Hi

This is not the usual subject for one of our blogs, but we thought we might do a quick round-up of the string libraries that are out there to purchase right now, and which ones you might want to consider if you are on a budget. The list is not designed to be complete, but is designed to really look at the main players in the market. So, here we go:

LA Scoring Strings (LASS)

Pros:

• True divisi articulations with a clever engine that will auto-split for you if needed (the only library to offer this)
• Flexibility, with Violins 1, Violins 2, Violas, Celli and Basses in Ensemble, First Chair and Divisi articulations
• Lite version is only $400 – a real steal. You don’t get the divisi articulations, but as it is always best to blend two string libraries, this is really not much of a drawback

Cons:

• Samples are incredibly dry, and can at times leap out at you and be tricky to integrate into a mix, if softer sounds are required
• The odd tuning issue here and there, though they are very minor
• Con sordino (muted) strings cost extra

Hollywood Strings (EastWest)

Pros:

• Great Sound
• Available in 32 bit format
• Gold version represents a great saving – you really only loose the fact that you have to live with 16 bit samples rather than 32 bit samples

Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL)

Pros:

• Great Sound
• Many different sample packs to choose from (Orchestral Strings, Chamber Strings, Appasionata Strings, Solo Strings)
• Deep interface with many articulation options

8dio Adagio Strings

Pros:

• Great Sound
• Some divisi sounds, but not as detailed as with LA Scoring Strings
• Dynamic Bowing patches sound great
• Easy keyswitching to be able to produce minute changes in performance
• Many, many articulations available, some unique to Adagio Strings

Cons:

•  Fairly new, so still has some bugs
• Adagio Double Basses not yet available,
• Pricey when all 4 sets (Violins, Violas, Celli, Basses) are bought

Spitfire Albion Volume I

This is actually not a string library, but an orchestral ensemble patch library. I mention this however as the string patches are sonically quite incredible. You basically have a choice of Violins in octaves, Violins with Violas, Celli and Bases in octaves or unison, and spiccato patches for Violins and Celli as well as full strings ensemble patches.
Pros:

• Incredible sound, recorded at Air Studios in London onto physical tape, giving the sound an unprecedented richness
• Great to use for blending with other libraries
• Competitive price at £349 + Vat

Cons

• Other than that you have not got articulations for each instrument of the orchestra separately (so Violins 1, Violins 2 etc), which it wasn’t designed to have anyway, there are none

Cinematic Strings

Pros:

• Controllable vibrato using a MIDI CC

Cons:

• Sounds aren’t quite as good as the other libraries

Conclusions:

1. If you intend to buy any of these either sign up to the companies newsletter, or twitter feed, or like them on facebook, as you will get news of their offers, and these libraries always go on sale at some point (at the time of writing East West have knocked $100 off Hollywood Strings Gold, for example), and truly huge savings can be had. Try to never buy a library at full price.
2. String libraries sound best when you blend two or more, so ideally you should buy more than one. Both the “lite” versions of Hollywood Strings (called Gold) and LA Scoring Strings (called Lite) offer a great starting point at $499 and $399 respectively. If you have not got a fast system, and the choice is between these two, go or LA Scoring Strings (LASS), as this will put a lot less strain in your computer.
3. Listen to the demo tracks available on the website, but be aware that these can sometimes fool you a little, as they are really designed to sound as good as possible, using mostly lush legato articulation or short spiccato patches. But often articulations in-between these two are hard to get right, and 8dio’s Adagio package does especially well at catering for these.
4. Spitfire Albion offers a great alternative, as you also get all the other orchestral ensemble patches for brass, woodwinds and some percussion, as well as some synths, and the sound is outstanding.
5. Not previously mentioned here, but do not buy EastWest’s Symphonic Orchestra – this was a great product when it first was released, but is now 10 years old, but is really showing its age

Hi

Over at comedy site College Humour they have created a really funny and clever parody of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Rather than talking about the rivalry of two gangs in New York City (as the original West Side Story does), the parody uses excerpts from the same songs as West Side Story, but instead weaves the action around how our everyday lives evolve around the internet.

The song “I Feel Pretty” turns into

“I’m on Twitter, I’m on Twitter,

And I’m tweating and singing a song about tweeting

But it’s seven characters too long.

I’m on Facebook, I’m on Facebook,

And my Facebook updates with my tweets,

So I twitter,

And then everybody knows my deeds.”

Compare this to the original lyrics:

“I feel pretty, Oh so pretty

I feel pretty and witty and gay*

And I pity, any girl who isn’t me today.

I feel charming, Oh so charming

It’s alarming how charming I feel

And so pretty, that I hardly can believe I’m real”

(* gay in those days simply went by its original meaning of “happy”)

So, Maria, rather than being a love song about a girl from the other side of the divide, turns into “Pandora, I’ve just found a site called Pandora”. “I Like To Be In America” turns into “I Like To Be On EHarmony”

To compare, here is a clip from the “Original” 1962 film version:

Hi

The BBC recently transmitted a programme (over Christmas 2012) which they called The World’s Richest Songs. In the programme they tried to find the Top 10 songs that had earned the most money ever. Now this is quite a task, and obviously to get really precise numbers is nigh impossible, but the programme was rather interesting, especially in what tunes it found to be the most profitable.

On hearing about this programme my natural instinct was to guess what the top few might be: Candle In The Wind, maybe We Are The Champions, Titanic Theme Tune, I Will Always Love You, maybe Everything I Do, I Do It For You? Basically recent big hits of the last 20 odd years or so.

Well I could not have been more wrong. In fact there was only one song that you could, by a real stretch, be called modern, and that was Sting’s “Every Breath You Take”. That was written way back in 1983, and I was amazed that it even made the list. So what are the top 10 richest songs according to the BBC? Here they are:

1. Happy Birthday to you
2. White Christmas
3. You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling
4. Yesterday
5. Unchained Melody
6. Stand By Me
7. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
8. Every Breath You Take
9. Pretty Woman
10. Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire

Surprised? Yeah, me too. For a start there are three Christmas tunes, only one Beatles tune and nothing really modern. So how could this list make sense? Well if you think about what makes money, you really need something that will sell all the time, and Christmas tunes sell every Christmas as long as they remain popular. Then, on further reflection, one realises that the older the tune the more time it has had to make money, even if it is only for 4-6 weeks a year (as with Christmas tunes). If you check the history of Stand By Me (written in 1960), that became a bigger hit second time round, as it was re-released to coincide with the movie of the same name it was used for in 1986. Every Breath You Take also had two bites at the cherry, as it featured in the charts in the original The Police version in 1983, and then again with Puff Daddy’s (aka P Diddy, Piddle Diddle, Piffle, or whatever he calls himself now) highly successful cover version in 1997. In fact White Christmas was US No.1 three times: in 1942, 45 and 46. The record was so popular, Bing Crosby had to re-record it, as the master tape had worn out, after so many copies had been pressed from it. Another curious fact is that most modern Christmas tunes were secular in nature (no mention of Jesus Christ, Bethlehem, Mary etc, but instead of Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Rudolph), and were in fact written by Jewish song-smiths.

So how does this list compare to the highest-grossig movies ever? The current list (Jan 2013) looks thus:

1. Avatar
2. Titanic
3. The Avengers (Assemble)
4. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
5. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
6. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
7. The Dark Knight Rises
8. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
9. Toy Story 3
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

So pretty much very different to our Top 10 music list. But if we now recalculate the list, in the only way which is fair, which is inflation adjusted, suddenly we get a similar phenomenon as with our music Top 10:

1. Gone with the Wind
2. Avatar
3. Star Wars
4. Titanic
5. The Sound of Music
6 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
7. The Ten Commandments
8. Doctor Zhivago
9. Jaws
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

So loads of oldies but goldies that had had decades to keep raking in the cash.

Fascinating stuff.

Hi

So this is fun. As part of an advertising campaign a well-known German car manufacturer decided to see if people in a Stockholm tube station were more likely to use the stairs than the escalator, if they made it more fun to use the stairs.

So how do you make it more fun to use the stairs? You make them into a piano (a walking piano). Remember the scene from Big where Tom Hanks plays on a walking piano in the children’s toy store? That’s a walking piano.

The result is rather good fun to watch, and 66% of people preferred to use the stairs rather than the escalator.

Great fun – one thing did strike me, though, which is that this did not look like a particularly busy tube station. I wonder what would have happened had they installed this in a New York or London subway/tube station. Maybe in such busy cities, where people have less time for each other and are always in a rush there may have been the odd dissaproving look?

Anyway, let’s enjoy this cool video:

English folk rock band Mumford & Sons have equalled the Beatles’ record of havgin 6 tunes in the American Billboard Top 100.

The Beatles set this record as long ago as 1964 – to put this into historical context this was the year that the death penalty was abolished in Great Britain, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment, interest rates in England were at 7% and a loaf of bread cost 21 cents in the US. Seems like a long time ago?

All 6 tracks in the current top 100 are from the new Mumford & Sons album Babel, which became the band’s first UK Number One Album.

Here is the video for Little Lion Man

3 years after their last album, The Liberty of Norton Folgate which reached the number 5 slot in the UK album charts in 2009, Madness are set to release their next in November 2012. Entitled Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da, the band are teasing us all with the expected mixture of reggae, ska, 2-tone and pop by allowing a free download of one of the tracks, Death of a Rude Boy. Starting with a driving beat, the song then gently erupts into comforting brass sound of the band but quickly gives way to a fresh new electronic sound. Unmistakeably Madness, Suggs’ voice is as fresh it has ever been. The song is quite dark, as the title hints but it has a lighter approach with it’s variation in vocal and instruments making it compelling listening. This is going straight on my MP3 player.

Learn more about Madness on our website

Hi

With the Muppets currently enjoying a bit of a revival, I thought I’d share some of the great musical moments that I enjoyed growing up when The Muppets were still on tv.

For anyone who never got to watch the original Muppets’ Show, there was always a special guest for each show, and if this guest was a musical star, they would perform with The Muppets. The Muppets did of course have their own in-house band, the most famous member of which was probably Animal, the drummer, who often featured in these great musical moments.

It is generally quite fascinating watching some of these older clips, as some of the so called stars are still going strong today, others I quite frankly struggle to remember, as time has not been quite so kind to their careers.

This first clip features Animal and the Puerto Rican singer Rita Moreno, who shot to fame when she starred in the 1961 film adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

The tune, Fever, is commonly associated with singer Peggy Lee.

Anyway, enjoy this great Muppet Musical Moment:

Hi Everyone

Slovakian viola player Lukas Kmit reacted cooly when a mobile phone interrupted his recital at the Orthodox Synagogue in Presov, in Slovakia.

Rather than losing his temper, Kmit adapted the notorious Nokia phone theme that had interrupted his performance, much to the delight of his audience.