First Chairs Reviews

First time I bought I was very lost with some articulations and the way the library responds to notation, now after a few days of use, its my favorite solo string library of musesounds, still I think needs a good update, maybe more round robins, Ostinatos are a big problem, it sounds very fake, Long notes are beautiful, maybe add the possibility of having harmonics?, I think this library does not have them, that would be nice. Thanks for the good work.

In quieter legato passages, the sound is full and rich. With faster tempos and shorter note values, odd things happen. Short notes play as if they have an accent over them—when they do not. For example, in a series of 8th notes followed by quarter notes, as in a 6/8 meter, the 8ths will all sound quite accented. I ended up going through my entire piece, reworking the articulations to accomodate for this odd behavior. I would add legato markings over notes to try to compensate for the strangeness. One consistent thing seems to be that in louder dynamics (f, or ff) the articulations get really short. These two things should not go together. Getting a loud, legato sound is difficult.

First 5 minutes of using this shows me I wasted my money. A simple line of three legato half notes and a half rest can't be played right. When playback reaches the rest there is an extra, very short but louder articulation before the rest happens. It's like when the bow is released from the string it pops out one more articulation. C'mon! Glad this only cost me $8. The Muse Strings library does not do this and it was free.

Hopefully improvements are coming. There are several really annoying issues. 1) Even without score markings, dynamics are all over the place. One phrase plays really loud with hard accents, and the next plays really soft. 2) Randomly, a note sounds where there is a rest in the score. 3) Where dynamic markings are present in the score there is often a click as if the note-on occurs first then the new dynamic is applied afterwards. A composer should not have to alter a score to make up for flaws in the player. The player should interpret what the composer has intended.

I loved the product when it was released but after 1.0.5 came out it has been terrible. Notes are incredibly detached, accents cause all notes to play staccato and it generally ruins the flow of the music. Not only that, but support takes over a month to get back to me after I send them comprehensive information about the issue to tell me they will add the information to a ticket to get it fixed. The issue has been going on for over a month and you only now see what I sent?

Yes, it is better than the free solo strings where violin 1 plays with horrible portamento. However violin 1 in this plays with mysterious accents on shorter off beat notes and is very quiet on long note on the beat - violin 2 is better.

Expressive chamber settings when playing a soft piece. Love how slurs actually work in playback. However after new release 1.0.5 short notes become more agressive and when used in faster context notes without any articulation markings can’t give legato feeling, even with legato marking. Shorter non marked notes becomes almoust staccatissimo and with heavy accent. This was not a problem in previous version. If looking for soundlibrary to use harmonics in solo strings this is not what you want. Pizzicato is magnificent.

Very expressive in a chamber setting and super versatile and realistic as soloists. It has a few quirks in how it interprets music, and can become super loud and aggressive if things aren't slurred, but it isn't difficult to learn how it behaves and adjust your writing accordingly. Much better than old musesounds in my opinion. If you are looking for a better demo than the articulation video, I encourage you to look at this demo I threw together for pag 24: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNHdtwSn_zk (note, I don't really care about subscribers or anything so please don't think this is a plug. Just a demo)