Symphonic Series instruments

Hey there!


I just cross graded to Komplete 12 Ultimate. I did this primarily to acquire the Symphony series. In particular the percussion group. So after I had downloaded everything, I opened it up to find that it was incredibly limited in the instruments because it was…as I had misread… the “Essentials”. I purchased the cross grade for just the percussion instruments, hoping to receive the rest of the instruments…especially a vibraphone. After that cross grade, I opened up the new percussion series to find some of the best sounding percussion instruments so far. I’ve been living with Elite Orchestral Percussion which sounds very good, but is a bit clumsy with some of the velocity sensitivity…particularly the vibraphone. OK…so I open the vibraphone in your set to find that it is missing the bottom four notes of a normal range vibraphone…yet contains a high G, not on a normal range vibraphone. As a performer/arranger, the bottom notes are WAY more important than the high notes for this instrument, so I’m a little confused as to the reasoning. Same goes with the xylophone and the bells. Why cut short the bottom few notes on these instruments. AND…having been asked for extended range bells, as a performer, we’re missing a lot of notes on that instrument. Marimba and chimes or tubular bells, same issue. I’m hoping that these will be added later in an update, as I really like the clean sound of these instruments. And to be honest, without them, they have limited use. The old “Factory” group has instruments that have complete ranges of these instruments, why not these? I.E. In the Symphony set, you have a 4.3 octave marimba, but in the Factory set, there is a five octave marimba.


OK…one other topic that has been on my mind for years….


Years ago I started off with an Ensoniq ASR 10. This was a competitor sampler with the Akai from the 1990’s. I used to make my own samples with this instrument and sometimes sell them to other people with the same instrument. One of the features of this instrument was a velocity, volume envelope cross fade (Forgive my lack of better terminology or accurate terminology or downright ignorance.) What this did, in my simplistic terminology, was to cross fade samples, one over the other. For example, you could layer two samples, one on top of the other. Fade one out as the other faded in using velocity settings. I used this all the time for percussion instruments. It worked extremely well with cymbals. I.E. Sample a soft crash. Then sample a loud crash, layered on top of each other. Velocity 1-127. The soft crash would fade out going from 1-127 and the loud crash would fade in 1-127. This created a very natural progression of the tonality change of the cymbals through the progression giving a very true 127 values of dynamic and tonality change throughout the range. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I don’t see that happening with any of the samples today. I see stacked samples with velocity changes, but one can always hear where they change from one set to the next. As an example. In the symphonic series, there is a tom with a series of samples giving a very wide range of response. All set to different key/note numbers. I can tell you that I could have done that on the Ensoniq on one key. All layered and fading one sample into the other. What happened to this technology from the 90’s? Ensoniq has been out of business for a long time. Even if this was “top secret” or copyrighted technology, it should be readily available for any sampler now.


Thanks for great products! I hope to see them get even better!

 

Ultimate doesn't contain the full versions of Symphony Series. This is only available with Ultimate Collector's Edition.

Kontakt can do this as well, in Mapping Editor. It's explained in the manual. Other samplers like Falcon, HALion 6, TX16Wx can also do that.

 

Thanks for the info about the mapping section concerning the velocity crossover. I will have to look into that further. Obviously, I must have missed something.

As far as the comment in the Symphony Series, please note from my post that I did two cross grades and have the full version of the percussion section. The ranges of the instrument did not change in the second cross grade. They are still woefully short notes. I have the complete set of instruments, but still missing complete ranges for the most basic instruments. Like the xylophone, bells and chimes. The marimba is only a 4.3 octave range. And the vibraphone is still missing the same four notes at the bottom as well. If I missed something in this second cross grade, then please point me in the right direction to repair these, as they are incomplete for arranging or composing in the state they are in at present.

 

Then it seems that's how instruments were sampled and mapped, I suppose... Looking back at NI's Kontakt Player library releases, sample content was updated in extremely rare circumstances so I wouldn't expect additional samples for Symphony Series to happen.