I've seen east west stuff but I cannot afford it, is there any available ones on our sister site or ones someone can recommend that do not totally break the bank. Also what tutorials are out there for learning all the orchestral one shots and where to use them and what they are used for. There are tons of cool sounds that I want to use in my productions but i'm not sure what they're called so a tutorial describing all the sound and a example would be great!

 

That's a big story!

 

You can start with that:

 

Good start would be Cinematic Strings 2, Cinebrass Core, Spitfire Percussion and Berlin Woodwinds.
For more delicate work, Spitfire Strings, Sample Modeling Brass, Berlin Woodwinds EXP B, C, and several Spitfire instrument packs (Glock, Crotales, Pylons, Kitbag, Kitbag 2)

 

And also for sketching and score Edirol Orchestral. Artic version works well in windows 7 x64

 

I like the Project Sam stuff.Orchestral Essentials,Symphobia ,Orchestral Brass,etc.I don't think I've heard anything from them I don't like.All the stuff Andrew listed is very nice as well. Edirol Orchestral is great for sketching and some of the sounds are ehhh and some ok,but the others listed are much more realistic in my opinion.

EWQL has some nice patches in Hollywood Strings and Goliath and most of the Hollywood line of theirs but yeah it's expensive.I'd dig around on the sister site for some of the Kontakt libs mentioned. There's a lot of great Kontakt libs for orchestral stuff.

 

Last edited: Jan 18, 2016

East West's Composer Cloud model is aimed at people like you and is super affordable for East West's entire catalogue virtually.

However, something like Spitfire Albion ONE or Orchestral Tools' Metropolis ARK 1 is where I would start if you don't fancy East West's offering as they will give you the entire orchestra and are outstanding quality from the off.

 

i think ALOT of people missed this part of the OP's post: can recommend that do not totally break the bank

 

Kirk Hunter DIAMOND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA!
150$

 

I think some of the Diamond stuff is on the sister site as well,also some nice patches.

 

all of those major symphonic libraries do sound great when you listen to demo songs that are on the devs/brand web-shop homepage; but when you load a preset and try to play some phrasing in your project... it turns into a whole different story and to make it sit properly in your own song/mix, that's even another story. So, it makes me tend to believe the symphonic library producers makes those libraries for themselves and only their developers are able to make them sound and sit great in a mix in their very own specific audio demo-spam projects they have composed and use on their webshop to make sell their libraries... At the end, there is no question that some major major musically-wirting & technical midi editing skill job is required to write great sounding strings ensemble sequences. Speaking based on my own experience, you may be surprised that some 'cheap/small' strings ensembles from some popular smalltime vsti's would sound sometimes better than most of those major space-resource-whoring symphonic libs.

 

Last edited: Jan 18, 2016

VSL all day baby.