The Sound Board

From Eastwest Facebook page.

Coming Fall 2020

HOLLYWOOD ORCHESTRA OPUS EDITION and HOLLYWOOD ORCHESTRATOR

Over 230 Gigabytes of pristine new recordings. Powerful new features. A separate Orchestrator that will assist you in creating award-winning compositions within seconds, and much more!

Note from Facebook comments:

- will be available on CC/CCX
- upgrade path will be available.

Unexpected from Eastwest - Doug seems to have gone back on his statement of not recording orchestra libraries. I'll be interested to see what the additional content is and how orchestrator is implemented.

good lord. Aren't we competitive after all. Good for all, imo.

Wake me in the fall when we know what it is or it isn't.

But if its structured like the current EW series with 8 billion confusingly named patches, I might not stay awake for very long..

Could be the fall of ‘22. Still waiting for Play Pro.

Award winning compositions in seconds..? Hm- so we get our money back if this promise isn't fulfilled I suppose.

Hoping it doesn’t have cpu problems like SD3

As a HO user, I am intrigued.

I'm not a fan of their PLAY sample playback engine, or the way they have their patches/articulations organized. Quite a big mess.

We shall see what this new library will offer next Fall. Which is quite a bit of a wait from now. If nothing has been improved from the current state of PLAY and HO libraries, I have no interest in it.

Muziksculp wrote: ↑May 06, 2020 3:01 pm I'm not a fan of their PLAY sample playback engine, or the way they have their patches/articulations organized. Quite a big mess.

We shall see what this new library will offer next Fall. Which is quite a bit of a wait from now. If nothing has been improved from the current state of PLAY and HO libraries, I have no interest in it.

I much prefer Play to the Kontakt player. Just open the mixers and the browsers and I think it will be obvious why I feel that way.

Ashermusic wrote: ↑May 06, 2020 4:52 pm I much prefer Play to the Kontakt player.

Jay - you and I have disagreed on (I think) everything since I met you online many years ago.

I see nothing has changed.

You decide.

Certainly an unexpected but welcome announcement. What concerns me a little is that I've seen EW move in a direction of "simplifying" things. So with Hollywood Choirs you don't get Sopranos, Altos, Tenors, and Basses but just Womeb and Men. With the pop brass I seem to recall it's pretty much all ensemble patches. I dearly hope they haven't done the same thing here and that we'll get individual instruments, not full ensembles.

But if we consider that 230/5 mic positions = ~46gb, to presumably cover all sections, it does seem likely that this will be mostly ensemble patches. It would also go hand in hand with their "create a composition in seconds" statement.

I don't prefer Play over kontakt, but I have no issurs with it and the naming conventions really aren't difficult. NV is non vib, VB is vibrato, UB is up bow, DB is down bow, RR is round robin, LS is loose, LT is lite, and the numbers refer to the amount of dynamic layers. It's all in the manual which is actually quite an informative read.

Doug posted this at the 'other place'.

"Hi Everyone! Keep in mind, we’ve been doing this for a long time. Longer than anyone else. We don’t care about one upping anyone. We all learn from each other and we just try and make the best stuff we can. It’s not easy. We are composers and producers. There are a few reasons we decided to do an expansion. I’m more focused on music these days than samples. I own many of the competing orchestral libraries and found that there are many positives, but they all have weaknesses. We all use multiple libraries to get some variety in tones. I end up using HO more than anything else in my template, but I recognize there are so many things that need to be addressed in HO. Our first priority was to polish the old library.

1. The biggest problem with HO is the non specific interface and ridiculous amount of patches. (PLAY was the problem at the start but not any more) You have to understand that HO has string patches that no computer could handle at the time. Even if we had used Kontakt, that would have been the case. To this date, no one has made such deeply sampled string legato patches with 5 dynamics, multiple string positions, vibrato and non vibrato. No one is using these mega patches From the original release. even today. They are stellar, though. The new library addresses all the stuff that’s wrong with the old library first. It’s all cleaned up and tightened up. The new interface allows control that you don’t have now. It is Laser focused on orchestral instruments. 90% of the old patches are gone. And you will be using the bigger patches, which will run easily.

2. With the reprogramming and new interface, Hollywood Strings is a really strong library. So the question is, what do you do to take it even further? We wanted to embrace what HO is all about. It is a big orchestra, so we decided to stay in that realm. HO Opus has an all new 1st violins section. It doesn’t replace the old one. It’s an alternate, like you would use in a different library. The players are all new and all from the upper echelons of the film score world. The legato is groundbreaking. The attitude is a bit different, there are some different articulations and there is more focus and precision. But it is 16violins so it’s lush. Sean Murphy also made some tweaks to some of the close and mid mics. The 16 violins alone took one week to record. We wanted to be able to point to this and say “this is what violins should be like”.

3. I have never found better French horns than we have in HO, so we chose to focus on doing all new 2 trombones and all new 2 trumpets. These new samples are comprehensive and all about extreme dynamics, comprehensive articulations and precision. But really this was all about getting the right players.

4. After the cleanup, we stand behind the original woodwinds. However, solo woodwinds are inherently problematic because cross fading dynamics and vibrato can never be done right with a solo instrument. It’s a real problem. There is always a small compromise. You can only fix it, if you accept that the sound will be inferior (close mics, phase aligned etc..) So we went in a different direction. We sampled 3 small woodwind sections. And they are fantastic!!

There‘s more, but I wanted to give you an idea of what we did. All the old issues with PLAY and our generic interface are gone. And the interface has one new feature that is unique and exactly the kind of thing that you’ve been waiting for. And there is the orchestrator software, which is useful even if you are an advanced composer."

So it seems big changes are afoot. The Orchestrator sounds rather alarming, but I am looking forward to seeing the new package...

I’m rather excited now.

Great to hear that they are restructuring the patches. The amount of patches and the naming were just unwieldy. Add to this the inconsistent use of cc channel to control vibrato, and Plays inability to set up keyswitches or customize anyhting, really. Made the library cumbersome to use for me. So a restructuring is very welcome indeed.

Yes to all that! Interested to see how it turns out now.

Play per se isn't really the problem, it's settled down a lot in the past few years, but the patch organisation and set up really is.

I really hope they can do something about the woodwinds, I don’t like the tone besides the dreadful legato.

Mikeybabes wrote: ↑May 07, 2020 4:55 am Doug posted this at the 'other place'.

Not Doug, Nick Phoenix. Doug isn’t a composer, a Nick is a terrific one.

Pablo Crespo wrote: ↑May 07, 2020 7:21 am I really hope they can do something about the woodwinds, I don’t like the tone besides the dreadful legato.

Definitely didn’t look that way to me, unfortunately. They’re “satisfied with the original but are adding some ensembles. Hmm.

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑May 06, 2020 2:59 am Wake me in the fall when we know what it is or it isn't.

But if its structured like the current EW series with 8 billion confusingly named patches, I might not stay awake for very long..

Same feeling here.

Muziksculp wrote: ↑May 09, 2020 2:45 pm

Guy Rowland wrote: ↑May 06, 2020 2:59 am Wake me in the fall when we know what it is or it isn't.

But if its structured like the current EW series with 8 billion confusingly named patches, I might not stay awake for very long..

Same feeling here.

You're only ~20 minutes away from not finding them confusing anymore. If you have HWB, HWS or HOP, just open the manual. There's a section where they explain the naming convention quite clearly.

Don't get me wrong here, they could certainly have given more easy to understand names. Absolutely. And I won't pretend that I wasn't initially confused either. But the god honest truth is that after I read the manual, it made sense. Not only are the names not confusing anymore, the whole thing is actually quite well structured.

Not trying to start a discussion here but, if I may be permitted to speak my mind, I think most people just don't read the manual, which they really should. Would it be better if you didn't need a manual in the first place? Sure. But I find it a little too easy to put the blame on EW when they give you all the information you need to make good and efficient use of their product. There are plenty things EW can be faulted with, but this isn't one of them IMO.

For HWS it's page 41 through 61. All patches are explained in great detail there.

Actually, if you want to save some time, for HWS:
KSFP = Key Switch Finger Position. If this is in the patch name, you will be able to switch the finger position using keyswitches at the bottom of the keyboard range (C0-D#0). The 4th position (D#0) is the default one for patches that don't over this functionality and is the highest up the neck and the most romantic sound.
4th Pos = the patch's finger position can't be switched and is locked to the 4th position. Read: you'll load fewer samples because you'll have fewer open string samples loaded.
UB = means the attack of the note is played in a Up Bow movement (read: a softer attack)
DB = means the attack of the note is played in a Down Bow movement (read: a more aggressive attack)
RR = round robin, so if you see "1st Violins Sus 9 RR 4th Pos", it means the patch will alternate between Up and Down bow movements and is locked to the 4th finger position. If you see "1st Violins Staccatissimo RRx14", it means there are 14 RRs of that articulation (this one is quite obvious).
3-13 = if you see a number in the patch name, that number refers to the total amount of dynamic layers, but they include non-vib, vib, and molto vib alternates in their count.
HT/WT = of course, half tone whole tone (for trills)
LT = Lite. Fewer samples are loaded with these patches.
BC = The legato transition is a bow change transition.

I think that more or less covers it? Not that hard, is it?

The only oddballs are patches like "1st Violins 1 NV NV NV VB RR". What this means is that the lowest dynamic will be non-vib, the second lowest will still be non-vib, the third will still be non-vib, the fourth will be vibrato. The RR here means that you'll alternate between Up and Down bow movements. (So, hitting a note for the first time will sound an Up bow, hitting it the second time will trigger a down bow, hitting it a third time will return to Up bow, etc).

Matthias, how dare you consult a manual, don't you know that isn't intuitive, which is the highest value known to mankind?

Ashermusic wrote: ↑May 09, 2020 4:09 pm Matthias, how dare you consult a manual, don't you know that isn't intuitive, which is the highest value known to mankind?

I think its very telling that they're totally revamping the structure of the library, and Nick Phoenix who made the library called the number of current patches "ridiculous". These things aren't trivial in the real world, imo.

Absolutely, Guy. What I'm trying to get across is that it isn't as much of an issue as it's usually made out to be (just like how the woodwinds aren't half as bad as they're made out to be, but don't tell anyone, they're a bit of a secret weapon)

I'll readily admit I'm biased on the Hollywood series because those libraries have been my workhorse libs for so long. And because of that I've invested significant time in learning them inside out. So much so that I caught a rare few recording /editing errors with people talking.

Anyway, I think I've made my point. If it came across as know-it-all-ish or condescending, please know that it wasn't intended that way! Hope it's all good