While Swing More! is focused on Brass and Sax, there are also three strings a bowing, two pianos a swinging, a ladies chorus singing and a drummer on a drum stool. We will get to the drummer later.
The Swing Piano has almost 10,000 samples and is over 6 gigs compressed and so it is far from an afterthought. With 6 velocity layers and 2 round robins it works well as a piano in this setting but can't compete the plethora of high end solo pianos that are sold separately by about every vendor on earth. In that regard it is your typical orchestral package piano, well if that orchestra swings. The Warm Piano is just the lower mid velocity range of the piano stripped of the high velocity samples. It is a one trick pony, but a pleasant one that will eat sugar cubes from your hand. They both have Close and Room mic settings.
The swing piano seems to be a bit sharper and brighter than my beloved Steinways but with less resonance and power. I have no idea what it is, but it seems to cut through the mix fairly well and play some little tinkly stuff at the top end. If you want some extra tinkle at the top end crank up the Sparkle knob. It has some growl on the low end, but nothing like a Concert Steinway or Bosendorfer. The piano does have a Concert setting that seems to add a bit more to the bottom end and mellow out the top a bit.
Cycling through the snapshots is fun. The Gloomy snapshot would sound great for a haunted house. The Vintage snapshot sounds like you are listening to a piano coming from an old time radio. The Modern snapshot cuts all reverb and adds the stereo effect and limiting. The Lo Ram snapshot just messes up the loaded samples which is just annoying.
The Strings are passable for background work, but they don't sound real. They are more like a nice string patch from a good synth than actual strings. Maybe this is unfair since swing strings aren't supposed to be orchestral, but when I listened to the strings in Swing More and then to the strings in Inspire and Anthology, the difference was painfully obvious. This is sad because there was obviously a ton of work put into the strings especially the legatos.
I would note that as I played with them some more I discovered some ways to improve the strings, especially the staccatos, well at least in my opinion. Pulling the Attack down to a lower level, say 0.32 ms helped to make the staccato attack more crisp and bumping up the reverb just a touch seemed to create a more pleasing sound. Don't go too high on the reverb or you will create mush. Finally going halfway on the mic slider bar so you have all three mic positions about equal seemed to create the best sound.
The All Strings Patch has 3 articulations, Sustain, Tremolo and Staccato and weighs in at over 5,000 samples and almost 2 gigs. There are violins, celli and basses, but no violas. This lack of violas hurts the transition from the meatier bass instruments to the thinner violins. Per usual there are 3 mic positions. The modwheel crossfade across the 4 velocity layers works quite well. At the top of the modwheel, the strings have a nice bite and fade easily down to the softer and smoother layers. The Staccato seems to be somewhat effected by both the velocity and the modwheel.It has 3 or 4 round robins.
About the lack of violas, while the viola isn't nearly the solo instrument that the violin is, it is an excellent support instrument and a necessary bridge in an full strings patch between the cello and the violin. The upper end of most instruments tends to become more shrill and weaker. To me this is especially true of the cello and the violin. While you are going to have to go high on the violin, you don't need to on the cello since you can transition from cello to viola while still in the cello's 'golden' range. Also the viola isn't tuned that much lower than the violin, so you can keep the viola as the violin's support instrument for many octaves. Having no violas in a string patch is like trying to play defensive football without linebackers.
The B1 and C2 Staccatos sound quite odd.
The Violins - Articulations has modwheel controlled 4 velocity Sustain, 3 velocity Tremolo and 3 velocity, 3 round robin Staccato that is velocity sensitive. These are basically the violins from the All Strings patch. Passable especially with a few tweaks and nice modwheel control.
The Violins - Legato Arco is heavily sampled with over 7,500 and almost 1.50 gigs of samples. There are a massive amount of true legato samples for both the fast polyphonic and slur monophonic legatos. The fast is pretty much what you expect out of a fast legato, but the slur is quite different with a sort if 'wah' effect as you slide along the string. I've heard slurs in brass, but I don't recall ever hearing them for strings. It is an interesting articulation that you can have some fun with. You need to understand strings in swing better than I to fully appreciate what it is for.
When you are playing Fast Legato, Do It Fast! Give it maybe a tenth of a second when both keys are held down. It is polyphonic which can be quite nice, but if you hold the go into the legato note too long it is just two notes playing at once which isn't what you want. Also I notice that the p - mf seems to sound better than the ff legato for some reason.
There is a glitch in the Slur Legato which doesn't loop, though the samples are plenty long, that the release sample will still play after the original sustain sample was faded to nothing. So if you would the notes too long you get an odd audio bump at the end. Also some of the slur sustains are noisy at the end. So I guess the lesson is don't hold the slur sustains for over 5 seconds, which to be fair you probably wouldn't do anyway.
The Violins - Legato Tremolo brings the Fast Legato to the stuttering Tremolo strings. My arm gets tired just listening to those violinists play. Like the Arco Legato this has tons of true sampled legato that seems to work fairly well. With all that high speed tremolo going on I wasn't sure how it would work, but things seem to sync up OK. There are three modwheel controlled velocity layers here.
Celli and Basses - Articulations sounds passible and quite meaty. In addition to 3 velocity layer modwheel Sustain and Tremolo articulations and the the 3 layer, 4 round robin Staccato there is a Pizzicato articulation with 4 round robins though only 2 velocity layers.
There is also a standalone version of the Pizzicato called Jazzy Pizz and Legato Arco for the low strings. Like the violin legatos these are truly sampled for each legato transition. These are the fast legato that last maybe 250 milliseconds, so once you trigger that transition release the old note fast.
Not to beat a dead horse, but this string section has passable sound for the purpose of background strings in a big band setting but nothing more. Project Sam is the sampling house that brought us Symphobia so they clearly know their way around strings, so I'm disappointed in the mediocre sound here.
Moving along to the Legato Ladies with 2,500 true legato samples and weighing in at half a gig. Sorry to mention weight ladies. These svelte ladies (forgive me now?) can sing Ooh and Mmm in both legato and polyphonic articulations. There don't seem to be any round robins or velocity layers save for the bends.
The polyphonic patch is nice, but the real star here is the monophonic legato here as it is very fine in both tone and transitions. It has much longer transition samples than violin as they push to almost a full second and this really seems to help the legato work more smoothly. It is better to play at this legato a bit slower. While only an octave and a half in range and only having two 'vowels', I can see using this little choral group for things beyond swing as they have a sweet sound.
Oddly the Oh ladies can Bend it like Beckham with whole and half tone bends, while the Mm ladies only sing a single tone. The bending can cause some odd effects on the legato side of things and you need to be careful of going too loud or soft on your velocity as the soft velocity trigger the half step and the loud velocity triggers the whole step. This is a situation where adding a separate keyswitch for the bendy notes might have been a better idea than putting them all in one articulation. Still especially when entering notes in your DAW or orchestration software it is easy enough not to trigger the bends.
So in summery.
A nice Swing Piano that doesn't have quite enough velocity layers or round robins to really stand on its own but should work nicely in the context of this package. Also a Warm Piano based on some of the softer velocity layers for a different sound.
A String Section sans violas that is passable for backup.
A sweet Legato Ladies Vocal Group that can probably be appropriated for other uses in your virtual musical world.
No comments:
Post a Comment