Benztown Halloween Madness Pt. 2 or Strings to make you…

Only two weeks until they’ll trick and treat us, so it’s time for the second part of our Benztown Halloween Madness! And what is one of the Halloween imaging essentials? STRINGS! Our choice for scary, thrilling and shocking orchestral sounds are the Symphobia 1 & 2 libraries from Project SAM. And we want to show you why:

Multis:
Symphobia runs on NI Kontakt (and the free Kontakt Player) and comes up with a lot of instrument-multis. So different orchestral instruments are already layered and you can create movie score feeling by just playing a few notes. Here a few examples we made with presets from the Symphobia 1 multi-category “drama and suspense” and the Symphopia 2 preset “this is just madness” (really fits:))

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115611109″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Hits and risers:
For impacting horror imaging Symphobia has very useful hits and risers. Under the “instrument” section you can choose”full orchestra” and “hits and rips” or “effects” and you have different bulky orchestral impacts splitted over your keyboard. A special tip from Oli: Ad another movie score reverb to the hits (for example Altiverb) to make them extra thick! Symphobia has very good build-in reverb but combining two different reverbs can be very interesting. So listen to Symphobia hits without and with additional reverb and to a really scary riser.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115611185″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Dystopia:
Both Symphobia libraries include some special instruments banks called “dystopia”, which mixes strings with different grimy, distorted and weird effects. The range goes from brutal hits to eerie spheres and are perfect if you need a quick horror drone for example – but you can also find very crazy, surprising and inspiring FX. Just a few examples from the dystopia instruments.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115611071″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Flexibility:
If you want to go more into detail, you can get very specialized string sounds from Symphobia, because you can load the different orchestra sections as a single instrument. And you don’t only have the typical articulations like sustain, tremolo or staccato. Glissandi, clusters and other effects are also available just from basses/cellos and violas/violins for example:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/115611316″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Besides the string sections you have brass, woodwind and special sections as separated instruments too. And you can tweak every instrument with different controls. In Symphobia 1 with a reverb knob, master eq and ADSR Menue –  in Symphobia 2 with up to 8 controls (including ADSR), 1 DSP effect, master eq and settings for release trails, round robin and the “close/stage” switcher – which changes your “point of listen”. Pretty much flexibility without entering the very complex Kontakt editing menu!

Price/In General:

The price for Symphobia 1 and 2 maybe high at the first look (via Project SAM: 999$/749€ each, 1.849$, 1.399€ as a bundle), but we only talked about the use for Halloween Imaging! They’ll help you every time you have to produce something dramatic, serious or cinematic and thinking of other special events: Columbus Day, Patriot Day, Memorial Day – some great orchestral sounds will make your stuff very big and epic!

Because of its extreme power Symphobia is our Halloween favourite and it’s Oli first choice for everything that need strings on it – because it’s easy to use but has a huge, very realistic, high quality sound.

But which sampled orchestra do you prefer? Or do you prefer to work with loops if it comes to string? Let us know in the comments and we’ll hope to thrill you again if comes to part 3 of our Halloween special!