AMG British Horns Reason/Refill

I'm making post-modern pop music with Cubase SX and Reason as my main tools. I've got an M-Audio Delta 66 and Event PS-6 monitors, plus headphones. Been using British Horns for a couple of months.

I was disappointed that this Refill turned out to only include 15 horn multisamples for the NN-19 sampler. Compared to other refills this is an extremely limited selection of sounds. Even given that there's only a few sample patches included, it would have been nicer if they were for the NN-XT sampler included in Reason 2, but that isn't the case either.

Despite these disappointments the patches are strong, bright, immediate and have a good degree of realism. The included multisamples are:

01 - Brass Section 1
02 - Brass Section 2
03 - Brass Section 3
04 - Brass Sec. Short
05 - Brass Sec. Very Short
06 - Brass Sec. Fall 1
07 - Brass Sec. Fall 2
08 - Brass End
09 - Alto Sax
10 - Trumpet 1
11 - Trumpet 2
12 - Trumpet 3
13 - Mute Trumpet
14 - Trumpet Trill Mono
15 - Trumpet Trill Stereo

As you can see the focus is on Brass Section sounds, with only a single saxaphone patch, and three trumpet patches. The Brass Sections are in-your-face, most suitable for doing classic soul (or music influenced by it, a la Joe Jackson). They certainly are not suitable for jazz, except possibly for the Dixieland variety. The Brass sections all sound nearly identical in timbre (particular sections 1 and 2). The focus here is more on giving you tools to construct a complete performance, with different voicings (short blasts) than to give you a wide palette of sounds to work with.

My favorite horn patches are the falling brass section voices (06 and 07). The falling brass at 06 sounds lively and soulful in a pop mix. The problem with these patches is that you don't have any control over how the timing of the fall, so they only work at certain tempos, with whatever wiggle room you're willing to tolerate (pretty high actually due to the imprecise feel of a horn fall anyway). I look forward to the day that someone can come up with a digital instrument that can sound as real as these horn falls but allow fully dynamic user control over *when* the fall takes place.

Because the falls have so much personality in a mix you'd be hard pressed to use each one in more than one cut on a album without the sample becoming obvious, but you might be able to spice up more vanilla horn parts using the first 5 patches with the occasion horn fall and noone would be any the wiser for it.

The "Brass End" patch is probably too cheesy to use for anything unless you're scoring a muppets movie.

As far as the individual instruments, the saxaphone is excellent. It's a shame there's only one to choose from. The trumpets are nice, if a bit on the bright side. Trumpet 3 is mellower and easier to find a place for in a mix. The mute trumpet doesn't do much for me. I think the one in the Yamaha Motif sounds better, for example. This one is too brittle, tinny and metallic. The trill trumpets are lively like the Brass Section falls mentioned earlier, and suffer from the same problems: you can't control the timing of the trill so its usefulness is strictly limited to certain tempos, and the colorful nature of the patches makes them instantly recognizable, meaning you probably are only going to get once chance to use them in a song.

Even though I was disappointed by the lack of variety in this collection of horn samples, since I got the Refill on sale for only $25 I can't really complain. I think it's worth about exactly that much. It's a minor purchase and makes a minor addition to my sound library. If you're into classic soul music or any New Wave variant thereof, this is a must-buy library, but otherwise it probably isn't going to find a central place in your library. For more general applications there's really only 4 NN-19 patches that are extremely useful (1 saxaphone and 3 individual trumpets). I would have been profoundly disappointed if I'd paid the retail price of about $50 for that paltry offering, but at $25 I'll consider it a fair deal.