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Anyone have any recommendations of VSTs for instruments other than bass? I'm fine with creating synth leads and basses in massive but I'm stuck when it comes to wanting to use piano, horns, sax, trumpet or strings, etc for some variation. I'm using Cubase.

The vst's recommended in other threads seem to be mainly about bass or filters/fx, sorry if I've missed something bate..

Cheers.

Kontakt or any sampler would be good for those since they are acoustic instruments.

Kontact looks nuts, comes with 33gb of samples . Shame it's £260.. any cheaper options?

How do samplers work with instruments like strings/brass etc? What do you need to be able to have however many octaves of the instrument, just one note of it? Sorry for ignorance, never used one before..

check kvr site, stacks of free vsts on there of all kinds

cheers battle gong, that site looks well useful.

to me, z3ta+ is the single best overall softsynth that exists

all bout SaxLab

boyd wrote:Kontact looks nuts, comes with 33gb of samples . Shame it's £260.. any cheaper options?

Short Circuit is a free one. I switched from hardware to hardware/software a few years back and I got Kontakt as part of Komplete really cheap.

boyd wrote:How do samplers work with instruments like strings/brass etc? What do you need to be able to have however many octaves of the instrument, just one note of it? Sorry for ignorance, never used one before..

Ideally you want multi samples of the instrument in different octaves. Such as:

C1, D#1, F#1, A1, C2, D#2, F#2, A2, etc through all octaves that particular instrument plays in naturally. You place those samples in the sampler and assign them to a range of 3 semitones each.

C1 assigned to B0, C1, & C#1.
D#1 assigned to D1, D#1 & E1
F#1 assinged to F1, F#1, & G1
A1 assigned to G#1, A1, & A#1

...etc, etc, until you have covered the needed range for that particular instrument. Take the standard concert flute for example. It only has 3 octaves of range starting on middle C. To represent the flute naturally you could get away with 12 samples. Of course you can use less or more samples depending on the depth of realism you require. The above is only one method of working with samples and samplers. There are numerous other ways.

Here are some really good multi samples that could be used in Short Circuit:

University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios

Heimlich wrote:Here are some really good multi samples that could be used in Short Circuit:

University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios

RUGGED!!

thx for that

And of course, there has to be plenty of goodness in this list of samples to get you going:

One Laptop Per Child Sample Library

Heimlich wrote:

boyd wrote:Kontact looks nuts, comes with 33gb of samples . Shame it's £260.. any cheaper options?

Short Circuit is a free one. I switched from hardware to hardware/software a few years back and I got Kontakt as part of Komplete really cheap.

boyd wrote:How do samplers work with instruments like strings/brass etc? What do you need to be able to have however many octaves of the instrument, just one note of it? Sorry for ignorance, never used one before..

Ideally you want multi samples of the instrument in different octaves. Such as:

C1, D#1, F#1, A1, C2, D#2, F#2, A2, etc through all octaves that particular instrument plays in naturally. You place those samples in the sampler and assign them to a range of 3 semitones each.

C1 assigned to B0, C1, & C#1.
D#1 assigned to D1, D#1 & E1
F#1 assinged to F1, F#1, & G1
A1 assigned to G#1, A1, & A#1

...etc, etc, until you have covered the needed range for that particular instrument. Take the standard concert flute for example. It only has 3 octaves of range starting on middle C. To represent the flute naturally you could get away with 12 samples. Of course you can use less or more samples depending on the depth of realism you require. The above is only one method of working with samples and samplers. There are numerous other ways.

Thanks for the explanation Heimlich, it's something I've been meaning to look into (I've only had cubase and been producing a couple months).

Cheers for the links so far everyone, I'll be checking all these bits out.

Wish I hadn't seen the Kontakt website though! It's the ideal of what I was thinking of, every bloody instrument under the sun .

So if I understand right, it's either an expensive plug-in like kontakt with loads of ready made instruments/samples there for you, or a sampler into which you put in your own samples you've sourced from places like these online sample libraries (which could feasibly cost nothing)? So is it mostly a question of money vs time-consumption?

What's the most common way of people doing this kind of thing in tunes where I hear funky instruments like sax/trumpet/whatever?

samples from records or old tunes

or paying sum1 to play sax, trumpet etc

as amazing as kontakt etc r, u'll never get em sounding like a real brass instrument. for that u need the real thing, so its sampling or session musos

Y dont u sample other music.

boyd wrote: Thanks for the explanation Heimlich, it's something I've been meaning to look into (I've only had cubase and been producing a couple months).

What's the most common way of people doing this kind of thing in tunes where I hear funky instruments like sax/trumpet/whatever?

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