Symphony Strings Reviews

I’m a professional conductor and I write big orchestra scores in let’s say John Williams style. This whole orchestra library is clearly the best in Musehub (the best means less mistakes comparing with all others, i’ve tried everything) and the sound of strings in particular is fantastic. But the amount of mistakes is ridiculous. First of all fast passages simply do not work. Noteperformer wich sound 10 times worse than Spitfire, make fast passages sound 10 times more realistic! Then we have a lot of random mistakes in performing legato, tenuto, marcato, and mistakes are different in different dinamics! Sometimes the passage with and without a slur sounds completely the same way. Conserning harmonics, we need to be able to write them down professionaly with noteheads and hear them played correctly based on our written note text, you just need to take some Ravel score like complete Daphnis and to chek how we write harmonics with different noteheads. (I’m not mentioning that strings do not perform at all a lot of artifitial harmonics no matter how you write them.) Col legno mp - you don’t hear the sound practically at all. Col legno mf - the sound is actually ff, orchestra doesn’t perform it that way until you reherse really a lot, believe me. Dinamics in general must be fixed in the first place I think. And so on and so on, a lot, I mean it, really a looot, hundreds of things to fix and to add before one can begin really professional work using versatile possibilities of the orchestra. (again I’m talking not only about the strings, but about the whole library, even percussion, where for example suspended symbal, wich we use from the beginning to the end in cinema music, - simply doesn’t work well.) PLease make this libryary work at least as professional as Noteperformer works (we all wonder how is it so that so small a library performs everything with 98 percent precision) and Musescore will be undoubtedly the best notation software in the world. You just need to seat near a professional composer who write realy versatile and complex scores with different, poliphonic orchestra layers (where you have not only melody, harmony, base, second melody and percussion) and you’ll see hundreds of sound mistakes in 2-3 hours of work. Then one of first questions wich appears when you begin to work is why you have so much technics like bartok pizz, flautando and so, but you don’t have the most basic one - solo!? We need to just write ‘1 solo’ and hear solo violin! Then we write ‘tutti’ and tutti we hear. Using an additional stuff for that is completely not professional if we are talking about serious composers who shoud not waste time in making one kind of score for the sound and then work additional month (if we are talking about a symphony) to make a professional score out of a ’score for good sound’. This topic also concerns the notation software itself. One basic example: I want to check for instance how 2nd flute, 6th horn and 2nd violins sound togeather separetely from the orchestra. And I can’t do it!!! In Sibelius you click stuffs you need and you play them. It’s the most basic function you need 10 times in a single minute when you make a professional orchestration, and the idea of using mixer (why so complicated and so long?) in order to do it is just insane, it takes at least 10-20 times more time comparing with Sibelius (imagine always searching 2-3-4 instruments in mixer when you have 60 instruments in your score, that is beyond common sense). There are several other basic things we need to be able to switch ad libitum. Anyway the sound of Musescore + Spitfire (I mean the sound out of the box) is so much better than everything that exists including Dorico, Noteperformer and so on, that I’ve decided to continue my work here even if I need to make a score whith ridiculous dinamic markings, additional stuffs and lots of other things in order to make everything sound real, and only when I export a good sound I begin to make a real score without ridiculous amount of additional markings. (And again this is much worse then working with Noteperformer where you simply can chek your professionaly written score, because here in Musescore + Spitfire the well made score simply will not sound correctly.) Please, fix the library and the Musescore itself so that all of us could work professionaly like we do in Sibelius, but if you fix it we will be using the sound Sibelius will obviously never achieve.

I made the mistake of not trusting other negative reviews and hoped that maybe they were exaggerated but this is very poorly optimized for Musescore and it's clearly not getting updated anytime soon. It's like they just sloppily converted it into a few sound fonts and forgot about it without any testing or tweaking. Spitfire Audio has some amazing stuff but it is definitely not here. Articulations and dynamics are way off from standard and nearly impossible to work with. Some notes randomly end loudly with some very clearly too sharp or flat. The time and effort you have to give to make this work and sound good is ridiculous and stressful. Please do yourself a favor and use the free sounds instead, as this is way too overpriced for how little care has gone into making this useable in Musescore.

Bought this back in December, when it was on sale, so I've had quite a while to try it out. I own the BBC Spitfire Orchestra Core, which is phenomenal, and one of the reasons I chose this as my first purchased MuseSound library. What a mistake. First of all, the balance is way off. Violin Section I is far too overpowered compared the other 4 sections. One has to seriously play with the dynamic markings or the faders to make any kind of reasonable sounding mix. And just going by the overall sound, the free MuseSounds are far better. And I haven't even mentioned the awful articulations and buggy tremelos. The sad thing is that now that I've been burned by this library, I will be far less likely to ever spend money on any future libraries from Spitfire, or even libraries from other companies.

I'm shocked by poorly this vst performs. I find the articulations to be unexpectantly unsatisfactory. There are ghost artifacts occurring all over the place and the overall tone is not good at all. In terms of tone quality this is only marginally better Muse Strings. I find myself reverting back to Muse Strings because the Symphony Strings articulation is so unmanageable. Maybe I just need to learn how to use it better. However, right now I consider it not worth the money and I regret purchasing it. A waste of money. I hope it works better for you if you decide to buy it.

The sound is quite good. However, the tremolos seem a bit problematic. There are some imbalances. But I believe they will be fixed with an update.

Great techniques and sound. Strange legato for violas, cellos and basses by the way, expecially when these instruments plays on forte and fortissimo

This library has a nice sound, and better pizzicato. The only problem is the strange legato sound in violas

I love the sound. Also a bunch of articulations and works nice, without any bugs

much better than berlin strings, cinestrings, or even vienna considering the price difference. has a nice soft legato sounds and sounds much more realistic than the other ones. would reccomend 10/10 would try again

Its sigma skibidi and realistic, I just hope it gets improved more though, but its still good

Overall it’s very good. My only problem is that the slurs don’t sound like slurs. Please get it fixed as soon as possible. Other than that, fantastic sounds!

The sound quality is outstanding, but it falls short of delivering a convincing spiccato/ staccato, and the legato also leaves much to be desired. At present, the MuseSounds library performs better. Keep up the good work!

Very nice sound of these strings, Spitfire quality. But as mentioned in other reviews - the legato does not work properly -hope this wil get fixed. Otherwise: fine srings to work with.

The sound quality itself is phenomenal but the legatos still need a ton of work. Particularly on repeated rebowed notes. It works great on pieces with long sustained notes but really suffers with passages with more movement and activity. I'm disappointed but I understand how hard this is. I eagerly await to see how this progresses.

What I like about this pack is it’s realistic sound, comes close to the wood of the instruments and hall, it’s a bit less compressed than normal muse strings which makes it more realistic but if you want that synthetic pad sound you can go for muse strings

a fuller sound than free but but could do with a few improvements but hopefully that will come with an update or two

Well, I’ve now compared Symphony Strings to Berlin Strings, and while Symphony is softer and smoother than Berlin, I still think the free Muse Sounds is best of the three! I find the accents in Symphony pretty overwhelming, but MS is softer. This is hard stuff, and hats off to all the people producing these wonderful products. It can only get better!!