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+--- Thread: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions (/showthread.php?tid=45)
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Paul Battersby - 05-30-2016
The Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra appears in the List of free sample libraries but I wanted to start a thread specifically for this library where people can discuss the SSO library and or share any corrections, updates or enhancements.
To get started, see my blog post about Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra where I provide additional articulations and key switches for Trumpets, French Horns, Trombones, Tuba, 1st Violins, 2nd Violins, Violas, Celli, Basses, Flutes.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Otto Halmén - 05-30-2016
My top tip is to augment the library with an intimately recorded piano bank. Sometimes, especially for piano-led tracks, you might want to mix the piano so that it's in front of everything else, and the one that comes with SSO is perhaps a bit too distant-sounding for this. Our list of free sample libraries has a few suitable piano libs.
Another tip I have is to avoid any other type of panning than regular pan (balance) pots. Stereo panners and width controls in general tend to do weird things to the ambience baked into the samples. This, of course, probably applies for other non-anechoic libraries as well.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Mattias Westlund - 05-31-2016
(05-30-2016, 08:41 PM)Otto Halmén Wrote: Another tip I have is to avoid any other type of panning than regular pan (balance) pots. Stereo panners and width controls in general tend to do weird things to the ambience baked into the samples. This, of course, probably applies for other non-anechoic libraries as well.
This probably depends a whole lot on exactly which stereo panners and samples we're talking about, but I have found the complete opposite to be true in most cases. I.e. a stereo panner will preserve the stereo information when panning which to my ears sounds much more natural than a balance panner, which will basically discard half the stereo information if you're moving things far to the sides. If you're going to use a balance panner you might as well use mono samples for the stuff that goes far to the left and right and save some RAM. But YMMV I guess.
Having said that, yes, width controls can sometimes cause problems if you make a signal with a lot of baked ambience narrower, probably becase of phase issues as the two near-identical stereo channels get nudged closer together.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Otto Halmén - 05-31-2016
Stereo panning (i.e. move the right channel away from hard right when panning a stereo track to the left and vice versa) seems to make perfect sense on paper. With an XY microphone setup, for example, isn't this pretty much what happens to the direct signal if you move an instrument section around the microphones? Depending on the room, the ambience would of course change in more complex ways.
The thing is, about 9 out of 10 times I audition panning and width controls for instruments, the primitive balance knob somehow sounds slightly better to me. So yeah, my mileage definitely seems to vary. Still not gonna stop auditioning all kinds of stuff from time to time, though.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Mattias Westlund - 05-31-2016
First of all let me emphasize that I am not even remotely experienced enough with stereo micing to have a clear and definitive stance on this matter. I think it might be a question for Samulis maybe?
But yeah, moving the sound source to one side in an X/Y setup will retain the stereo image (and like you say, the way the ambience is picked up will change). That's what stereo micing is for, after all. So because of that, stereo panning makes more sense to me. A balance panner OTOH amounts to basically the same thing as turning down the gain on one of the X/Y mics.
At the end of the day these are more or less subtle differences though that won't very noticeable in a mix, especially when you bring a send reverb into the equation. So just do whatever works best for you
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Mattias Westlund - 05-31-2016
Sorry for the OT Paul!
Back on topic: digging through my Samples dir I came across some 180MB of WIP violin samples from the very earliest incarnation of SSO (deep in a subfolder within a subfolder named "deprecated"). These samples are dated December 6 2009, i.e. more than a year before the 1.0 release, and features some kind of divisi setup with 6+6 violins. Sustain and detache. I'm not 100% sure but a quick A/B makes me think these aren't any of the samples that ended up in the final release. The ambience is different, and they have kind of a different character overall. But it's really hard to tell as the samples aren't normalized and looped unlike the 1.0 ones.
There's a section of 6 celli as well, though nowhere near as detailed. Haven't checked whether these are the actual SSO final samples, but I don't think so given the date.
Would this be of interest to anyone? Be aware that I'm not going to offer them as a nicely edited and ready-to-use package. I'd be happy to upload the samples as is and let anyone do with them what they will, but nothing more than that.
Edit: it appears that the violins have both a 12 piece section, rendered together, as well as individual 6 piece divisi sections. It might be that the 12 piece one ended up as either 1st or 2nd violins in the final release but I can't say for sure without further comparing.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Mattias Westlund - 06-01-2016
Well SSO enthusiasts are going to have a field day, that's for sure.
I have managed to locate a whole bunch of even earlier samples from the project that would later become SSO. I thought the December 2009 ones were the earliest but it appears I have samples dating as far back as late August 2009. Looking through them I realize that this is stuff I believed was lost forever. I suffered a hdd crash sometime in October or November that year and remember losing a whole bunch of samples that weren't backed up. I thought these were among them but it appears they have been sitting all along in a "Temp" folder on my E: drive. There's violins with a few different articulations, plus violas, celli, basses, horns and trombones, all of them chromatically(!) sampled.
I have copied all files over to a different dir and ordered them by date, along with a bunch of other outtakes and abandoned attempts at updating the library in more recent years.
![[Image: sso-leftovers.gif]](http://mattiaswestlund.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/sso-leftovers.gif)
There's still a bit of sorting to do, but I will figure out a way of sharing this once I'm done.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Paul Battersby - 06-02-2016
This must be a sign from Apollo the Greek god of music (and other things) encouraging you to put out a rev 1.1 of the SSO library.
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - bigcat1969 - 06-02-2016
You know I'll be excited!
RE: Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra additions - Otto Halmén - 06-02-2016
This is wonderful!
Are these dry samples or ones to which you've already added a Bricasti M7 impulse response?