Sounds and Demo

Well, now that I’ve got all the formalities out of the way, let’s talk about what we REALLY care about – the sound! I don’t really know what to say here, other than the fact that any composer looking for a sub-$500 orchestral library would be hard-pressed to find something that sounds better than this.

As noted earlier, the library focuses on samples you’ll use 90% of the time, but that shouldn’t lead you to think that there aren’t many instruments. The instrument listing on Kirk’s website should prove that there is no shortage of articulations. If you’ve got the RAM to spare, I’m particularly fond of the keyswitched instruments, which load up the most commonly used articulations in a single instance.

I should point out here that most of the instruments arrive in one of three versions – dry, hall and verb. The dry samples are just that – with no additional processing. The verb samples are presets which load up with Kontakt’s built in reverb unit, and the hall samples load up the convolution reverb with the provided impulse file. As a general rule, I do most of my composing with dry instruments and apply reverb using Aux sends and busses after the fact. However, I am admittedly relatively new to Kontakt, so I’ll need to experiment a bit more with these additional instruments before committing to only the dry instruments.

The richness of this library shines through in perusing the samples – particularly without the reverb. These are very musical instruments, and while quite comprehensive, one gets a sense that the recordings weren’t rushed. Hunter has clearly spent a great deal of time programming these instruments for maximum playability.

To that end, we would be remiss if we failed to mention how frequently this library is updated. New and updated instruments are posted often to the website, and to add value to an already amazing buy, Hunter is in the process of creating legato scripts for the library.

Taking advantage of the new scripting language available in Kontakt 2, the LegatoLive tools for KHSO Emerald will offer an even greater sense of realism and playability. Below we offer a few short passages which utilize some standard instruments and some of the newly available scripted instrument patches. As you can tell from the samples below – which are played in real-time with only a touch of reverb – these are exciting additions to the library, and I look forward to experimenting with them.

What it sounds like: Composer and reviewer W. Brent Latta created this demo to give you a sense of the sounds in KHSO:

KHSO Audio Sample [CDM/Symbioticaudio]

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