Cinesamples - Cinestrings Core
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Prologue
A lot happened since Cinesamples came up with their CineBrass 1.0 back in 2011.
More and more products came into light, whether it was CineWinds or CinePerc, though the instrument 'qualities' remained the same. In another words, Cinesamples won't change.

Introduction
CineStrings completes the last missing piece in orchestral sections, well, as long as we don't count orchestral choir. The library is quite different from the rest, mainly in it's functionality and how it's layed out, also Cinesamples tried something new as well.

Performance
The whole library consists of all 5 instrument families, e.g. 1st Violins, 2nd Violins, Violas, Cellos, Basses.
Each family's articulations span over 4 patches:

• Articulations - Sustain (Legato), Spiccato, Staccato, Marcato, Tremolo and Trills
• True Legato - self explanatory
• Pizzicato and Col Legno - those two in single patch
• Harmonics - separate

Fig. 1 - Articulations, mapping page
Since strings are known to be articulation-rich section, Cinesamples could have taken into consideration perhaps consolidating all playing styles into single patch, in the same way Spitfire did it.
The script is very flexible though, articulations can be triggered in many ways, from keyswitches to CC.


Fig. 2 - Mixer screen (once again)
Mixer page hides the Cinesamples' usual interface of five different mics and six presets.
Just for recap, let's revise what those mics are about:

• Full Mix - done by Dennis Sands, 'perfect balance' of room acoustics and timbre detail, stereo
• Spot - focus on section of players, like Close mike, mono
• Close - little bit of room acoustics, somewhat empty, but close sound, stereo
• Room - stage mike, good amount of detail and sense of depth, stereo
• Surround - ambient mike, sounds distant, but not quite deep, stereo

And presets:

• Dennis Sands - Full Mix equivalent
• Dry and Close - Spot and Close (mix 6/10)
• Roomy - just Room
• Ambient - just Surround
• Best Legato - just Close
• Bright JW - Close and Room (mix 6/10)
• and Cartoon - just Spot

The real use of those presets is beyond me, four of them are just switches for individual mikes. It's hard to call them presets, if that's all they do.

Lastly there is Settings page, and this is where things get interesting!
On the left side we can see some new stuff.



Fig. 3 - Settings page
Advanced controls (though I would't call it 'Advanced' perhaps 'esoteric' )
On this pane, you can configure crescendi/descrescendi and CC switches for Sul Pont and Trills
The 'Hairpin creator' as they call it is probably the most advanced stuff for mocking up swells.

Start, hold and end knobs define the envelope, which can be even time-synced.
Velocity drop-down menus then sets the start, hold and end dynamics.
When activated, the 'Hairpin creator' make the swell after key is pressed, then waits for the next stroke. This makes composing moving textures and chords very easy and enjoyable.

Other controls are same or very similar to those found in CinePerc, except for Room Tone, which adds noise to the recording, that might help glue together quiet parts.

Performance

After playing with the library for a while, I've noticed some weird issues.

First of all, there is no attack overlay for sustains by default, that option can be turned on on the Mapping page, but when disabled, the sample starts with a pop.

Playing with the Hairpin creator, e.g. swells sometimes rendered the patch unusable, triggering only release tails, though I wasn't successful in replicating the situation. Otherwise the Hp creator is really awesome stuff, definitely the best what this lib has to offer.

Poly-legato does not work correctly in higher velocities (over 90), hard to say why..

Otherwise, legato articulation lets you control both dynamics and vibrato in real time, all CCs can be flawlessly remapped. Dynamics for shorts is possible to control through both CC and velocity


Sound Specifics

Cinesamples has build up its own sonic footprint and Cinestrings is not an exception. Similar to ProjectSAM, the sound is loud and projecting, but lacks depth and detail at lower volumes.
Here's a demo made from three string libraries, Spitfire Mural, Cinestrings and LASS in that order.
http://soundcloud.com/andrew479/demo-full-section-strings-test
The award for best detail goes undoubtely to Mural, while LASS gets a silver chalice for that precise punch. Cinestrings though sounds quite dull in this example, despite all my attempts to liven it up.

Cinestrings would work best in trailer/cinematic 'booming' scores, but for slow and tender cues, you'd be much better of with either Mural or Sable.

Drawbacks & Recommendations

• Very high CPU usage, combined patch with three mikes consumed all 4 cores of my i7 machine
• Mic positions are once again a trade-off for more round-robins (for Long notes). For example the Spot is completetly unnecessary, being sonically almost the same as Close.
• Patches won't let you unload unnecessary articulations to save RAM
• Do not use modwheel when Hairpin is enabled, it confuses the envelope control.
• And everything mentioned in Performance section

Highlights in a nutshell

• Swells generator is awesome!
• Quite rare articulations - Sul pont trems and Col Legno
• Loads of onboard effects
• Highly, highly customizable!

Auxiliary & Demonstrational Video

[media][Someday, maybe, I hope so!][/media]

Conclusion

Cinesamples' latest library, which finishes its orchestral range, was mostly hit and miss.
The library has lots to offer, 5 mic positions and abundance of articulations, however still suffers from the issues as its older siblings, being very resource intensive and unreliable.
The good things about it still include the unprecedent flexibility over remapping CC and velocity and very useful poly-legato functionality.
But it all breaks down into its sound, which seems to me, rather 'synthy' and dull.
No amount of mic positions helps with that, sadly.

But anyway, I highly encourage all of you to give it at least a try, because Cinestrings in spite of all its issues, has potential.

Reviewer's rating:
6 out of 10 stars

 

Great Review Drew.

Considering the footprint of this library i truly expected better, it's was horrible compared to Spitfire Mural

 

To be honest, I kind of expected that CineStrings would not dethrone Mural, however 6/10 is an even lower score than I had thought this would get.

This is not to say that your rating is groundless - on the contrary, you made several valid points that are hard to dispute. There is, however, one thing that I have to say about the review - the demo is, in my opinion, not really that informative because Spitfire products are known for their "built-in" reverb, even if you don't use any processing of your DAW on them. LASS, on the other hand, is known to require quite a lot of tweaking, and CineStrings would definitely have sounded noticeably better had you put some reverb on, I dare say.

But make no mistake, that's just one tiny grievance that I have against this, overall, it's a great review, as per usual

 

Cinestrings is recorded wet, just like Mural, plus they add additional reverb to it. LASS is put there not for comparison, but for reference. *yes*
It's probably right, IR would help 'smooth' the sound, but the sound footprint remains the same, and that's what I disliked. *yes*

Anyway, the rating has almost no importance on the real value of the product, it's just how I liked it, that's why I didn't rate HZ01 and actually thought of getting rid of it for all reviews. *yes*

In fact it took me about 4 days to finish this review, I understand it's a bit 'choppy' at times mainly for it was rewritten many times, though Cinesamples' products are hard to write about, as the sum of goods and bads is usually zero and then you have nothing left.

 

Well, I thought that the score reflects the good and the bad of the library - i.e. the CPU and/or RAM requirements, synthy sound, velocity jumps - all that would, in my book, mean taking one star per fault off of the rating. At least that's how I approach rating movies, games, etc.

Anyway, bottom line: for a 500$ product worth 44 GB of hard drive space, you would expect a more polished and optimized result. At the moment, it really is fairly underwhelming; let's hope for an update or something like that.

And sure, CineStrings do have some natural reverb on them as well, but I always turn it off and use one of my BREVERB/Arts Acoustic Reverb presets because I'm usually not satisfied with the original reverb available in most libraries.

 

It does, in a way, but I rate it based on instinct, not on empirical evidence, which is however taken into account.

 

Nice work again Bro...

Your "Library" of Reviews is growing fast (good for us...)

 

I go from Molekular a library just released by BuroakenSowend and I look up and here comes another of Andrew's reviews. Sometimes I'm so proud of the members of these forums I could just explode. Now I see that my decision to skip this release was a good choice and I don't have that nagging feeling in the back of my mind. Andrew another amazing job. Thanks for all the time and effort you had to spend to share this with us.

 

The Hairpin Creator is an AMAZING feature. Like, "why didn't anyone else do this already-it sounds so freakin natural" good. It is MUCH more realistic sounding than using an expression pedal or mod wheel to control dynamics. Much more smooth.

Except it's sort of broken...

You choose the starting dynamic (p, pp, mp, mf, f, etc), the peak dynamic, and the fall of the swell. It's like a ADSR on a synth I suppose. However, if you need it to swell up more than a dynamic level or two, it does this weird thing every 4-5 chords you play where it will only play the loud part and the release portion of the swell immediately, which obviously sounds kinda f@$ked up...

Made me feel much better that Andrew experienced this as well- I was worried it was just on my system. Anyone else getting this?

 

Great review Andrew.

Still prefer Mural over Cinestrings

I did find setting some simple EQ curves helps to reduce the rosin_y sound slightly and overall sounded better. Maybe useful for LASS as well.

Try this EQ settings and add your favourtie reverb of 2.1 secs.

@ 540Hz, minus 2.0db and 0.10Q
@ 3350Hz, minus 1.0 db and 0.60Q
@ 8900Hz, plus 1.5 db and 0.71Q (optional)

Cheerios

 

Very interesting and informative point of view Andrew *yes*

Thank you for all the time that you spent for the analysis of this library

However, I fell asleep by trying to load in Kontakt the following Multis =

"True Legato.nkm 16.Full Unison".

Seriously, someone managed to load it in less than 10 minutes ?

 

@tempo

Took less than 10 secs to load the 16 Full Unison True Legato multis with K 5.3.1. Did batch resaved earlier.

 

Thanks,I will try

 

Thank you for another great review Andrew!

When listening to your comparison audio example, or Cinestrings own demos, I can't help wondering how they could have screwed up so badly.

I'm definitely not saying this just to bash Cinesamples, but this lib simply doesn't evoke much emotion or passion.
On the technical side, one can compare things to a dish that has been overcooked, left alone and warmed up again in the Microwave.
Perhaps Cinesamples used some kind of automated batch processing of the individual samples that took the life out of them. Perhaps they got scared after being criticised for noisy samples in the past. Whatever it is, the end result is not how I would perceive a real orchestra in a real hall to sound like. A bit sad really.

 

Batch resave solves the problem; thing is, it takes like 2 hours.

By the way, how did you find the low velocities in this lib, Andrew? Dan James said in his walkthrough vid that he considers CineStrings to cover the middle ground of string libraries, but from my testing, it turned out to be suitable mainly for those epic arrangements, with little to offer in the soft register, unlike Loegria, Sable, etc.

 

Another well done review Andrew - Thanks

Looks like I´ll pass on this one *yes*

 

Almost each strings have their own qualities but I still love LASS (like Andrew I presume).
I hope that someday we can see a FULL LASS 2 here...

 

Wow great review Andrew, interesting comparison (I'm a lurker but signed up to say that and ask a few questions).

How do you think the articulation mapping customizing compares to Spitfire's Mural? You say this has unprecedent flexibility over remapping CC and velocity but I was under the impression Spitfire products could also do this with the articulation script included. Being able to remap things would be very important to me.

 

Thanks Andrew !

It confirmed i had a good feeling not to even download it

For a simple and effective "strings only" bank, i would go for Cinematic Strings 2 and Adagietto.
For something bigger, probably Spitfire Mural/Sable.

ppl want dry samples only ? You can use only close mics on CS2 or Adagietto And you will not need tons of EQ...unlike LASS 2

A nice day or night to all

 

I feel like most string libraries have difficulty conveying both the very soft sounds as well as the very loud ones. I feel like a real string player can get way more intense than is reflected in most libraries top velocity samples.

After trying out nearly all of the big libraries mentioned in this thread, I can indeed agree that each has its particular uses.

My brief assessment is that Cinestrings Core sounds nice and that the hairpin creator is the standout feature to my ears. Probably not worth $500 to me for MY uses, but then again, that's ALOT of $$$ to a guy like me.