The higher brass is represented by three trumpets playing long notes in clean, well‑tuned octaves.
SAM built their reputation on orchestral brass samples, and the selection here maintains their usual high standard: eight French horns performing sustains whose fierce attack can be attenuated with the mod wheel, powerful staccatos, semitone trills (reminiscent of a swarm of aggrieved giant bees) and some real‑life, deliberately discordant pitch‑bends, in which notes start off in unison and gradually drift apart. The octave cellos and basses are also very good, and absolutely nail the threatening, low‑strings grumble that says to audiences 'something bad is about to happen'. This creates instant orchestral drama - and I could jam for hours with this sound.
I greatly enjoyed the 'grace note performer' patch played by unison violins and violas: urgent, emphatic short staccatos that mutate into semitone grace notes when played loud, supported in the bass by massively powerful tutti staccato stabs.
Unison sustains from the original Symphobia are also included, but there are no full string-section pizzicatos. On a less subtle note, you won't have any difficulty hearing the bright, perky xylophone the producers recorded playing along with violins and woodwinds, an inspired touch that has created a unique and colourful orchestral timbre.Ī new set of full string section articulations complements those in the original Symphobia: these include energetic and bouncy short spiccatos optimised for film action scenes, trills and a set of beautifully played, emotive and precisely co‑ordinated crescendo‑diminuendo swells. Though the wind instruments' contribution appears subliminal, you'll notice a marked difference in tone if you compare this sound to a strings‑only patch. Further listening revealed a bass clarinet in the low register and a trace of an oboe higher up. In Symphobia 2's 'Dystopia' section, the mod wheel can be used to apply extreme filter settings to the processed soundscapes.Much as I enjoyed the lively staccatos of the combined strings and woodwinds patch, I initially found the woodwind element hard to detect - because the loud, emphatic strings bow attack (a Symphobia trademark) tends to mask it. Then again, if you'd rather end on a big fat tutti major or minor chord, there are plenty of them in the library too. An optional, additional grandiose timp-roll layer makes these octave samples ideal for the final, triumphant note of your latest orchestral masterpiece. With this, you can keyswitch between splendidly forceful and meaty staccatos, looped sustains and a set of long notes in which higher instruments double the bass notes across four consecutive octaves.
The producers go straight for the jugular with a powerful 'full orchestrator' patch containing strings, brass and woodwinds playing together. Since the 'all together now' instrumental approach of the original went down so well, Symphobia 2 offers a lot more material in the same vein. Thanks to Kontakt's new lossless compression method, the 33GB of 24‑bit sample data occupies only 18.2GB of disk space when installed.
Kontakt Player 4 software (which doesn't allow editing) is included on the installation DVDs - but if you already own the full version of Kontakt 4.1, you won't need this player (in fact, if the installation software detects the full version of the program residing on your system, it won't install it anyway!).
Symphobia 2 is formatted for Native Instruments' Kontakt 4.1 sampler, which runs stand‑alone and as a plug‑in on Windows and Mac machines. (You can read the original SOS review of Symphobia at /sos/dec08/articles/sampleshop.htm) Contrary to rumour, it does not incorporate the original library (though it was recorded in the same concert hall): it's a new, separate, much larger, supplementary collection, which takes over where its predecessor left off. Add to that Symphobia's impressive array of hits, rips, clusters and glissandi and its large soundscapes section, and the net result is a powerful, impressionistic and easy‑to‑use orchestral collection that was well received across the board.īuilding on the principles established in the 2008 original, SAM have created a follow‑up, entitled (no doubt after much deliberation) Symphobia 2. The success of ProjectSAM's Symphobia is founded on a simple fact: many users lack the time, patience or know‑how to painstakingly build sampled orchestral arrangements one instrument at a time, and so appreciate a library that features full, ready‑to‑play strings, brass and woodwind family sections as well as ensembles of different instruments playing together. Symphobia's sequel probes deeper into the psyche of the sampled orchestra.