I'm interested in upgrading my virtual instruments vis a vis Acoustic Piano sounds, Drum sounds & Orchestral. Right now I'm running Apple Logic on a MacBookPro w/Apogee's Ensemble as audio interface & have the Apple jam pack instruments, ultrabeat drummer, also I have Garritan orchestra which is not very impressive sonically.
1) What is the most realistic virtual drum program which is reasonably priced & fairly easy to use? (Lots of peeps seem to be using ToonTrack EZ Drummer)
2) What is the best virtual acoustic piano vis a vis the amount of disc space needed to store samples? (I'm doing everything on a laptop & tho I use external drive for audio files I'd prefer to keep virtual instruments on the internal harddrive. Ivory sounds great but requires a lot of room How are the piano modelers like Pianoteq?
3) Are there any realistic orchestral libraries that don't cost an arm & a leg like East-West? Which will give you the most bang for the buck?
Thanks, Brian
Comments
First of all, if you don't mind, could you elaborate on what you
First of all, if you don't mind, could you elaborate on what you find missing in your existing stuff(apart from Garritan)? I use Logic so I know that it's sample library is impressive to say the least. In fact, whenever I looked around for upgrades, I merely realized that I wasn't using Logic's stuff to the fullest. So it might help if you explain what you find missing in your current arsenal.
I could help you out a bit with drums though. Ultrabeat isn't very great for realistic drum sounds in my opinion. You basically have BFD, Addictive Drums, EZ/Superior, and SSD among the popular products. Many more exist, obviously; but these get the most rep. Out of these BFD is the deepest, most complex and most tweakable, and not the easiest to use. Toontrack's stuff is much easier to use, but their drum sounds are already preprocessed to some extent, and you can only tweak them so much. Addictive drums falls in between. I've only used their demo but I liked it. It's deep enough to give you some sound control and simple enough to not to interfere in your composing/producing. I don't know much about SSD.
If you want really cheap I guess BFD Eco(their stripped down and simpler version of BFD, which I have and like) would be it, but I don't know how you'll take to it. BFD (eco) requires time to learn how to use it to its best, even though it's much simpler than it's big brother. It's almost like mixing a real drumkit, I guess. You have to know what you want.