Guenter,

Your comment about the horns gave me all the relief I needed. First I tried Native-Instruments Session Horns, which requires the use of the Kontakt player. Unfortunately, the free Kontakt player NI offered for download required so much modification - going deep into folders, removing objects with cryptic names, etc. Needless to say, I did none of this myself. In fact, Sweetwater tech support had to contact NI for help.

So, after giving them my hundred bucks, I discovered that Session Horns is not as simple as "pick a horn, assign it to a track." I put off Session Horns as a learning project and turned to Xpand!2 (why are the Germans the kings in this area? - don't answer, I know why) and found some pretty good sounding horns there. In fact, they have a million instruments and all of them are good.

Still, I worried about the horns and how they would sound. I think it may be the fact that so much of the body is involved in horn playing - the mouth, lungs, fingers on a complicated valve system - that these sounds are among the last to be successfully synthesized. But they must be getting close to get a reaction like that out of you. Even the shortest reviews from you have something of concrete value in them.

Thanks my friend

Dean