EastWest Advanced Orchestra Giga

My musical background is about 11 years of classical piano training, with a decent amount of theory but minimal experience with orchestras. I am focused mainly on composing, sequencing, and mixing sampled orchestral music, as a student.

I've been using Gigastudio for a little over one year, and this was one of the first libraries I purchased, to cover all the orchestral bases in one sweep. I've since continued to build up my sample library with newer packages such as Garritan Orchestral Strings, London Orchestral Percussion, and the SAM Horns and Trombones libraries. I'm using a Delta 1010, sometimes working with Sennheiser HD580 headphones, sometimes with Mackie HR-824 monitors depending on the time of day. :)

While it doesn't stand up to the newer libraries such as VSL or EWQLSO, AO is an excellent choice for 'entry level' (is there such a thing in the small orchestral simulation field) users who don't want to spend too much but need a decent palette of sounds and articulations to work with.

My favorites sounds are the soft string sections and particularly the woodwinds. The brass is probably the weakest section, but can be useful if they are not meant to stand out in a mix (like a subtle solo horn in the background). Also the loud string sections end up being very heavy on bow noise which creates a rather intrusive coarse effect when the modwheel x-fade is turned to maximum. The percussion offers a good spread of choices, but very little depth within the selections, ie: there is "one-of-each" but not much more.

The samples are dry close-miked, requiring you to supply your own ambience through a reverb unit or plugin, or convolution program.

As I try combining multiple libraries' sounds with each other, I start to find that mixing them actually becomes more challenging because they are recorded under somewhat different conditions. With AO, this aspect is not a factor as the samples are all from the same library and have a more uniform sound, allowing you to worry less about the sounds sticking out against each other, so your whole orchestra is fairly consistent instead of being cobbled together from a variety of sources, which requires you to do some more clever mixing. How critical that aspect is will be up to you to decide.

For new Giga users, it also has the benefit of being somewhat less complicated to work with. It offers some controls like modwheel x-fading of dynamics, keyswitching articulations, but as the selection is somewhat limited it never gets overwhelming and is relatively quick and easy to work with; there's not many MIDI CC numbers and functionalities to remember.

In summary, you can definitely get much better comprehensive orchestral libraries at this point in time, but their costs are about 5-7 times higher. AO offers the complete orchestra, emphasizing breadth over depth, but it is very worthwhile if you're just starting out, getting a handle on all things Giga and are working on a tight budget.

I have been writing and arranging orchestral music for more than 10 years now.
Using Gigastudio 160
Have been using this library for about 4 years.

The price tag has dropped a fair bit since I first bought it. This is the first Giga library I bought when I made the switch from hardware to software sampling. Sold all my hardware sound modules soon after that.

Firstly, this library has almost everything needed for orchestral music. When I got it, I've only got the choice of getting this or Miroslav, the latter which is way beyond my budget. Now with the new libraries coming out, Advanced Orchestra is certainly showing it's age and I'll probably replace it soon.

However, it has served me well for a quite while and I'm happy to have owned it. It has got a fair number of articulations but then most samples have only 2 dynamic levels (p and f).

Strings: Got most of the useful articulations like tremelos, glissandos, grace notes, chords, col legno, sordino, pizzicato, trills, appeggios, scale runs etc. My main complain is that the cello somehow seems really soft and lack power. Can't seem it get it loud enough to match the other string sections. All sections sections does not have spiccato of which would be useful in quick passages - the detache sample is OK for these with some tweaking but hard to emulate. The scale runs are very useful but only comes in one tempo, which can be a problem at times. The Soft Sustain patch is quite useful and expressive in slow pieces. To get good results from the strings, lots of tweaking is needed. I'm still able to get satisfactory and realistic results most of the time.

Brass: The lack of ff and fff samples are a shame. It just does not have the bite when I need loud samples, especially the trumpets and trombones. I've not used the trumpets much at all - I've replaced it by the free SAM trumpets. Horns are probably the best of the entire brass section.

Woodwinds: The woodwinds are not too bad, probably the best in the entire library. Of course it still need some tweaking to get it to be more expressive but that's OK. I was quite excited when I first got it because for the first time I was able to get the winds to play tongued and slurred phrases, something I was never able to do with my old hardware sound modules.

Percussion: Tympani loud samples not too great but usable - I use the free SAM tympani with it. Cymbals are OK - lots of them. Mallets are good. Would be great to have windchimes, slapsticks and a few other toys.

Another thing: I don't know why they did not include multisamples of harp. It only has glissandi and chords samples. Got Xsample library to supplement that.

Includes some orchestral effects but I find some things like hitting the mouthpiece of a brass instrument not quite useful (I'm a trumpet player and we're taught since day one NEVER to do that to our instruments!). Some may find the other FX useful but I've not used it.

All in all, it is quite complete and useful (despite the shortcomings) considering the price. Of course, it is not fair to compare it to the newer libraries like VSL and EWQLSO since this is really an old library. Still I find it a useful library and I believe it is a good start for people who wants to go into orchestral writing.