Instrumentz

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I start this thread as a gathering and place for posting of instruments that the community uses. Both free and commercial. It's not directly RC, but at the same time it is because we all use instruments and VSTs/Sf2/Sfz/...

Kickstarting this with some free ones:
https://youtu.be/jHDJjsrC_OM

I particularly love Palette Primary Colors
https://youtu.be/5S71eR1tDpE

Spitfire labs is also quite big now, and growing, which is a lots of respect for this big company.
https://www.spitfireaudio.com/labs/
Of them one i'm starting to enjoy (to my shock and awe) is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dssamz-3o2Q

closer to my startup heart remains the only thing i had for a long time, Sforzando instruments such as
https://www.plogue.com/products/sforzando-banks.html
Out of which the war tuba, the table warp and the sax were my favorites I think. The table warp is a whole ton of instruments in there and the others also have multiple variations and flavors.

I cannot also forget the Saint James Orchestra
https://youtu.be/Ipm1uJMIUQ8
which was the best sf2 i found out as I was starting out with RC and looking for instruments. I found it just sooooooooo good. If it was legally possible I would totally suggest if it's free for it to come with RC for people starting up, because it's so good and so amazingly free.

Also Virtual Playing Orchestra http://virtualplaying.com/virtual-playing-orchestra/ was quite great in content and a lot of great instruments hidden in there
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ywVVkF8txc

Also Versialian was quite great https://vis.versilstudios.com/vsco-2.html and was my first orchestral VST that I enjoyed (though i had some problem with volumes going down in Cubase)
https://youtu.be/dyvIp3FosKs

In terms of commercial plugins which obviously have a higher entry barrier but still might be of interest to RC users to share among themselves the things I use and like are:
Jaeger:
https://youtu.be/Z-uOck7zALw
(this is also a plug for Daniel James which i think is a great composer with great videos of his process


My main solo legatoists are from Spitfire Solo Strings
https://youtu.be/TrfLMX_af_k

And my favorites for RC ostinatos are the ultra tigths from Performance Samples' Fluid Shorts because they're so responsive.
https://youtu.be/VD9QpgmGsYE

I also use quite a bit of Symphony Essentials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIKlrcgJnvA

And this free cello has a great grittyness
https://youtu.be/FB9H-ftRXjU

that in my mind is sometimes even better than the Tina Guo 2 library that I got on a sale that I know everybody loves
https://youtu.be/BKNL8xk0po8

If anybody's curious to see how these VSTs look in my RapidComposer workflow you can have a peek here:
https://youtu.be/Png9sbhublQ

So, this was my attempt at kickstarting this subject in the hopes that others will join and be posting their favorite instruments that they use with RC, both free and commercial ones as well as their thoughts on them.

Greetings to all the great people here! And of course a huge round of applause for the superhuman that created RC!

PS: there's one last purpose I hope for this thread: occasionally I see great sales on great instruments, sometimes they last as little as a day, sometimes a week, but I think it would be great to have a place to let the others know of such opportunities. For example I got my Fluid Shorts mentioned above on such a sale and similarly I bought on a 9$ sale The Cabaret Piano https://samplehero.com/products/the-cabaret-piano that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise but now it turns out I'm rather enjoying it with RapidComposer sometimes.

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Very nice collection, great tips on instruments!
Thanks, iXaarii!

There is a forum on KVRAudio devoted for sales/deals (Sell & Buy (+Special Offers, Deals & Promos) so please do not post sales notices in this topic.

Thanks!
Attila

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lol yea.. well, not to brag.. but almost everything I have is commercial. Just installed NI Ultimate 12 collectors.. I really just wanted a good orchestration, but.. the regular install was "watered" down version.. I am so looking forward to ToonTacks bass and they will be releasing the orchestration version of percussion. I was in need of the orchestration, and since I have their keyboard, it only made sense to. All my videos use IK Multimedia orchestration, and as it turns out, those libraries are actually over 20 years old. So I had to upgrade.. biggest gripe with NI, is it's all download, and very slow for me. Taking about 3 days to install.. lol

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musicdevelopments wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:44 pm Very nice collection, great tips on instruments!
Thanks, iXaarii!
glad to be of service
musicdevelopments wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 5:44 pm There is a forum on KVRAudio devoted for sales/deals (Sell & Buy (+Special Offers, Deals & Promos) so please do not post sales notices in this topic.
sorry to hear that. There's just a nice sale on pianos and i just got one (last song i made is just it, including percussion) and I was just about to post it here as I thought some other RC-ers might be tempted also as there's specific types of instruments that we might care about other than plugins and softwares which I get the impression are there... but then I read your reply.

Please forgive me, I don't really get what KVR is, i'm just here for RC and I wouldn't post anything there as I only care about the RC people. But I understand it's the rule so I'll respect it, no more mention of sales on this thread.

Just to clarify, it's okay to mention instruments we use/like or so, though, right? Still sorry to hear that as it could have been nice in such cases to ask people about an ongoing sale which ones they have/like/recommend, but I guess that would also imply mentioning ongoing sales so I guess that's out also.

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BluGenes wrote: Fri Mar 29, 2019 11:14 pm lol yea.. well, not to brag.. but almost everything I have is commercial. Just installed NI Ultimate 12 collectors.. I really just wanted a good orchestration, but.. the regular install was "watered" down version.. I am so looking forward to ToonTacks bass and they will be releasing the orchestration version of percussion. I was in need of the orchestration, and since I have their keyboard, it only made sense to. All my videos use IK Multimedia orchestration, and as it turns out, those libraries are actually over 20 years old. So I had to upgrade.. biggest gripe with NI, is it's all download, and very slow for me. Taking about 3 days to install.. lol
how very cool! Congratulations on the upgrade. Looking forward to hearing your new sounds!
I have a love/hate relationship with IK multimedia as for many years their I only knew them as the annoying troublesome part of installing Band in a Box.
I still tried many times to use some strings i have there but it interrupts funny sometimes.
How do you find their keyboard?

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exactly as you do.. love/hate it.. It was great as starting point.. what got me started in all of this was the desire to create my own backing tracks to play my guitar. I actually started with Band in a Box, but, got frustrated with the fact I couldn't edit the drums... Well, that lead me to to toontracks, then lead me to RC, then it just snowballed. I may need help. lol.. got expensive really fast.. but, now I have the best backing tracks ever. after 40 years of guitar playing, I still sound the same, though. lol

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Versilian Studios has both paid and free orchestration libraries. The libraries were created by college level performances, and are actually not bad at all. This was one of my first libraries just to test the waters.. ;)

https://vis.versilstudios.com/vsco-2.html

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Thanks for the shout out about VSCO2, Sammy doesn't get enough love for all his work. Did I use shout out right? I'm tragically unhip.

Some great free stuff has been coming out recently. Loving the Labs and Palette stuff. Great to time be poor and want to compose.
Image

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BluGenes wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:21 am exactly as you do.. love/hate it.. It was great as starting point.. what got me started in all of this was the desire to create my own backing tracks to play my guitar. I actually started with Band in a Box, but, got frustrated with the fact I couldn't edit the drums...
for me it was the lack of control about what exactly you repeat and then later melody. Even if you have the right progressions, and i love myself a complicated chord progression, a lot of music is about pattern and repetition, and with Biab it was pretty much impossible to control even that the next time you play a Bmaj7 it sounds the same as the previous. Similarly to branch of a melody in different directions.

In contrast to that these i see as the core points of RC (or at least the possibility of further melody control in branching) and in that I think they both have a separate role which each each could improve. Biab's model i see pretty much as selling style/instrument packs "here, we've made a reggae style/track/sound for you", while RC is for me a much more musical understanding view of things. Everything from a library of chord progressions to changing modes with shifting chords to the
pièce de résistance of being able to take a phrase up and down notes or even across scales... this is just mindblowing.

For the above reason however I also see a possible symbiosis: say i get myself a great set of phrases for punk rock or dnb from Biab (hypothetical as unfortunately they're way too bent on retro styles like country) and then you could take that phrase and in RC make variations on it until you find one that you like and is original, or have it morph into another, all on a progression that RC has calculated for you to take you from chord X in mode A to chord Y in mode B, and that while having certain notes in your melody change function half way through so you can keep playing the same melodic notes but they now feel completely different as in the new chords they serve a new function and the brain picks them up in a whole different context. THIS is the level of awesomeness i see & hope RC reaching, and also why I'm switching more and more to RC and with tools like the idea generator further developing I can see that with time I might do all my composing in RC even in that tricky begging phase where i just want to crazy quick experiment with ideas to reach one i want to then spent many tens of hours developing and polishing. I love RC more and more every day and with each release! It's aaamazing!

BluGenes wrote: Sat Mar 30, 2019 2:21 am exactly as you do.. love/hate it.. It was great as starting point.. what got me started in all of this was the desire to create my own backing tracks to play my guitar. I actually started with Band in a Box, but, got frustrated with the fact I couldn't edit the drums... Well, that lead me to to toontracks, then lead me to RC, then it just snowballed. I may need help. lol.. got expensive really fast.. but, now I have the best backing tracks ever. after 40 years of guitar playing, I still sound the same, though. lol
I don't have quite your experience but i have a similar story. Ever since i was like 12 or so i have been playing one instrument or another, organ, piano, guitar, piano again... years of taking couse and years of trying on myself. yet across like 25 years of traditional music playing i never got good enough to really be able to perform live... or even not have horrible trouble in performing semi-live and recording enough good enough quality that anybody might have the patientce to listen through all the bad stuff to get to the good parts. I'm not saying i'm good now, but heck, in the past year of my life i've made made more music and of a better quality (while still not being good, of course) than in the first couple of decades of my life. For me this was a dream come true!! magic, really. All i'm saying is that while i still have a couple of guitars and pianos they have never rewarded my hours/days/months/years of time spent with them as generously in finished music pieces that I can show as using music software. I have at least a friend, very musically talented who looks down upon these things as crutches because he can play great... but for me... this has brought dreams to life that I probably would have never lived otherwise. I'm incredibly thankful for that.

And then there's the new angle of sample libraries, that i've only discovered for a few months: to be fair, if i was traditionally composing, at least with my low skill levels, i never would've gotten to live this world... i mean heck... how would i have ever hoped to play an orchestra? I bought myself a violin a few months ago, just out of excitement and curiosity, and i soon realized there's no way i will even get to play it enough to get any good at it, living in an apartment here in germany, even if i had the time and patience & skill. That thing makes a sound so loud i can barely stand it myself, let alone the neighbours. My digital violins i can put the volume down on. That's aaaamazing (not amazing being able to pack away whole string sections to 0 space along with pianos). Where i'm getting at is this all wouldn't have made any sense without RC now: without it i could never have produced enough songs to ever hope of ever using more than 2 instruments in my whole life, and while i might have occasionally bought the odd harmonica or violin or something, i would have never been able to really compose for them... so amazing!

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Very cool iXaari! I am pretty much in the same area as you, musically.. Never thought in a million years I would be working with orchestration. Now I can't get enough of it!

One thing I did was choose the best guitar amp(s) for me. The one requirement I had was headphone jacks.. I am usually up at 4am here and I can play as loud as I want without any problems. The amp(s) also work as an interface, so, recording isn't a problem. (I don't have to mic the amp). Plus, I can record BOTH a wet and dry track/channel at the same time. Which means I can re-amp the dry track with any combination of effects I want.

I'll have to look around again, but, I have found some great resources on orchestration and learning the nuts and bolts of how it all works. For instance this one is a great starting point. It's by George Strezov, who has some amazing songs on SoundCloud. I think he has libraries as well.

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a- ... udio-13389

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Wow, you can play as loud as you can... i so envy you. I'm always wary of disturbing neighbours. I even got myself a Violin just for laughs as my wife had always wished for one also and her childhood friends never let play with theirs so it was a little dream come true but then i realized just HOW loud it was and i realized it will remain just a thing to wonder at and be proud of to have (the magic of amazon ordering and mass production!)

That tutorial is awesome! would you be willing to post it yourself on this thread here viewtopic.php?f=168&t=522653 so we have the resources on tutorials and the more instrument focused side of things separated for archiving? It's a great tutorial and i wouldn't want to steal it from you to post :D

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This is a series of instrument presentations from the real world that I found relevant to our digital music production especially as it is sponsored by a Kontakt sample library producer and you can feel that in it's systematic approach and functional considerations which I found personally to be very enlightening as to what to expect from the digital instruments I use:

Violin:
https://youtu.be/_d7CCjfGuJE

Clarinets:
https://youtu.be/g64MDwOhFK8

Trumpet & Picolo:
https://youtu.be/rSKfyTWjoMM

Flute:
https://youtu.be/YJHp4uGZMis

Trombones:
https://youtu.be/TZGj06YaWuQ

From that company the instruments I am most likely to buy as soon as I can afford to is

Berlin Inspire:
https://youtu.be/sfFf9y_QV_A

and Berlin Inspire 2:
https://youtu.be/ZFaF6uAd9K0

I'm undecided which one has priority, my impression is that 1 is more ensemble and 2 is more soloists... tough choice.

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just realized your message was held for review in this video..

Instruments:
-Guitar Rhythm, Applied Acoustics Strum Session (cheap one - not the Strum GS2)
https://www.applied-acoustics.com/session-bundle/
(note i get the bundle from plugin boutique .. lot cheaper a few months back)

-Guitar, Ample sounds Ample Guitar MII Lite - free
-Bass, Ample Bass P II Lite - free
https://www.amplesound.net/en/download.asp

-Drums
1- BeatSkillz Synthwave Drums
https://www.beatskillz.com/shop/synthwave-drums/

2- Beat DRMR - free
https://www.kvraudio.com/product/beat-d ... at/details

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CZCiOB_Ndg

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thanks a lot! great to know of your tools! If you use/discover new ones I'm always interested in hearing which they are and maybe others are also.

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Some nice discussions on harmonic instrumentation:

https://youtu.be/4F2qLkSYbMw

and melodic instrumentation

https://youtu.be/L9ZuL3Eq-oU

that I just recently found.
Unfortunately I can't myself currently afford Berlin Strings/Woodwinds however it's still nice to learn the concepts... and who knows, maybe one day I'll catch a sale on their little brothers the Inspire 1 & 2 which have some elements from them if I understand right. Anyway, the principles hold I strongly suspect across different tools and instruments.

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