Spitfire introduces their Studio Series with Spitfire Studio Strings

[GR Baumann]

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[Daryl]

:::munches popcorn, waits for Daryl’s response:::

No point. I've given my professional opinion, as an ex Professor of Violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. If someone chooses not to believe me, then that's their prerogative.

[bigcat1969]

Spiccato and Staccato meant the same thing before say 1750 and that was that they weren't legato. Later that century spiccato started evolving into the bouncing meaning. It wasn't used all that often until the 29th century when music got weirder. (Thanks Wiki)

Staccato can be used to describe any series of short, sharp sounds. It goes back about 350 years in music.

Now please discuss Sautillé and col legno battuto.

How do you get a viola section to play spiccato?
Write a whole note with "solo" above it.

[Linos]

Looking forward to hearing the first user demos and impressions. So far I haven't heard anything that makes me buy it, but developer demos alone often don't show the whole picture.

[Muziksculp]

@Musiksculp: you should realize that Daryl is playing the Violin. :-)

I also play the Violin

[tack]

It wasn't used all that often until the 29th century when music got weirder. (Thanks Wiki)

I do very much look forward to hearing 29th century music.

[Muziksculp]

I'm looking forward to the release of LASS 3 . With easier, faster workflow, better sounding samples, auto-divisi, and much more, I might just pass on the Spitfire Studio Strings.

[Guy Rowland]

I'm looking forward to the release of LASS 3 . With easier, faster workflow, better sounding samples, auto-divisi, and much more, I might just pass on the Spitfire Studio Strings.

Wait.... what now? LASS 3?!

[bigcat1969]

Oh you haven't been to the 29th century? Yup shorts and microshorts often of a moderately percussive nature dominate the AI composed music in a tonal system with 1,140 intervals.

[Daryl]

@Musiksculp: you should realize that Daryl is playing the Violin. :-)

I also play the Violin

Hopefully better than that dreadful video you posted.

[Linos]

(I’m not sure, Linos, but Mozart might well have been referring to the non-strings-specific articulation when he mentioned ‘staccato’ and ’stacatissimo’, and not to any bowing technique.)
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That may well be the case. And 'staccato' may not be a bowing technique, but it is an articulation alright. And as such clearly has not been invented by sample devs. In a letter dating from November 22., 1777, Wolfgang Amadé Mozart writes to his father: 'Er hat ein schönes Staccato in einem Bogen, sowohl hinauf als hinab [...]' (my free translation: ' He has a beautiful staccato in one bow, both up[bow] and down[bow]'. I am not a violinist, nor am I a professor, but to me this is clear evidence that at least to Mozart there was such a thing as a staccato-articulation, and that it has been invented centuries before sample developers existed. Otherwise his father could not have understood what he is writing about. I apologize for splitting hair, the musicologist in me couldn't let it go. Now I am very much looking forward to your first impression of Spitfire Studio Strings.

[Mikeybabes]

Oh you haven't been to the 29th century? Yup shorts and microshorts often of a moderately percussive nature dominate the AI composed music in a tonal system with 1,140 intervals.

Oh, I never realised you had a Delorean.....

[Guy Rowland]

The clouds are building. In the future, people will look back on this thread as the birth of what came to be known as The Staccato Wars.

[Muziksculp]

@Musiksculp: you should realize that Daryl is playing the Violin. :-)

I also play the Violin

Hopefully better than that dreadful video you posted.

Parden me, but what's dreadful about the video I posted ?

By the way, she is a very good violin teacher, that's showing and explaining the difference between Staccato and Spiccato bowing techniques. Nothing about it is dreadful.

[bbunker]

If Derrida were here now, he'd probably point out that the words "Spiccato" and "Staccato" don't have any meaning as signifiers themselves, and only have that through their associations within networks, within groups. And that they would of course have unique meanings in a group of composers and a group of string players, with even more complex associations with members stuck between those networks. And - of course those meanings would vary even within the larger networks, because the signifiers would change over time and geographical distance. So, there's that.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't do much with short(ish), detached(ish) bowings on the string, taken under one bow. Like Loure to Slurred Staccatos. This is the company of the "British Drama Toolkit." How will I possibly do my twee, priggish score of Sense and Prejudice and Emma without a full set of time-synced Loures?!??!??

[Mikeybabes]

I'm kind of surprised they didn't do much with short(ish), detached(ish) bowings on the string, taken under one bow. Like Loure to Slurred Staccatos. This is the company of the "British Drama Toolkit." How will I possibly do my twee, priggish score of Sense and Prejudice and Emma without a full set of time-synced Loures?!??!??

Yeah, that's been worrying me too....

[Linos]

In stead of the staccato wars, lets have a staccato discussion in a separate thread.

On topic:

for anybody looking for Studio Strings, 8dio made an announcement on facebook. They are to release their Intimate Studio Strings in september. Could be an option as well.

Intro-price $188 and well over 110.000 samples!

Intimate Studio Strings contains both deep-sampled solo strings and modular divisi strings - meaning you can create the exact ensemble size you want (ex. choose between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 violins, 1, 2 or 3 cellos etc).

The library has one of the most luxurious articulation lists we've ever seen. Including adaptive legatos, con sordinos, wealth of emotive arcs, sustains, any short note imaginable, tempo-synced ostinatos in multiple tempos and dynamics, multiple type of runs, FX and for some serious drops for all you disco lovers.

Intimate Studio Strings is designed for a more close and passionate sound. Think Coldplay, Ludovico kinda vibe.

The modular divisi allows you to dial in exactly the sound you want. Whether a lonely and expressive soloist or a full ensemble.

Here are two little examples of it - together with our Silka Choir.

[Muziksculp]

Anyone buy the standard version of Spitfire's Studio Strings ? if Yes, I would love to hear some user feedback.

[Piet De Ridder]

If I have to condense my first (and probably lasting) impressions in a score, I’d say: 4/10. In words, that translates as: something of a disappointment.
First of all, Spitfire Studio Strings is certainly not what it says on the box: “an incredibly versatile pro-end stage sample library” (I purchased the 210 gig so-called 'professional' edition). For starters, it’s not ‘incredibly versatile’ at all, due to the incomprehensible absence of a lot that is required for spirited, vivacious and tightly focused performances — I’m thinking of a.o. a diverse collection of musically useful, crisp, shorter bowings — and, secondly, try as I may, I can’t call it ‘pro’ either because it is simply too undersampled in several key areas to deserve that tag.

There is only the barest minimum of dynamic layers (which not only limits dynamic colouring severely, but also makes the difference between using CC#1 or CC#11 often preposterously inaudible), the library isn’t chromatically sampled either — not necessarily a major weakness, as Sable showed, but in this case, you can sometimes hear it — and patches which, on paper, shouldn’t share samples (full ensembles and half-ensembles, for example) share quite a few.
(I might be wrong, but at times it sounds to me as if the full ensemble patches were not arrived at by genuine full ensemble recordings, but by stacking the smaller section samples. Again, I may be wrong, but I can definitely hear the exact same noises, transitions and inconsistencies in both the half- and full-ensemble versions of many patches.)

The absence of a versatile collection of quality short bowings is the big problem though. Not only is there only one short articulation — not counting the one-velocity-layer ‘Brushed’ (*) patch which some of the desks also have —, but this ‘Short Spiccato’ is also very uneven in speed, character and tightness across the instruments’ range (a very frustrating thing, I find), and there is simply not enough dynamic timbre differentiation in these shorts either.
(The dynamic range of the library, which is considerable, is on the whole much too much artificially created by mere volume, instead of by actual timbral changes. Another major short-coming in a supposedly pro-end product, if you ask me.)

(*) Weirdly, this ‘Brushed’ patch sounds completely different depending on which instrument section you choose: in the Violins1, it is a short soft-ish stroke, in the Vlns2 and the Cellos, it is slightly longer, but in the Violas it is at least three times as long as it is in the other sections. Odd.

To give you an idea of how infuriating this neglect for the short bowings is: if there’s only one short patch, and it is a bad as it is for, say, the 6 Celli, you have no short samples to work with at all for that particular section.
Here’s a quick comparison between, first, the Sable Cellos Spicc followed by the StudioStrings 6 Cellos Spicc, the latter displaying, to my ears anyway, a degree of ugliness I never thought I’d ever encounter in a Spitfire library. (Both use the same midi data.)

Using these Studio Strings, and considering all the glaring omissions mentioned above, you can’t but wonder what those 210 gig of data are actually used for. Well, obviously, there are the 6 mic perspectives and the two stereo mixes, but then? Well, there is the ‘modular’ concept of this library — 2 small divisi desks, the half-ensemble and the full ensemble — which requires a huge amount of samples of course (more or less quadrupling the size of what the library would be without these divisions). And then there are tons of articulations which you’d normally expect to find in an Expansion-pack or something, but which Spitfire have included as standard: many different trills (not just 2nds, but also maj and min 3rds and in one case even 4ths), not just a regular ’sul tasto’ but also a ‘super sul tasto’ (don’t be surprised if the next Spitfire stringlibrary includes an ultra-velvety-super-sul-tastissimo patch), and a collection of FX-articulations (glisses, runs, falls, slides, atonal gestures, …) the uselessness of which is at times (I’m thinking of the violins phrases) sadly comical.
Lots of really good and great-sounding stuff in there as well though, absolutely, but you can’t but shake your head and wonder: all of that … but hardly any decent shorts?

The legato is an acceptable legato I suppose, but neither the slurred or the portamento legato should be mentioned in the list of big selling points of this library, in my opinion. They don’t offend the ear, certainly not, but if you’ve said that, you’ve said everything.

It’s not just the absence of versatile short bowings that stand in the way of rendering lively, agile performances with this library, it’s also the rather slow-ish, non-affirmative character of most everything else that contributes to it. Not saying it is totally impossible to render a joyful, swarm-of-butterflies-like string scherzo (in a crisp, tight performance, I mean) with these samples, but it’s certainly will prove a hell of a lot more difficult (and will sound a lot less convincing) than doing something slow or medium-tempo with it.

And the sound? Well, much of it sounds pretty good, I find. At times even exquisite. (Which is what convinced me to buy it.) But considering that this is supposed to be the pro-end of Things Sampled, “much of it” just isn’t enough, I find. A library that truly deserves being called professonal, and aims to satisfy the professional user, shouldn’t have nowhere near as many weak spots, omissions, sloppy samples — almost every legato patch has a couple of flawed or clumsy transitions which, if they occur more than once in a phrase, immediately expose the artifical nature of the sounds and the performance — nor the degree of being-undersampled-where-it-matters which these Studio Strings suffer from.

Spitfire is the name on many of my very best (orchestral sample library) purchases ever, and my gratitude, appreciation and respect for the company is undying, but with these Studio Strings they now also have an entry in the category ‘disappointing purchases’.

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[Guy Rowland]

Thanks for the detailed overview, Piet. You had me at that Sable / Studio Strings comparison. Yikes.

[Linos]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write this detailed assessment Piet! Invaluable information. That's all information I need, to know that I definitely want to pass.
That comparison with Sable - yikes indeed. Sable sounds classy and refined. Aren't those shorts just amazing here? The Spitfire Studio Strings part shows that they are supposed to be much rawer sounding. More bite and energy. But in the end it just doesn't sound very good in this example, does it?

[Piet De Ridder]

To be fair to the library and its developer, that 6 Cellos Spicc patch is not representative at all of how the Studio Strings (incl. most of its spiccato patches) sound. That uncharacteristic patch is simply a good illustration of what the paucity of decent short bowings forces you to work with in certain cases.

In fact, that yapping, aggressive, unpleasant quality of those 6 Cellos spicc’s is completely unlike how the bulk of the Studio Strings sounds. This is a library that I would even call near incapable of expressing anything truly raw and agressive in a coherently sustained manner. Apart from those 6 Cellos spiccs and the atonal FX, everything sounds extremely civil and well-behaved (even tiresomely so at times).

It’s a very uneven library, really. Containing some sensationally beautiful sounding things next to inexplicably weak material.

Sable sounds gorgeous, yes. (Well, its shorts certainly do. Among the best strings samples of all time, in my book. I keep having some difficulty being equally enthusiastic about some of Sable’s long and ‘espressivo’ samples though, in which a certain tendency to sound a bit nasal and piercing is hard to ignore.)
And while sounding gorgeously, Sable also carries a lot more punch than the Studio Strings do, and can, if so desired, sound a lot more agressive and raw than this new library can. And, importantly, in a much more coherent, musical and “consistent-across-the-entire-library” way. Still Spitfire’s unsurpassed masterpiece, I find.

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[Guy Rowland]

Thanks again Piet, appreciate the nuances here. As is so often the way, I have a pretty high bar for buying anything orchestral these days since I feel pretty well covered and the last thing I need is another 210gb of variable flaws to wade through. I'm forever grateful that you appear to have a virtually inexhaustible desire to keep on trying all these libraries looking out for those hidden pieces of magic buried in there amid the flotsam and jetsam, that in your hands can be turned into something wonderful.

Agree with you re Sable btw, its the one Spitfire library I have that I absolutely wouldn't want to part with. Its alive with gorgeousness.

[Muziksculp]

Hi Piet,

Thanks for the detailed impression of Spitfire's Studio Strings.

Cheers,
Muziksculp

[Daryl]

Parden me, but what's dreadful about the video I posted ?

The playing.

By the way, she is a very good violin teacher... Nothing about it is dreadful.

In your opinion. I beg to differ.