Ryzard mentioned the SoundFonts from the Emu products. I've got them, but was never that thrilled with the sounds.

Well, except for the oboe from the Proteus 2 - I loved that sound, when I purchased and S-50 years ago, made sure I sampled that sound before I left the music store...

I spent way too much of my time trolling through the internet for inexpensive SoundFonts - and in particular, looking for the perfect solo violin - I finally gave up and purchased the Garritan Personal Orchestra ($149US), which includes four solo violins. (I waited until New Year's, when they dropped the price to $100US).

Still, I was disappointed with the results. The samples are quite good, but they lacked the "life" that I associated with violins. I eventually figured that I needed a better sound library, so started looking for a better violin library.

I found Quantum Leap's Solo violin ($99US and requires an iLok, which costs an additional $50US). The EastWest Gypsy ($399US) has an excellent violin as well, but isn't inexpensive. In fairness, it's got other instruments as well.


From the examples on YouTube, it became clear that while the samples were very good, it seemed that the sounds "out of the box" weren't that far away from the GPO sounds I already had.

Listening more carefully, I noticed that there were different sorts of effects that really sold the sound, like the "scoop" (where the initial sound starts under the correct pitch, and slides into the pitch) or "portamento" where the note slides from one pitch to the next.

So I spent some time with the GPO violin and learned how to code the various articulations in MIDI. Here's the result. It's not as nice as the more expensive libraries, but it was good enough to convince me to stop looking for something better, and learn how to use what I had.

I'll just suggest that whatever solo violin you get, you won't get the results you want from it until you really get into the sounds and add the articulations.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?