of my current library. Some will be left out, either because I'm not familiar enough with them (yet), because I haven't heard of them (yet), or simply because I don't consider them to be worth getting a hold of.

On a side note, I'll admit I've started paying for samples recently but that's just because I had some money lying around and decided to put it to good use, but none the less I still frequently use many of the samples I'll be posting about here.

So feel free to subscribe if you're just starting out and want a good foundation to your sample libraries or even if you're an experienced writer who just wants to ensure you're not missing out on anything.

Thanks,
Gareth.