EastWest Hollywood Strings

Both Silver and Gold are on sale, and I'm in the market, but know little about them. Are the Gold that much better sounding? Are there other strings I should consider? I'm not doing symphonic stuff, just dressing up various types of pop songs, but I want a good sound.
Thank you.
 
Hi,
I think the primary difference between silver and gold is that gold has the complete set of articulations, whereas silver is limited.

I've had EW HO diamond for quite some time and, to be honest, am not that happy with the strings.
A lof of the samples have clicks and percussive bow noises, and a surprising number of them are completely out of tune. There are whole patches that more or less can't be used.
It's also extremely intensive - Pointless trying to run it on anything other than a dedicated SSD.

I don't know how other suites do it but I find it really cumbersome trying to arrange something with a range of articulations.

I'd shop around, but I'm afraid I don't have any specific recommendations for you.
 
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Hi,
I think the primary difference between silver and gold is that gold has the complete set of articulations, whereas silver is limited.

I've had EW platinum for quite some time and, to be honest, am not that happy with the strings.
A lof of the samples have clicks and percussive bow noises, and a surprising number of them are completely out of tune. There are whole patches that more or less can't be used.
It's also extremely intensive - Pointless trying to run it on anything other than a dedicated SSD.

I don't know how other suites do it but I find it really cumbersome trying to arrange something with a range of articulations.

I'd shop around, but I'm afraid I don't have any specific recommendations for you.


Wow! Thanks for that.
 
I've been using the EW orchestral libraries since 2005 I think. I had and still have their legacy orchestral stuff loaded on Receptor by muse research which is not in business anymore. Naturally they didn't update their software interface for newer operating systems, so I ended up buying their Play version from Sweetwater. I can see some improvement from their original library. Both libraries are geared towards cinematic/big Stage type of sound. If this is going to be your only go to string (orchestral ) library then you should probably reconsider if that's not the style you record. Even their close mic (spot mic) samples are wet. That hall reverb is awesome but totally useless for pop music unless you layer them with dry and smaller sounding samples. In any case, you won't have that much control over reverb and all as it's recorded with the samples.
 
Have you tried the VSCO2 or Sonatina strings yet? I downloaded all of them from VST4free.com, and used the VSCOs the other day to create a real 'wall of strings' sound with the 'section' VSTis.
 
Thanks for those suggestions, and thanks to all for the wisdom.

I have been looking at SONiVOX - Orchestral Companion - Strings, and I've just about decided to buy them.
 
Sonivox's strings has a trial version so you should try them before buying to see if you like them. I'll also note that when I bought them from Audiodeluxe they were on sale for 1 dollar.
 
Are Garritan strings any better or worse than any other strings, generally speaking?

Not my first choice but I'm in the process of revisiting them after I went through the Eli Krantzberg tutorial on Groove3. He shows how to get a lot out of them.

They work in Aria Player, which is free (and not to be confused with the Aria London Symphony Strings libraries (currently on sale at VSTbuzz), which require the full version of Kontakt).

Paj
8^)
 
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