EastWest / Hollywood Orchestra OPUS Edition

[Lawrence]

For $295 (?) I would get a new percussion section, new and better player, new winds (they have to be better than the original) a few solo instruments, improved strings etc. the only thing that hold me back is the time it would take to replace Play with Opus in my template which really means rebuilding my template. Does Play still exist after that? If not, none of my old sessions would load properly.

[Guy Rowland]

For $295 (?) I would get a new percussion section, new and better player, new winds (they have to be better than the original) a few solo instruments, improved strings etc. the only thing that hold me back is the time it would take to replace Play with Opus in my template which really means rebuilding my template. Does Play still exist after that? If not, none of my old sessions would load properly.

Now this I do know the answer to - all existing projects should work forever with Play, and Play co-exists with Opus. If I decide to go for it, I likely won't replace any old stuff in the template with Opus, except HO - just not worth all the faff.

[Luciano Storti]

Worth noting that with Apple's transition to their own silicon, Play5's longevity might not be as extensive as we'd like to think.Personally, owning the Diamond version I'll probably upgrade before year's end.

[Ashermusic]

If I decide to go for it, I likely won't replace any old stuff in the template with Opus, except HO - just not worth all the faff.

Don't be so damned lazy!

[Guy Rowland]

Dang - the upgrade is even cheaper now, $249 today on Black Friday.

Curses.

[Luciano Storti]

Yep, now's the time. Wish LASS hadn't just come out as well. Dread the time having to set these two up again!

[FriFlo]

Dang - the upgrade is even cheaper now, $249 today on Black Friday.

Curses.

Yup! Typical East West move! TBH, I have been expecting that now and that is why I held off. Now I am gonna do it. But why they charge you the same for owning any ONE of the 4 collections in the past or owning the full package is really beyond me ... If I would ever lead a company, I would never make my existing customers feel so unappreciated. :-)

[Guy Rowland]

Yup! Typical East West move! TBH, I have been expecting that now and that is why I held off. Now I am gonna do it. But why they charge you the same for owning any ONE of the 4 collections in the past or owning the full package is really beyond me ... If I would ever lead a company, I would never make my existing customers feel so unappreciated. :-)

I think I remember Doug saying beforehand specifically that ONLY those witth the full HO would get the discounted upgrade, before Opus came out. I could be losing my marbles again, but if he did do that, it really is pretty bad because he twisted the arm of many to upgrade for a few weeks when it was totally unnecessary.

[Guy Rowland]

Oh thank goodness, as I was hoping, tax is charged to the UK, so it's $300 again. Obviously that's still crazy cheap, but that added to the SSD I'd need to buy and install pushes me comfortably into the "NAAAAH" camp.

[lucor]

Yup! Typical East West move! TBH, I have been expecting that now and that is why I held off. Now I am gonna do it. But why they charge you the same for owning any ONE of the 4 collections in the past or owning the full package is really beyond me ... If I would ever lead a company, I would never make my existing customers feel so unappreciated. :-)

I think I remember Doug saying beforehand specifically that ONLY those witth the full HO would get the discounted upgrade, before Opus came out. I could be losing my marbles again, but if he did do that, it really is pretty bad because he twisted the arm of many to upgrade for a few weeks when it was totally unnecessary.

Yeah, I was one of those idiots that got tricked into upgrading my Brass, Strings and Woodwinds (all Gold) to the Diamond Edition of the Hollywood Orchestra, because that would give me the 'best deal' for the OPUS release. So I essentially threw out several hundred dollars for nothing.

EastWest always seemed pretty shady with their business practices, but that was the last straw for me. They will never see a single penny from me again (which is a shame, because they have some great products).

[Guy Rowland]

Yeah, that sucks lucor. And your outcome is entirely predictable and understandable.

Yet some (not many) developers couldn't care less about this sort of thing. Customers remember this stuff. But East West has always taken the steamroller approach - never mind what gets damaged on the way, just keep knocking down those prices. And overall it does work, I guess.

[Guy Rowland]

Just a heads up that the Opus edition is $299 in the 2022 Cyber Monday sale, and it's a $199 update for anyone with a qualifying product (I have two, the original HO Gold brass and strings)

I won't be installing the library til later this week when I have a) the 4TB new NVMe drive and b) time. But I have just installed Opus itself, and it seems pretty impressive - slick, far easier to navigate. I like the NKS-style sound previews too.

[Ashermusic]

Just a heads up that the Opus edition is $299 in the 2022 Cyber Monday sale, and it's a $199 update for anyone with a qualifying product (I have two, the original HO Gold brass and strings)

I won't be installing the library til later this week when I have a) the 4TB new NVMe drive and b) time. But I have just installed Opus itself, and it seems pretty impressive - slick, far easier to navigate. I like the NKS-style sound previews too.

Still the best overall inclusive orchestral library IMHO and I find Opus more enjoyable to work with.

And yet, on this “Promises, Promises “ music I am creating for a live theater, it’s ended up being pretty much Kontakt, UVI Workstation, and Trillian.

Horses for courses.

[Muziksculp]

Hi,

With regards to EW-HOOPUS. I agree, it is still a wonderful orch. library to use. The OPUS player is fantastic, very efficient, and offers a lot of features,, and editing parameters.

By the way Nick Pheonix mentioned (on VI-C), that something BIG is coming to EW-HOOPUS during Dec. , so I'm super excited about this news !

I'm guessing a lot of new content for HOOPUS.

Cheers,
Muziksculp

[srkrishnan]

Now on sale for $250 at JRR shop with code GROUP

[Guy Rowland]

I've thus far downloaded the strings, brass, harp and percussion. Here's some first impressions.

STRINGS. The new 18 violins sound wonderful, sweeping and romantic. I am become John Barry. But ye gads could EW not have taken this opportunity to standardise their CCs?! They're all over the bloody place. At least there's a setup page now, but every time you load a new instrument it reverts to the default. Maddening. And try as I might I can't control any dynamics at all on the otherwise lovely 18v Sul Tasto Flautando. It claims 2 layers via CC11 expression but buggered if I could find them.

It's still a great sounding library though, and some of the articulations are really handy, such as the slurred and spiccato runs.

BRASS. The new 2 Trombone patches restore the feel of Symphonic Orchestra's 4TB articulations (ironically). Shame there's no legato there though.

PERCUSSION. I'll confess this did little for me... it's fine, but nothing I don't already have a ton of good and mostly better options for.

HARP. Ditto - I far prefer the tone of Symphonic Orchestra's (that really was - and is - definitive for the Hollywood sound). The range here seems oddly limited, there's no bottom couple of octaves.

General comment - the default mixes feel too wet and soggy, I always want to load up the close and mix with the mains. I'm not sure about the divisis either, they seem odd spatially.

Looking forward to trying out the rest, especially the woodwinds and Orchestrator. Opus seems to perform very nicely - I have it set to purge by default and it's performing like a champ. The CC thing is super-frustrating, I'll almost certainly have to run my transformer scripts in Cubase still.

PS - in the Installation Center, there's updates there for my other libraries. They all seem to be working ok as they are as far as I can tell, do the updates add anything?

[Guy Rowland]

HOOPUS Part II
Well that all downloaded quicker than I expected.

WOODWINDS
The three new patches are pretty good, ensembles of flutes, clarinets and bassoons. As for the rest, the problem really is those two velocity layers not crossfading. It's a smooth bump, but a bump nonetheless.

SOLO VIOLIN AND CELLO
These are better than I expected from their reputation. There's several legato options which in general work very well, and the crossfading between layers works way better than the woodwinds. Tone is good too to my ears. But there it is a but - a big CAPS LOCK BUT - there appear to be no release samples. It's so masked in the basic preset with the reverb and space, but on the close mics its there in all its horror - it just plan fades out when you release a key.

ORCHESTRATOR
Well I don't care what anyone says, this is a hoot. In fact, it's absolutely stormingly brilliant. If you need something in a hurry, here you go. Anyone scoring on crazy deadlines should not even think about not having this. Most of the patches are genuinely playable, whether pads, ostinatos or even scores - they are arrangements more than melodies, and have a terrific range across CC1. Most of us will know if we'll ever get on with something like this, and for those who will, they will also know the strengths, weaknesses and limitations, when to use and when not to use. Seems you can edit every element of it too. Strikes me that if you used this for some undemanding underscore and put lead and a counterpoint over it, you'd get away with murder. It's well designed and even if you never use it in anger, it's a ton of fun. And it's a good showcase for the tech as well, there's over a dozen instruments in some of these multis and it's playing perfectly purged here (streaming from my shiny new NVMe, mind).

I updated all the other instruments after I noticed Symphonic Choirs wasn't working properly, and now everything works smoothly. Still also seems to work on my old version of Play 5 - no Kontakt-style backwards compatibility horrors, thankfully.

Overall for £200, this is insanely good. Some of its biggest deficiencies like the CC tombola really should be simple fixes (indeed they should never have happened in the first place). The limitations on the weaker parts of the library do put a block to its overall scope, but even so there's a ton of stuff here that will get good use.

[scherzo]

I certainly agree about standardizing the CCs. But what's worse is there still seems to be a bug, at least with the strings, where the volume of the release tails is hardwired to CC11, so that even if you reassign the dynamics controller to CC1 - like practically every other library in existence including many of EW's - you will likely be hearing a lot of bumpy volume-mismatched release samples and will end up hating your life. There are a few other instances as well of parameters seemingly hardwired to specific CCs. Not sure how that made it past quality control or why it still hasn't been fixed, but there it is.

I get around it by leaving it at the CC11 default and using Cubase's transformer effects to change the controllers going into the instrument instead. Just like I had to do with Play, which didn't let you re-assign anything. It's a bit of extra setup work with a few potential pitfalls, but in use it works pretty well. Midi effects to the rescue once again - transformers, transformers everywhere!

That and a few other niggles aside though, I still think it's a great update. It was well worth whatever it was that I paid for it just for the strings alone. The samples are still fantastic, and now that they aren't trapped inside a horrible player, they're even quite usable. The new violins are great. Still exploring the brass - there's some good stuff in there. Rumors of new content coming soon. Me happy. HOOPUS is probably the best value for money in all of sampledom today. Maybe some of the best value period.

I ended up kicking the woods and percussion out though. Not because they're terrible, but I have other alternatives there that I like better and would rather use the disk space for other things. YMMV etc.

Some day I need to try that orchestrator thing. I'm one of those who are instinctively skeptical on principle, but who knows, it might be fun and useful?

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks for the tip on those release samples, scherzo, I'll get to experimenting with that. I ran out of Cubase transformer slots with Play... I hate the ninente thing so I have one slot dedicated to making the minimum velocity 10.

Pretty much all your other comments tally with my early experience. And embrace the Orchestrator! Just have an hour or two exploring and having fun.

One of my favourite TV shows is Lego Masters Australia. It's such a joy. And it's scored - every moment is actually scored like a film, though of course much is parody etc, and it really adds to the whole joyous experience. It came to mind as I was playing with Orchestrator, because its exactly the kind of tool that would be appropriate for that kind of show. There likely won't be the time or budget to score it conventionally, even with VIs. It doesn't have to be performed at a concert, it just has to track a fun reality show. You could shave your time by 3/4 for that kind of job using Orchestrator.

[mcalis]

I am always happy to see people (re)discover the hollywood orchestra.

Regarding EW's business practices - they've been doing this forever. That's not an excuse but I know what to expect with them. I got on the OPUS train very early and probably shelled out a couple hundred dollars more than I could have but I honestly don't care. I know what price these libraries retailed for on release and I've gotten so much mileage out of them that I still think I got everything ridiculously cheap.

HWS is one of the first libraries I ever got, and I still use it a lot.

Some tips for the newcomers:
1. HWS and HWB especially are both deep libraries, you can get a lot out of them, but you'll need to put in some effort.
2. Read the manuals. They are seriously well written. It's less necessary now that EW has gotten rid of its old naming scheme for patches, but there is still a lot of good information in there.

Gems:
- 1st violins Stacc Slur patches. Very, very useful for playing "connected" shorts. Also great to use in runs or for accents in runs. This is probably the biggest gem in all of HWS. Somewhat limited in dynamics
- Cellos sus and legatos are great. They have a lot of weight. If you need detailed programming you can use the Bow Change patch and use CC14 to switch between slurs and bow change legato transitions.
- Horns portato patches
- Shorts on the oboe (has a very specific, pointed character)
- Bass flute
- Solo clarinet StaccS
- 3 trumpets StaccS
- 2nd violins flautandos
- Rep Runs scripts are really good as a "messy" layer in layered runs.

- In general HWS has a really excellent "togetherness". The sections blend well with each other.

Turds:
- Basses in HWS are so-so
- 2 tenor + 1 bass trombone is good, but really only does one thing well and that's cutting through a mix. Great for punch, but very limited in what they can do.
- Most of the legatos on the woodwinds are still not good. Tone-wise the woodwinds are good and they actually work suprisingly well in context.
- Repetition patches in HWS spike the CPU
- Pre-recorded runs in HWS have sucky time-stretching and release tails are abrupt. They are useable and can work quite well in context, but it's generally better to stick to the tempos they were recorded at (I think 120, 145 and 180 bpm if memory serves me right).

Random tips:
- Mid mics are my favorites for HWS by far. Sometimes with a touch of close.
- For HWB it's either Vintage or Main mics most of the time.
- The woodwinds are best on close mics.
- For detailed string programming, use the finger position control. With HWS you have control over open strings across all sections.

I probably can think of more tips, I've been using these libraries forever, but off the top of my head this is what came to mind.

For Guy:


Their default reverb/FX settings suck, so I use this option to have them not load by default.


Something else I did is route the close, main, mid, etc mics to outputs 1&2, 3&4, 5&6 respectively and used "Store Mix" to save that as a preset "All Mics Routed". You can then quickly recall this through that menu.

[Guy Rowland]

Great tips, thanks Matthias! I found that stacc slur patch and it sounds great. In general the connected articulations feel promising.

I'm just coming to the end of a very busy patch, hoping over the next couple of months to properly dive into HOOPUS and add to the template.

[mcalis]

Great tips, thanks Matthias! I found that stacc slur patch and it sounds great. In general the connected articulations feel promising.

I'm just coming to the end of a very busy patch, hoping over the next couple of months to properly dive into HOOPUS and add to the template.

Happy to help. For what it's worth, I do find that both HWS and HWB can benefit immensely from some processing. HWS has some upper-mid harshness and HWB can do with more low end on both horns and bones. Don't get me wrong, they're both quite useable out of the box but sometime last year I landed on some processing that I really feel has elevated them both.

You should also consider me somewhat biased toward these libs. They're kind of my favorite and I probably have different requirements than you. As a hack and hobbyist, I can afford to spend a long time on mockups and use some patches within whatever niche they are strongest.

As a working composer, you are probably best served by just picking out the gems and not bother too much with the more niche patches or patches that only work within very specific contexts.

One more tip that just came to mind: because EW sampled every note instead of every second note, you have more flexibility with the transposition trick. I like the first violins better on most patches so for 2nd violins I just duplicated the first and tuned down by 1 semitone.

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks again Matthias. I can feel January calling to get to grips with it all.

In the meantime, some new multis have appeared for the Orchestrator.

[Ashermusic]

I would call your attention to the three settings: standard, epic, and soft. They do sound quite different and of course being able to make your own mic mixes is a bug help.

[Luciano Storti]

...
Gems:
- 1st violins Stacc Slur patches. Very, very useful for playing "connected" shorts. Also great to use in runs or for accents in runs. This is probably the biggest gem in all of HWS. Somewhat limited in dynamics
- Cellos sus and legatos are great. They have a lot of weight. If you need detailed programming you can use the Bow Change patch and use CC14 to switch between slurs and bow change legato transitions.
- Horns portato patches
- Shorts on the oboe (has a very specific, pointed character)
- Bass flute
- Solo clarinet StaccS
- 3 trumpets StaccS
- 2nd violins flautandos
- Rep Runs scripts are really good as a "messy" layer in layered runs.

- In general HWS has a really excellent "togetherness". The sections blend well with each other.

...

Random tips:
- Mid mics are my favorites for HWS by far. Sometimes with a touch of close.
- For HWB it's either Vintage or Main mics most of the time.
- The woodwinds are best on close mics.
- For detailed string programming, use the finger position control. With HWS you have control over open strings across all sections.

I probably can think of more tips, I've been using these libraries forever, but off the top of my head this is what came to mind.

These are very good starting points, Matthias, thank you. I'm just now familiarizing myself with Opus and the tip about saving the mixer snapshot is awesome. Very quick. Only wish it saved the mic setup as well. And I think you're right: the mid mic and a bit of close mic are a really good combo that can take well to additional reverb.