Garritan Personal Orchestra VST 2 PC

I have been involved with electronic music for over 33 years. I have seen the 'orchestral' ambitions of musicians advance from Mellotrons through Emulators, Synclaviers, Fairlights, Roland, Akai and Kurzweils up to the current software Gigastudios.
The pursuit of a realistic orchestra from synthesized means has been a goal of mine and may just have been realized (finally!) with my purchase of the Garritan Personal Orchestra (I'll just say "GPO" from now on).
Since I am Garritan's first GPO customer, I am told, I have been working with this since it was introduced late last year. I have left several reviews of orchestral related synths on these pages.
I own a small but effective studio in my home centered now around a late model PC with much software. I still maintain a few choice pieces of external synths, but none for orchestral work which is my main studio use. I'm running Win XP and using an ECHO interface. I monitor through speakers I modified from some excellent old Polk studio monitors driven by a high-end amp, and top AKG headphones.

"Ease of use" is the mainstay of GPO. If you've ever gotten frustrated with your Gigastudio and all those arcane and counter-intuitive 'keyswitching' samples etc, then the GPO is definitely for you!
The GPO doesnot implement 'direct from disk' as of this writing, but it will. The library is designed to load into your computer's ram and as such does take up more space than the Giga. Speaking of which, you won't need that Gigastudio to load and play the GPO, in fact you can't use it at all with any other software or hardware sampler. Like other soundware developers these days, the GPO has it's own unique player which is derived from Native Instruments Kontakt (NOT the less powerful Kompakt!). Is this a 'bad thing'? NO WAY AT ALL!
The key to GPO is in it's VERY well done programming. I challenge ANYONE to get a better program for these samples. It's THAT good and I am definetly an expert at orchestral programming. The Kontakt softsampler can do things THAT NO OTHER SAMPLER CAN DO. This is essential to the whole philosophy of Gary Garritan's vision for this product. You no longer need all those layers and common articulations with those confusing keyswitches that force you to play 'wrong' notes while your playing-in your orchestral parts. The modwheel is your volume AND timbre control, simulating the change in tone that instruments exhibit when they get softer. The velocity response is used to change attack characteristics while playing. The 'sustain' pedal or midi cc# equivalent is also used to instantly change between a smooth legato and normal playing. It is also used in other ways too, but that is it's main use.
There is no need for a 'vibrato' wheel or such as their are samples with and without vibrato which is the better method as synth vibrato just doesn't sound realistic. The Player holds eight instruments of which any number can be set to the same midi channel for layering if desired, but this would go against GPO's method of 'ensemble building' that is, to assign each instrument of your ensemble to it's own track in say, a french horn section and use one each of the unique "Ens Instrument" to achieve a natural unison. Therefore, you can freely write chords and unisons as you go and they will sound natural and slightly different each time, mimmicking what happens in a real orchestra. You can even extend this technique to the strings as there are patches for them which use different similar samples to build up a decent sized violin or 'cello section from solo "ens" instruments. This most closely mimics REAL orchestration, so if you have a favorite piece you would like to do from a score or you want to try out those examples in your orchestration book, GPO will get you there easily.

GPO is actually 'fun' to work with. A real rareity in software instruments these days!

In use, GPO sounds VERY nice. The amount of realism you can achieve will depend on how experienced you become after using it for awhile. While the woodwinds are simply among the very best out there at this time and are quite complete, I intially experienced some frustrations with the brass instruments. GPO uses a single articulation in a sustained sample which is then modified to get staccatos etc. At first, I could not get a satisfying attack for aggresive parts. This eventually gave way however as I found that GPO lets you treat each individual instrument in a section in much the same way as real a orchestra. I have been able to render each brass instrument to it's own track where I can apply delay, compression, eq and convolution ambience as needed, then mixing the ensemble with an overall reverb. And btw, GPO comes with it's own excellent reverb plug-in at no extra charge! This in addition to a 'lite' version of Cubase VST to get you started (it may be all some people will need)and a fine scoring program. The included GPO host app designed by Plogue from their "Bidule" will allow eight GPO instances to be loaded with the built-in Ambience reverb so you can hear imediately what you are entering into your scoring program and even render it to a .wav file (sorry MAC users).
As can be seen, GPO is a really complete package, though I use it with SONAR 2.2 XL with no problems. For SONAR users not on 3.0, or on Home Studio/Plasma platforms, I would seriously go with Cakewalk's own EXCELLENT VSTi wrapper. The DXi version (like all of NI's DXi) suffers from an unusual 'tempo bug' where changing tempo while notes are still sounding causes all note after them to get stuck 'on'. Use the (wrapped) VSTi version and you will experience NO problems with GPO.
Along the lines of this 'complete' package for orchestration is a Steinway 9ft grand piano which is so good it's worth the price of the whole package alone. I never touch my Giga pianos anymore. This piano is not a resource hog! There is a lite version and two 'duo' versions. The harps are also truly excellent (what else would you expect from Garritan, a professional harpist?!) and offer unique versions which utilize 'harp packets' you insert into your sequencer track to allow you to 'strum' chords and scrolls with different voicings of chords. These can sound almost totally realistic. The included pipe organ has the most commonly-used stops and a full organ version and it sounds spectacular, on a par with the piano. The string sections are derived from the famous Garritan String Library and though they don't included the myriad articulations and don't offer chromatic sampling, they are excellent and expressive. The kind of totally smooth swells and diminuendi you can get with these strings and in fact the whole library, are truly unique. I was never able to get a convincing swell with my Gigastudio brass, in particular. By throwing away all those dynamic layers and using Kontakt's power to modify a sample's sound by midi control, you can just play with your finger on the modwheel and hand on the keys and get all the dynamic contrast thats been lacking in orchestral mock-ups and has been difficult to achieve. I thought I would miss the sound of these other softer layers, particularily with the strings and some brass, but to tell you the truth, I can't really hear a significant difference. But your computer will when it doesn't have to have it's ram allotment chewed up by eight layers of samples for a single trumpet or a clarinet!
This orchestra is REALLY complete and is lacking in only a few small areas. You will get enough instruments to realize 90% of all classical orchestral works. And you will not be locked into a single 'built-in' ambience as these samples are quite neutral that way as opposed to some other libraries which boast sampled concert hall ambience and multiple mic positions. GPO lets you add these kind of things in a much more cont

So...

Worth the Price? YES! Absolutely

Choose this over others? Always

Compared to the other low-priced libraries? A better deal

What do I love about it? Expression

What do I hate? Nothing worth hating

Is it a CPU hog? Not much actually.

Has it crashed? Of course, a few times what plug-in instrument hasn't? If you push your computer too hard with any softsynth/sampler you can get a crash. The early bugs have been corrected already, except that dang tempo change bug. Just use the VSTi with a wrapper.

Anything I wish it had? Stronger brass, agressive string downbows and more instruments, ALL of which are being worked on as I write this. GPO will be every budget composer's toolkit. It's already so complete. I don't expect my opinions stated here to change in the future. This is an ongoing project with Gary Garritan and Tom Hopkins. Check out their forum and the many, many demos and you'll be convinced.