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East West Quantum Leap & Spectrasonics stuff?

For guitar, choirs, orchestra, bass etc.?

Perhaps not "cheap", but "bang for your buck -wise", definitely Kontakt.

Usually around November NI has a sale, usually can get kontakt for half price.. a really good deal then.. worth it to wait.

drewspuppet wrote:Usually around November NI has a sale, usually can get kontakt for half price.. a really good deal then.. worth it to wait.

It was just on sale fyi.

There is a reason those multi sampled instruments are somewhat expensive--really nice recordings of expensive instruments by experienced players, sampled in a variety of ways so the user has full control of the articulation of the instrument and can mimic, as close as possible, live playing on a computer. That's not going to come cheap.

Kontakt is a good alternative. If you are just looking for a straight up sample library I'd recommend something less complex than East/West ;p

Thanks Genevieve, I'll look into Kontakt. I've heard a lot about it but never really looked into it. Seems really good!

You could get something like alchemy player or beat zampler and the Sonatina Symphony sfz library. All free.

Kontakt is great but I'd like to nominate Reason. Vienna's pretty good too but it's crazy expensive.

I have Omnisphere and it's good for some Pianos and Strings but not that great for horns. Omnispehres good for Atmosphere sounds/Pads.

I know many will disagree but Reason has some great refills for pianos, violins, orchestras, horns, etc. With Reason, you'll not only get live instruments via NNXT and NN19 (samplers) but you'll get some awesome synths as well. The flexibility when you flip the rack is second to none and the combinator allows you to basically create any custom instrument you want.

The only word of caution is that you should know the basics of synthesizers (Ocs, filters, lfos, etc) before diving into Reason. To some Reason sounds a little sterile but nothing a little synth programming knowledge can't fix.

There are things in Reason that no other Synth can do.

I also forgot to mention that Reason is a Full Standalone DAW on its' own. You'll have to rewire to your host Daw but that's not that difficult. Ableton probably has the best rewire compatibility as the Automation parameters are already mapped within Ableton. Other DAWs like Cubase, Logic, Pro Tool etc, you'll have to use CC midi numbers to control any automating.

Bottom line, if you want straight Orchestral instruments to sound good right out of the box, get Kontakt. If you want those instruments + a few other synths, get Reason.