Reply To: ⚡ SoundProps 90% Off Sale Nov 10th to 12th

[LinkedMusicians]

On pseudopop said

Their complete guitar bundle, containing 13 guitar models, seems interesting. It would be about 60 euros after discount.

However, each guitar appears to be around ~750 MB in size, which seems small. In comparison, Orange Tree Samples Evolution Rock Standard is over 6 GB, and they have sampled only “three dynamics, downstroke and upstroke pick directions (when applicable), with 2 round robin each”.

SoundProps guitars boast “up to 6 velocity layers” and quite a lot of articulations, even more than what OTS offers.

Size isn’t everything, of course, but I’m not convinced that the retail prices of these products reflect their quality.

I’ve shared that I’ve consulted to Orange Tree Samples, so I want to be transparent about that. It was around 15 years ago when I approached Greg (the founder of OTS) with a proposal for doing a guitar and bass sample library line that ended up being Evolution. I came with my full wish list for everything the ultimate guitar sample library would do, including a strumming engine. My real name is in the manuals (don’t post it here, I don’t want it in search engines and AI). I’ve also consulted to several other guitar sample library developers. I can tell you this, that other guitar sample library developers — including some of the most well known sample library developers in the business have told me that Evolution was an inspiration for them. The developer who did Big Fish Electricity told me that he studied Evolution and attempted to reverse engineer everything Greg did. Back 15 years ago, Andrew Aversa told me that he was developing his Impact Soundworks Shreddage line to be a very simple, genre specific kind of knock off of Evolution. When I told another MAJOR developer more recently that I worked with Greg, he gushed that he would never hold his guitar sample libraries to be at Greg’s level, nor would he put anyone else’s there either. I can tell you that some of the most famous movie composers are Evolution customers — including one of them I can’t name who has a company with a line of guitar sample library plugins.

Back when I was a working musician, while I had some guitar lessons and played guitar at an elementary level, I took years of piano and organ lessons and my experience with guitar sample libraries goes back to the 1980s. I am hypercritical of sample libraries, but especially guitar libraries because I’ve spent so much time with Greg on the original Evolution libraries (I didn’t sample or code anything, I was kind of like the product manager specifying what the ideal sample library should be able to do). The idea was to look at what everyone else was doing and learn from it. Greg had earned a reputation in the sample library development industry as a brilliant, innovative thinker from his work with Cinesamples.

SoundProps libraries aren’t even close to the same league as Evolution or even IS, which is inferior to Evolution. It would be like comparing an inexpensive and simple acoustic drum plugin to SD3. There are A LOT of reasons that the latter is superior. One is the sample recording quality itself, but there’s a lot more to it when it comes from Evolution, and I am pretty familiar with the reasons why that is.

Not even looking at the customization capabilities of Evolution — which are incredible and unparalleled — there are a bunch of factors that made the Evolution libraries sound more realistic than anything else out there (my personal opinion is that only Ample Sound has come close to getting there). I big part of the realism of the sound on those libraries is NOT the main sample you hear but what happens before that and then the physical modeling. They’re not just straight sample libraries. Get into all the ways you can customize them to get a handle on it. So, comparing something like SoundProps to Evolution isn’t an apples to apples comparison, even though they’re both Kontakt libraries.

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