I have Garritan Personal Orchestra, and if it’s anything like instant orchestra it’s not that much better than sonatina. It is better than sonatina but still suffers from the same main problem, that there aren’t enough articulations.
The really good libraries are going to really, really cost you. However there is this:
Which I currently subscribe to and highly recommend. $30 a month is actually really freakin cheap compared to what it would cost buy these out right. Make sure you can afford it, because you have to commit to a year. But a year subscription still costs less than buying 2 of the 7 you pick out right, and you get to add one to your 7 every 3 months.
The best ones to pick are the Hollywood series, which leaves you 3, which I went with choirs, pianos, and stormdrum.
edit: I did want to add that you need a fairly decent machine for East West. An SSD is practically a must to store the samples on, because they’re too huge to just load them into ram so it streams them from the disk.
I think combining different free orchestral samples/plugins is the key.
Two free plugins i like is the 4Front Upright Piano and DSK Overture. The piano is pretty excellent for a small plugin like that, best free piano i’ve tried at least. The orchestra has some very nice qualities, i feel the quality varies a bit between the instruments, but for free it’s pretty good.
ZynAddSubFX is only a synth, but it does some pretty darn good sounding strings and lots of other stuff.
I have also used Edirol Orchestral VST a bit, but stopped using it because i’m not shure if i had the rights for it. It’s a discontinued plugin though and i downloaded it from a page that said it was free, but i’m not shure if it is really legit.
I just hit my 3 months, which means I get to add a new East West instrument to my collection. But instead, I get this email:
Dear Composer Cloud Member,
You’re probably looking forward to adding your next product to your Composer Cloud subscription. Well, we’re not giving it to you.
Instead, we’re giving you everything. That’s right, we’re giving you access to all 50 products in Composer Cloud for the same rate you’re paying now.
What’s the catch? There is none. So many of you have signed up that we were able to get Amazon to cut our download costs in half. We don’t want you to wait to enjoy the full Composer Cloud experience. We want to give you all the instruments you need to create your best work and we want to give them to you today!
What do you need to do? You’ll see your new license ready for activation in the EastWest Installation Center.
Need we say more? Thank you for being a member of Composer Cloud. And don’t forget to spread the word to all of your musician friends!
The sonatina samples are surprisingly good. If you’re patient with them they can sound fantastic and since they were recorded all in the same space they “fit” together well. I converted a bunch of the individual SF2s to Renoise instruments and put a doofer on them that makes the instrument volume mod’s AHDSR “attack” parameter vary by incoming velocity (so a slower attack on lower velocity, fast attack on high). With some effects, layering, some of the instruments almost rival commercial stuff, but they add an “old recording” patina that doesn’t fit some stuff. Like they sound like old Hollywood film strings. The violin sections have been really useful and actually often sound better than some samples I made of one of the big expensive string libraries, the choir, french horn and oboes sections have been really useful. Some instruments are just bad and can’t be fixed, the piccolo is awful, so are a few other solo instruments, but the sections are mostly very usable. As Renoise instruments you can do a whole lot with modulation, etc (e.g. I have a sonatina choir mod preset that makes it sound like a bunch of moaning alien chipmunks).