I am looking for a good horn library in the same style as Big Fish Audio's Vintage Horns, basically Old Soul/Rn'B/Jazz vybes. I'm not really able to download a bunch of libraries to test them out, so I thought I'd throw it out to the masses. Size is an issue, but quality is also important; so I'm going for the middle ground. Multiple, smaller libraries is also an option.
I have been looking at Chris Hein's Compact library. Thoughts?
(Also, I tried BFA's Vintage Horns libraries, and they're nice, but, as I noticed--and my buddy, who plays Sax, pointed out--the velocity is way off the mark, seemingly only having hits of 10%, 12%, 40% and then 100%. I play piano and all my other libraries are golden, so it's not a user/Kontakt error....unless there's some sort of velocity calibration that I'm unaware of for those libraries?)
Thanks in advance for any advice/recommendations.

 

Not exactly the very best but you can get some nice rnb/soul/jazz horn sections and solo brass from NI's Session Horns Pro. I like the fact you can -within seconds- quickly build your own brass section (up to 6 different instruments) and start building your arrangements. Sound is quite good as long as you are aware of what you 're doing hehehe. Here's the articulations chart:
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/cinematic/session-horns-pro/articulations/
Cheers

 

Chris Hein's Compact library sounds and works well. But you need to tweak (set up) the velocity curve for your playing way. With most of the horn libraries you would need to do this tweaking anyway. And many libraries (like Chris Hein) have the modwheel (CC1) assigned to vibrato, instead of dynamics, so you have to change it if needed.
And there are the Sample Modelling instruments that takes so small room on your HD and sound so real (with a good reverb added, like Altiverb) but are difficult to play appropriately, you need to manage more parameters other than dynamics, or using a wind controller that creates those parameters.

 

In my opinion Native Instruments' Session Horns, or Session Horns Pro, is the best horn section library for any type of pop music. I use it, and I love it.

Session Horns is only 3.51 GB, whereas Session Horns Pro is 27.5 GB.

 

@jazzzz I had tried messing with the ADSR parameters, but I still seem to be getting only a few responses that would lead one to believe that the phantom horn players are only capable of playing as though they are either junked out on Heroin or flying high on Coke.
I can easily distinguish what the ADSR is doing and it doesn't seem like that's the issue. Also, I didn't have an issue with the Embertone horns at all, as they just needed a bit of tweaking (as you mentioned,) and all other instruments--pianos, strings, etc.--I've only had to do very slight adjustments (sometimes, only for a specific song or passage.) The only time I have encountered this before is on very low-end libraries, which, overall, doesn't seem to be the case with Vintage Horns (and yes, I know it's not *high-end, but still.)
On a side note, I actually didn't know that the modwheel was interchangeable on BFA's library, largely because I have been trying to get the aforementioned issue straight; so that's good to know.

 

The Fable Sounds Broadway BigBand and someone said Chris Hein's, have the most realistic possibilities with articulations, mutes, and dynamics with keyswitches. As everyone said, nothing vanilla-out-of-the-box is perfect, but those two for me I find are fairly realistic.

 

Yes Chris Hein's is quiet complete articulation wise. But it's less intuitive to use.
NI 's Session Horns is very practical.
I use to add one SampleModeling SWAM sax to change a bit the color and get more life to the section.

 

A good horn library?

Pornhub

 

Session Horn Pro has given me the best results to date, but I still struggle for realism and end up with a lot of processing outside Kontakt.

I still reckon you need to layer it as has been mentioned above..

 

Forget the BFA Vintage Horns library. It doesn't have the feature to use modwheel.
Although there exists a middleman program in which - besides many other useful tricks - you can transform values from CC to velocity: http://www.bewaryprods.com/software/products/TransMIDIfier/
...but I don't think that BFA library would sound any better. It's just too old script for today's standards.

Session Horn uses CC11, instead of CC1 and it doens't give the option to change it in its patch but there is a script that comes with Kontakt which can do that. Go to KSP and choose in the Preset tab > Factory > Transform > Transformer

Broadway Big Band is a quite old library again, and huge (over 100GB).

 

For me .... Chris Hein's Compact library sounds is very nice


Miles thankx R2R

 

Vir2 Mojo Horns for Kontakt wasn't too bad either. It sported several keyswitch articulations and you could choose, for instance, a trumpet, and choose the number of pieces in the ensemble. Apart from brass instruments, it also included some woodwinds. You should consider it.

You can watch a review here:

 

I agree that Chris Hein is a good bet - I quite like the way all his libs are organized. I like the sound of the Spitfire horns a bit better, but I'm not a huge fan of their GUI. For individual solo brass instruments (horn, trumpet, trombone, saxes, tuba) I love the SampleModeling libs - very expressive.

 

Haha, yeah, a bit large for my current setup. As for all of the afore mentioned stuff, I copied the link/information so I can look into to further. Thanks.

I hadn't heard of this one. The woodwinds aren't necessary, but if the horns are nice, it's a nice bonus. Thanks.

I have had a lot of people here and on other forums recommend different libraries

but no one has really had any issue with the Chris Hein library, aside from the fact that it isn't a 40 GBs (or 100GBs.)
I think I am going to give that one a try and hope it's not a waste of a couple of GBs of downloading.
If that doesn't work out, at least I now have more recommendations and some new ideas/knowledge.

Thanks for all of the input. It's appreciated.