Wednesday 30 January 2013

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.

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