East. West Hollywood Strings. Reviewed by Dave Stewart in Sound On Sound September 2. When it comes to keeping an audience interested, Los Angeles- based sound company East. West have the instincts of a showman. Their latest release was originally announced over a year ago, raising expectations sky high and setting Internet forums ablaze with gossip. For months on end, visitors to the company’s web site were confronted with a set of red theatre drapes concealing the object of desire, so it was a dramatic moment when show time finally arrived and the curtains drew back to reveal the new star turn: Hollywood Strings, the world’s largest self- contained string library, 1. While these devices have much faster access speeds than regular hard drives, they are considerably more expensive. Happily for those hit by the current economic doom- fest, the library runs without problems on conventional fast drives, though some of its bigger patches do demand a pretty hefty system. I'd been waiting for a while on an affordable, new WoW battle chest so that I could start a new account with the first month free. Previously, one would have to. Get Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition Strategy Guide Minimum System Requirements Required (minimum) Specs CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2. Adjust Brightness for Laptop Computer on Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP. World of Warcraft system requirements, World of Warcraft Minimum requirements and Recommended requirements, Can you run World of Warcraft. The largest network of nude patches and nude mods for all popular games. Instant download and detailed guides on installation for all nude skins. However, I was surprised to find that the drive in question is a bare internal type, which means that you either have to put it in a spare drive slot inside your computer or buy a suitable external case for it. At the time of writing, East. West’s web site states that the drive is supplied for installation purposes only and is “not intended for daily use (such as for storing the samples for streaming)”, a caveat repeated on the product box. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim system requirements released, render giant spiders on 2GB RAM. By Tom Senior. The company have now upgraded the drive to a 5. GB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7. RPM SATA model which they say is suitable for sample streaming, and they advise that this warning message is now out of date. East. West supremo Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix of Quantum Leap need no introduction — having enjoyed a professional partnership since 1. For this project, the pair enlisted talented Norwegian composer/orchestrator Thomas Bergersen. Like Phoenix, Bergersen is an experienced film- trailer music producer, and having created a number of orchestral sound libraries for his own use (no, they’re not commercially available), he shares EWQL’s sampling and programming pedigree. In the words of Doug Rogers, “Who better to obtain that quintessential Hollywood sound than someone with his credits?” An excited forum user put it more emphatically: “DUDES!!! Shawn F- ing MURPHY recorded it!!! It IS gonna be sick.”. Since early 2. 00. East. West/Quantum Leap releases have been formatted exclusively for their proprietary Play sound engine. Play 5 comes in 6. PLAY 4 for 3. 2- bit compatibility), both of which are included with the library. The chief advantage of the 6. RAM, but in order to run it, your operating system, computer motherboard and (if you intend to use Play as a plug- in) host sequencer also have to be 6. The Play sound engine was reviewed along with East. West’s Fab Four and Ministry of Rock libraries in SOS March 2. Read the article at www. Play version 2. 0 (not to be confused with the forthcoming Play Pro) is now available as a free download to registered users. The makers claim the update also improves loading times, and while I was unable to compare Play v. I can say that on a 3. GHz PC the player took 2. MB instrument containing 7. Since its selling point is a large- scale, big- budget cinematic sound, it doesn’t contain solo instruments or chamber sections. No chords, phrases, . Though it’s probably not an issue for media composers, there are no real- life muted (con sordino) samples; the effect of the mute is simulated by a switch that activates an EQ curve modelled on sordino recordings. Hollywood Strings was recorded in East. West’s Studio 1 with 5. LA’s top string players, using full- blown symphony orchestra section sizes (1. In marked contrast to EWQL Symphonic Orchestra (recorded in a reverberant concert hall), HS has a large- room studio acoustic which, while by no means dry, lends itself to users adding their own reverb if desired. To that end, the library includes a large menu of convolution reverb impulse responses, including some derived from the hall in which EWQLSO was recorded. The looped sustains are manna from heaven for pad merchants like myself, incorporating three degrees of vibrato as well as alternating up- and down- bows. As one who likes to compose by playing, the provision of pre- programmed, full, six- octave strings sections is very helpful. You can use Play’s instrument key- range setting to build your own full strings setups, though you’ll find that the presets require fewer samples. I liked the intensity and forceful attack of the . Some of these deliveries incorporate as many as 1. RR sample. This greatly increases the timbral variety — and arguably, value for money — as each violinist brings in his or her own unique, often priceless instrument! The 1. 4- piece second violin section replicate many of the articulations played by the 1. The rhythmic effect is somewhat blurred, but a 1. The same idea is applied to the note repetitions played by the violas and basses. With these, the pulse is sharp and clear, though its real life speed is consistently a little slower than the tempo figure displayed by Play. It creates very lifelike, user- controllable swells and fades and obviates the need for played crescendo and diminuendo samples: rather than fiddling around trying to make fixed- length crescendo samples fit the tempo of your arrangement, you can create perfectly- timed crescendi of your own. Starting notes with no vibrato, then gradually introducing it with the wheel is also very expressive. It takes a while to develop the requisite foot/hand co- ordination, but with practice the combined modulation produces those dramatic, emotive surges in volume and vibrato intensity we associate with strings. Transitions between layers sound natural and ultra- smooth, but a disadvantage is that even though you’re only hearing two layers at any one time, the others are playing silently and consuming polyphony. For this reason, East. West put the 1. 3- layer instruments in . For the those with less powerful systems East. West created ! Keyswitches are used throughout to switch between semitone and tone trills, up and down runs, and so on. In addition, each section has a single main keyswitch instrument incorporating various types of sustained note articulations. At this time it’s not possible to create your own custom keyswitches in Play. In HS, East. West bit the bullet and, following the example of Vienna Symphonic Library and others, painstakingly recorded legato intervals of one to 1. This generates enormous amounts of sample data and helps explain why libraries of this ilk are so big, and why they take so long to create! I found the results to be excellent: with a little convolution reverb added, the cellos’ legato performances sounded truly magnificent. The legatos incorporate different dynamics and vibrato strengths (controlled by CC1. CC1 respectively), so you have the great advantage of adding real- sounding, expressive surges and diminuendos to legato melody lines. Velocity is used to control the speed of the intervals, including that of the portamento slides: playing hard triggers a quick note transition, while the 5. The fastest legato intervals speak quickly, but they’re not up to producing a realistic trill effect. If you need one of those, use the played trills samples. The makers also created monophonic legato and portamento simulations that can be turned on and off on the front panel. The legato effect works well across the board, and the portamento sounds pretty good if used judiciously. Unfortunately, neither the scripted nor the real legatos accommodate the old monophonic analogue synth technique of holding down one note while rapidly reiterating another, a nice easy way of playing a trill! Though the samples do their job well, I noticed that the time- stretching used on these instruments introduced some extraneous audio artifacts. These have now all been remedied and the fixes will be available in a free Play update.) Multi- digit performers will enjoy whipping out very fast, Flight Of The Bumblebee- style lines on the . Real- life string sections often divide to play different parts or the individual notes of a chord. For example, in a 1. Old- school string libraries can’t replicate this effect, as samples are usually played by all the players in a section. Every patch in the library has a corresponding A and B . These mono patches have a smaller sound than the other mikings and can thus be used to simulate an orchestral divisi. One advantage is that as they are the same performances (albeit miked differently), there are no tuning, timing or phase discrepancies with the main stereo samples! In HS, the choice of string may be determined by a knob whose four positions (selectable manually or via keyswitches) correspond to the instruments’ strings: for example, selecting . If you choose a pitch that the currently selected string can’t reach, Play will explode, creating a giant fireball that burns down your house. Actually, I’m lying: what really happens is that the software automatically moves the note over to the next closest string. Finger- position control is implemented on bowed long notes (not legatos) for all sections except the basses; there are also . No- one in their right mind would criticise the effort that went into creating it, but at times I felt a little less effort might have been beneficial — for example, I occasionally found myself hankering after some simpler, less multi- dimensional patches (for example, straight velocity- controlled vibrato sustains). For maximum flexibility of programming, having access to the individual layers used in the instruments would be very handy. Which I guess is where Play Pro comes in.. Users should make sure their systems can cope before buying; it’s not realistic to expect to simultaneously run large numbers of HS’s .
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