Customer Reviews

EastWest Symphonic Orchestra Silver Edition

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You will be able to find demos showcasing the instruments in this library, and they will sound very good, and they really do. But this review is about telling prospective buyers what they DON'T tell you.

MOST of the instruments in this library have NOTE RANGE LIMITATIONS! For example, their solo violin sounds awesome, but it has about a 3-octave limitation. How does that translate negatively? I had a cadenza in my music that somehow fell short about three notes in the lower range! When you exceed their note-range limitations, you hear silence! I ended up having to create a separate track and selecting a similar sounding instrument (in this case a viola) to compensate for the three notes that the solo violin could not provide!

I do understand why they did it this way though, and it's to preserve the fidelity of the sampled instruments. But it is in my humble opinion that they should've provided the full range anyway, even if they had to synthesize the remaining notes, and leave it to the judgement of the musician whether or not they would use those synthesized compensations.

These note-range limitations could turn your arrangement from being simple and organized to becoming a convoluted and messy fragmented arrangement. Musicians should not be restricted in this way.

Also, I found their installation documentation highly convoluted. If you think your installation will be a simple and smooth "Insert the DVD and sit back and wait", think again. When you receive the package, it comes with a sheet of instructions telling you that the DVDs are OUTDATED, and that you should download the latest version from their web site. What they didn't say was that you still had to use the outdated DVDs anyway or the instrument libraries won't get installed. But this will be just the beginning of your ordeal. In the interest of time and space in this review, I'm not going to enumerate all the steps you have to go through, but just be prepared for an unorthodox, convoluted process of installation.

I was tempted to give this product a one-star, but the quality of their sampled instruments were excellent. I also liked how they provided different articulations for some of the key instruments like strings. For example, Violins would have a long/legato version, a staccato version, a tremolo version, an accented version, etc. Most instruments do not come with this level of refinement, but they are very good (as long as you do not exceed the note-range limitations!)

Buy this orchestral library if you want, but you have been forewarned!