The beauty of it is that, rather than you having to load a complicated setup to achieve this, all the action occurs within a single patch.Ī good example is 'Complete Orchestration': this starts off as a quiet, woodwind-dominated timbre and opens up into a big, heroic, Hollywood-esque strings-and-horns soundscape when you push up the mod wheel. The most complex of them are found in the Blending Textures folder: these cleverly programmed confections contain multiple layers which can be crossfaded with the mod wheel or expression pedal, allowing you to switch or fade from one sound to another. And though its patch menu lists familiar categories such as strings, brass, wind, choir, and so on (more of which later), what differentiates it from conventional libraries are patches that mix and blend instruments from different families. Rather than using solo instruments for ensemble building, as in GPO, Garritan Instant Orchestra contains pre-packaged combinations of instruments.

In the words of its creator, 'Instant Orchestra is about producing orchestral music instantly and easily.” Can such a complex and demanding task really be so simple? Let's find out. The resulting 1.87GB collection (which, like its predecessor, runs exclusively on the ARIA sound engine) is called Garritan Instant Orchestra, the title reflecting the short-attention-span, I-want-it-now world we live in. All in all, several orchestras and hundreds of players were involved. The samples for the new library were recorded over a long period in a variety of locations: in the Czech Republic with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, and in New York and Seattle with US musicians. You can read the Sound On Sound review of GPO4/ARIA at /sos/jun10/articles/personalorchestra4.htm.Įncouraged by the popularity of his eponymous creation, Gary Garritan decided to make a sequel. In 2009, a fourth revision, GPO4, made users' lives even easier by porting the formerly Kontakt-formatted samples over to the simple-to-use ARIA sound engine (designed by the French company Plogue). Personal Orchestra's selling points were (and are) its low price, logical approach and thoroughly comprehensive instrumentation. Because of the library's small RAM footprint, large setups like this will load in less than 10 seconds!īack in 2004, Garritan Personal Orchestra enabled impecunious musicians to engage in the noble art of orchestral writing without having to take out a second mortgage to buy the samples, or attain a master's degree in computer science to work out how to use them.

The ARIA player's main screen, showing a 16-way, fully multitimbral setup of instruments from Garritan Instant Orchestra. Instant Orchestra aims to take the pain out of creating orchestral parts - but can such an affordable library still produce the goods?

Garritan personal orchestra 5 songs