I recently stumbled on this free orchestral sample library by Mattias Westlund called Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra. I have to say that some of the sounds challenge a few of the commercial orchestral sample libraries!
These will nicely spice up your electronic tracks and I highly recommended them.
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra is a free orchestral sample library. While not as advanced or ambitious in scope as commercial offerings, SSO contains all the basic building blocks for creating real virtual orchestrations. It’s primarily aimed at beginners, but also more experienced composers looking for something lightweight and/or portable might find it useful.
The SSO samples are stereo, 16 bit, 44kHz. Melodic instruments and chromatic percussion are sampled in minor 3rds. Staccato/pizzicato patches have 2x round-robin. All samples have varying amounts of stage ambiance, depending on their front-to-back placement, but in addition to that, a good hall reverb is a must.
The sounds are in .sfz format, so the best way to start playing with them is to download and install the free SFZ Player by Plogue.
Licensing: SSO is a free (as in speech, and beer) library released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 license.
Download the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra.
9 Comments
Hi!
Thanks mate! Works great in 1 instance but if you ad more than one the sound gets all messy. Do you know how to use it in several channels??
Cheers!
HI David. It’s problem of sfz. Solvable by creating multiple copies od dll and renaming them like: sfz1, sfz2, sfz3 … … … And then use them separately.
Thanks for the tip, Martin!
Thanks mate!! I’ll try it out.
Ah yes, Sonatina. A large, organized collection of samples and sound-fonts using Iowa State’s repository.
What’s better is when you load Sonatina into Directwave programs and add some fine-tuned reverb.
Here are some of my examples of Sonatina in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlU8jv7ptQw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poP-FYggStw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CZ_-xCRJ6U
Hello,
First, I must say that I really appreciate what you do for people on your website and YouTube channel. I’ve learned so much and I can’t thank you enough.
Second, when I try to use the instruments on several channels, even with fl maximized for my system, and trying everything above, I still get loud white noise when i try to play more than one pattern on the playlist at a time. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Hey Matthew,
I think it’s a problem related to the Cakewalk’s free SFZ Player.
You might wan’t to try sforzando instead.
Cheers!
The link seems to be down for the sfz player 🙁
Much appreciated if anyone knows where I can download this. I’m almost kind of mad we can’t all share via torrents. My upload speed is slow at the moment, but it’s still 20-40k that can help with the cause when I’ve gone to bed or otherwise not here.