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    Review: UVI Orchestral Suite – Essential Symphonic Orchestra

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    In this review, I am back with another fantastic UVI product, Orchestral Suite – sample library for UVI Workstation and/or Falcon.

    UVI Orchestral Suite is a huge orchestra at your fingertips. It will feed your orchestral needs with over 4.5GB of sounds (15,645 samples), which translates into 60+ classical instruments with the common and unusual instruments split into single categories, but also the whole orchestra in a single patch or ensembles. The patches include strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion instruments, cathedral organ, harpsichord, celesta, and even a classical guitar, harp and choir.

    The instruments sound convincing, some with more or less realism and expressivity. While the majority sound very good as they are, some may need to be added in context to discover their true value. I would say that the main target of this sound library isn’t creating orchestral music as realistic as possible, but rather creating pop and dance passages, soundtracks for games – where realism is not the main priority. UVI Orchestral Suite can be a perfect tool for EDM producers, hip hop music, sound designers and game music composers.

    Each patch comes with a very intuitive and easy to use interface with cool graphics showing the instrument in use. The GUI is split into 5 main rows/settings: Performance, Expression, Envelope, Equalizer and Reverb.

    The Performance allows you to either play chords in polyphonic mode with two or more notes at once, or solo parts with “Legato” enabled (only one note at once, similar to lead presets found in virtual synthesizers). The legato is also having a fade out control. Next, we find portamento/glide that can be set to be triggered by a sustain pedal for more realism while performing via MIDI.

    Moving on to the Expression field, there are a “Velocity” and “Wheel” selectors – basically is the way you control the note dynamics, either via MIDI keyboard, respectively modulation wheel. Using the mod wheel, you can shape the expression of a note at any point, create crescendos etc. You can also draw the volume curve to fit you playing style.

    UVI Orchestral Suite comes with an ADSR envelope, where again, every aspect can be assigned to a MIDI controller. Let’s say you want to control the attack while playing. Right click on it, then select “MIDI Learn” and choose the corresponding MIDI CC of your hardware knob. You can also assign it to host automation. Controlling the ADSR via MIDI or host automation will get you fantastic results, you avoid the flat sound and add expression in your music.

    The Equalizer is very simple allowing you to fine tune the sound with its sweepable mid-band frequency and bass/middle/treble bands.

    Last but not least, we find a reverb unit with drop-down menu of five reverb types/spaces (cathedral, large halls, concert, chapel and small venue), size and dry & wet knobs. The sound of UVI Orchestral Suite is quite dry (which personally I like), but with this convolution reverb, you can add some depth to the overall sound. Of course, you can use external reverbs for more and more space width and depth customizations.

    See also: Review of UVI Synth Anthology 2

    All the instruments come with a series of articulations including legato, staccato, sustain, tremolo, marcato, run etc with lots of variations. The strings come with a big number of articulations that can be accessed via the drop-down menu on top right of the interface (see image above), or directly on the keyboard. These keyswitches and layers are usually located on the lows, but always near the active octaves for a fast workflow.

    UVI Orchestral Suite is very fast to load and easy with your computer resources, both in terms of RAM and CPU load. On a decent computer, you can load a large number of patches without any problem.

    If you look to add some classical vibes into your electronic and sample-based music production, then UVI Orchestral Suite is perfect for you. At €199, UVI Orchestral Suite is an affordable solution for the producers of hip-hop, pop music, urban, EDM and similar genres. But those who are looking for absolute realism, may not find it flexible enough for their needs; there are other libraries offering that, but the price tag is in an upper league too.

    UVI Orchestral Suite is a fantastic product for its simplicity, ease of use, with a huge variety of classical & orchestral instruments. It offers a very good sound quality and is perfectly adapted for modern musical productions. Highly recommended!

    More info:

    UVI Orchestral Suite

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