Acoustic Samples / VBrass French Horns

[Piet De Ridder]

New addition to the Acoustic Samples' V-series arriving later this year, the VBrass French Horns.



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[Linos]

I'm looking forward to this one. The performance sounds almost too clean in this demo. Also, the instrument doesn't excite a room the way a french horn does so wonderfully in reality. That's always an issue with dry-recorded brass. You just can't fake that blooming sound. If it isn't captured in the recording, no amount of reverb can add it.
Nevertheless, the demo shows a lot of potential. It may be better suited to solo or chamber pieces than to orchestral sections. As the woodwind section was quite an achievement, this is certainly something to watch out for.

[Piet De Ridder]

Seriously impressive, these horns. Really. There's four of them. And a Wagner tuba. All wonderful.

There seem to be a couple of glitches in the software that need a look at (bursts of sound when editing the virtual space while playing notes) and the default volume of the patches is excessively loud — I need to lower the level of the UVI Workstation by at least 12dB to avoid overload issues — but all that is more than compensated for by the remarkable sound and the unmatched expressiveness and playability of these instruments. (A bit more brassy timbre at higher dynamics would be nice though.)

A well-sampled full horn section can do things and project a sound of a roaring beefyness that is beyond the reach of these VHorns, sure, but for everything else that requires the suggestion of one or more horns being present, I don't really know of anything as satisfying than these Acoustic Samples instruments.






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[Luke]

From the demos these do indeed sound pretty spectacular. As far as ensembles go, where you're looking for a particularly cohesive sound, I would likely try to layer them (haven't bought them yet), but they seem well-suited to many a situation. Regarding the "brassy" quality, reports on VI mention the Bell Microphone as having that quality, so perhaps worth investigating.

After this very good start by AS, I am cautiously hopeful that there will be Trumpets, the tone of which will be warm when needed, and still somewhat rounded and not as piercing when pushed yet still capable of that impressive, towering sound, a quality that seems hard to find in VI world without resorting to additional instruments in the family.

[Joe_D]

In terms of maximum bite, in addition to the bell microphone that @Luke mentions, there is the "bee" knob below the breath knob, which lets you dial in the maximum amount of bite or buzz.

[Tanuj Tiku]

I think this series is a nice modern equivalent to sample modeling etc but ultimately does not offer anything radically different. Fantastic writing tools though. I have the winds and I keep running into issues but look forward to working more with them.

I don’t generally like the sound quality of the V-series as much. Even their live recordings with which they compare the samples have the same problem - to my ears! So, while they are not bad by any means, I just don’t like it much personally.

[Lawrence]

I think this series is a nice modern equivalent to sample modeling etc but ultimately does not offer anything radically different. Fantastic writing tools though. I have the winds and I keep running into issues but look forward to working more with them.

I don’t generally like the sound quality of the V-series as much. Even their live recordings with which they compare the samples have the same problem - to my ears! So, while they are not bad by any means, I just don’t like it much personally.

I like the tone of the horns. I don’t find them revolutionary.

In the live vs samples section, I thought all the VBrass horns versions stood up well with the exception of the excerpt from Till Eulenspiegel.

[Ashermusic]

I don’t need more French horns and while it’s true that certain libraries will do certain tasks better than others no matter how great a library is, these sound as good for my taste as any I have heard, overall.

But then, I almost always feel that way about Acoustic Samples libraries.