My Negative Review on Soundsonline.com Products...

For those thinking of buying some East West Quantum Leap products, I'd just like to give a little review of my own experience with the libraries.

The libraries I'm reviewing, since they are the two that I purchased, are Ministry of Rock and Goliath.

I'd like to say before I begin that I am not biased against the East West libraries, I've just had a hard time with them and I don't want anyone else that is thinking of buying these libraries to suffer through what I suffered using them. The sounds are probably the best in the sample industry today. I mean, they are extremely playable and just AMAZing. There are probably many MANY people that could benefit as producers from using these libraries.

Other than that this is where I went wrong:

- I bought what I thought was an upgrade from Reason 3.

Reason 3 has much lower quality sounds than East West Quantum Leap libraries, but for me the playability is the most important thing. See, I didn't know that when I bought these libraries. I didn't know consciously what I actually wanted, which was ease of use combined with a pretty decent sound. I thought that it would be a breeze to set up and just play.

First off, I was using a computer loaded with 8GB of RAM, and a Quad-core CPU and the Play Engine still killed about 95% of my inspiration for that month in music. The engine uses up a LOT of cpu space, though they say much less than Kontakt. (I couldn't imagine how horrible it was to use the libraries when you had to go through Native Instruments sampler) The libraries, in other words, will cost a lot more than the price they are listed at. Instead of $500 for one of the libraries, just add on another $1000 and you're good to go.

Second: Because of the bulky East West Play Engine I had to try to record one track at a time instead of being able to play an entire band or orchestra. This was probably where the worst part of the nightmare started to kick in for me, switching from Reason 3. (Which is all about just loading as many tracks as you want, playing and tweaking everything in Real Time without any hiccups and adding in compression, reverb, chorus, stereo imaging, and maximization etc...)

Third: The Guitars are good in East West, but I have re-produced the intensity of them by sampling my own guitar. The main Power Chord guitar is basically just long held notes at a velocity of 127 and "chunks"/muted the rest of the way.

Fourth: The String sounds in Goliath are MIDI-ish. I know, it's kind of critical as Strings are one of the hardest things to re-produce. I am actually thinking of buying their newest string library in the future. =)

I switched back to Reason 3 and DOWNgraded from my last computer (got a laptop instead of a desktop) and recently I've been really enjoying my sounds.

The bottom line: I've learned that I'd rather have a 1 minute song that sounds 7/10 and took 15 minutes to produce than a 1 minute song that sounds 10/10 and took 3 weeks to produce.

And I've definitely learned that I've gotta have something that just WORKS, that much is for sure. If this sounds like you and you're thinking about buying the East West Libraries, then just think long and hard on it.

I've also learned that it is not the size of it that counts, but how you use it. What I mean by this is that I have re-created the East West Libraries Guitars and only used about 10MB of space instead of 100-200 like the Les Paul Pc Patch found in Ministry of Rock. I've also re-created legato strings that are a lot more expressive than any of the East West Libraries (the strings in East West Gold Orchestra are really not that great...) in which you can find a tutorial link for your DAW or sampler here:

YouTube - How to make your String Quartets Expressive even though they aren't real!

Again, I don't hate the company or anything. I'm actually looking forward to their string library. I just want people to know what their options are, and that to create stuff like the realistic demos you hear on East Wests website will take a LOT of work. If your producing a 20 track soundtrack and you're planning on paying $1500 for an East West library it may just be better to pay a producer/studio to produce your work. Maybe even hire some instrumentalists.