Welcome to Music Nation. I’ve explored numerous libraries and expansion packs from UVI, and I was genuinely enthusiastic about trying out the Orchestral Suite, especially given the recent influx of exceptional titles from Spitfire Audio and Native Instruments. Therefore, I was highly eager to witness how UVI competes with the industry’s giants.

(Review updated August 2022) Orchestral libraries are big business these days, and with the Kontakt platform providing a tidal wave of choice, UVI Orchestral Suite needs a good base library to entice some of the traditional, and lucrative, orchestral scoring industry their way.

Time to get some manuscript paper out to start scoring some demo arrangements this week.

Overview

UVI Orchestra Suite is a traditional orchestral sample library for the UVI Workstation and Falcon platform.  It features over 60 string, brass, woodwind, vocal, percussive and complementary instruments weighing in at around 6GB fully unpacked.  The library mostly follows a global workflow layout typical of all Falcon expansions, so learning to play the entire collection of instruments is straightforward.

All controls are fully MIDI mappable with full access to further processing and synthesis modulation if you have the full Falcon software. The vast majority of the instrument in UVI Orchestral Suite share a similar interface, with performance legato and portamento settings, velocity expression, ADSR, EQ and reverb settings.

None of the instruments feature genuine legato; instead, they employ scripted emulations. Furthermore, there are no built-in controls for adjusting dynamics, vibrato, or individual instrument volumes directly within the patch. Consequently, one must manage the global Workstation or Falcon volume, which, in turn, impacts reverbs, EQ, filters, and virtually all other parameters. The expression control can be either velocity or modulation wheel-controlled and progresses through different sample layers.

At under 5GB installed, it’s certainly frugal in comparison to some of the competitors, often having libraries clocking well over 100GB in size.

Road Test

Orchestral Suite is simple to install as per all UVI libraries, simply drag the downloaded UFS file to your sound directory and you’re done.  Playing through the presets is fast due to almost instant loading thanks to the small sample file size.

Of course, I immediately made my way to the strings category.  Unfortunately, the big opening patch All String Ensemble sounds quite flat and lifeless.  Playing at an andante tempo the samples sound very robotic, and because there is no way to adjust dynamics everything feels emotionless.  The patch also sounds weird, almost like an accordion or a poor GM synth sound module string patch.  Longer-held chords are better, but with no dynamic control the note tails stop very unrealistically, resulting in Mellotron-like tape strings – when you let go of the chord the samples come to a dead stop – silence!

The trick here is to interact with the ADSR controls, in particular, the release.  This will increase the sample release time, in effect giving you the impression of bow release.  The best results come if you assign to a Midi controller the volume curve, which, according to the manual, is actually an expression of timbre and dynamics control.  Also, if you have after-touch on your MIDI controller I found assigning that to the ADSR release control and after a little practice, much more lifelike performances could be somewhat achieved.

Legato suffers from the same lack of dynamics, and since the scripting is emulated there is no real sense of realism or expression at all.  The legato works more like mono-note mode on a synthesiser.  Though the individual samples are fairly nice, playing them as an instrument sounds very unrealistic unless, again, you add a little more release time to open up the bow release.  The portamento also is not particularly well done.  It causes quite strange and synthetic results.  It could be used as a creative technique, but for traditional string scoring, you will want to avoid it at all costs.

There are up to 6 articulations to choose between, including marcato, and pizzicato though a few common sustain variations.  The problem is they do not sound as though they were recorded by the same orchestra.  The marcato and pizzicato are in totally different sound stages from the sustain and tremolo samples.  Swapping between articulations on the fly is like playing two totally different sample libraries.

For velocity input, you have the choice of either velocity-sensitive key hits or mod wheel control.  With the key hits, you need to strike the note at the exact right velocity to trigger the expression you want – like a drum machine.  Of course, then you have no way to alter the volume unless you hit the note again at a different velocity.  Once it is triggered you are just stuck with the amplitude level.  This makes zero sense.

If it were mappable to aftertouch I could see much more use, but velocity-sensitive expression is quite possibly the most useless thing I have ever encountered in an orchestra string library.

The mod wheel option is the only way to control what the manual says is to note volume and timbre, but to me sounds like just a filter cutoff.  Overall volume gain is a mess also.  It results in distorted overdrive if you hold a chord in polyphonic mode and push the mod wheel too high, largely due to samples simply stacking on top of each other.  Holding a chord with more than 5 notes will distort the output channels no matter how much you pull back the mod wheel.

Working my way down through the string section, the bass, cello, viola and violin sections did not improve greatly.  The dissonance between articulation recordings is obvious, and in my opinion, totally unusable in traditional scoring.  The FX phrases are quite neat, and a small saving grace.  You can choose between various runs, glissandos and trills which work nicely, and thankfully all sound like they’ve been recorded in the same studio.

The solo violin 1 and 2 sections have the best degree of response of the bunch – in particular, release decay – when you lift a key they don’t just hit a brick wall and stop.  There is a short falloff as the bow leaves the string.  It is not amazing, but it is not terrible.

I had more success sequencing string passages by hand. When you take time to consider every note overlap, velocity layer and amplitude, you can come up with some passable arrangements. But boy, I spend a few hours working tirelessly on a simple 12-bar quartet piece, it was extremely tedious reworking every individual note, listening back, re-editing, adding more reverb, EQ, and re-editing.

Diving in Deeper

Happy, the library picked up significantly after the disappointing string category.  The brass and woodwind ensembles and solo patches were all mostly good – not great, but good enough.  The terribly scripted legato is still here, but it’s not so bad on woodwind and brass for some reason.  Also, the expression controls blur the velocity layers better, almost to the point I could not tell. Great! Phew!

I particularly liked the flute and oboe instruments, They are very well recorded and quite playable instruments.  My favourite French horns are here, and again, they are not going to set the world on fire, but they are pleasant enough.

The brass features quite aggressive expression controls, so you need to be careful here or customise the response curve to suit.

A real gem in the collection is the cathedral organ. This features a slightly different interface from the other instruments but is equally well laid out and easy to follow.  The included presets are wonderful, each running various pipe configurations, plus an awesome chord player – just hit Tutti 7th-9th for some instant Phantom of the Opera epicness.

Likewise, I am very impressed with the choir patches.  Even without the reverb, they sound very natural and lifelike.  The dreaded expression controls worked very well here to modulate between vocal timbre.  Unlike the strings, all the articulations are well-balanced and sound like they came from the same recording session.  The children’s choir is great, but I love the mixed male and female best, very wide and powerful sounding.  Great stuff.

The celesta, harpsichord and pitched percussion instruments (including glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone etc) all sound good and play well. These are handy additions to the collection and will be invaluable to most arrangements.  The included percussion instruments are mostly excellent, particularly the taikos and timpani.  The keyboard is split between performance hits, so it’s easy to knock up a pretty convincing arrangement.

A nicely captured classical guitar patch is included, and as it turns out, this is one of the more successful and playable instruments in the library.  On its own, you will find more detailed sample libraries for this kind of thing, but as part of an orchestral arrangement, it balances surprisingly well and was the one instrument I quite enjoyed scoring for.  The fret noise effect is a little over the top and should be disabled, to prevent it from sounding like the world’s sloppiest player.

And finally, the orchestra patches, which emulate a full accompaniment orchestra. Though not the most convincing I’ve heard, the patches are not overly offensive and quite usable in pop arrangements, I’m sure. The included chord player is quite neat and can produce some nice one-shot chordal ideas, though you can’t easily string them together as melodies since they’re not legato.

What has me intrigued with this patch category is how UVI managed to make the demo on their website as you only get a 2-octave range on most of the articulations,  I would love to see the MIDI workings for that, there is no way I could come anywhere close to recreating the amazing demo.

In The Studio

Hoping to find some saving grace after the woeful string sections, I tried a few layering techniques.  As it turns out overlaying the string sounds with synth patches as ostinato vamps, or under big percussion lines works really well.  Morphing with delay and chorus effects sound totally outside the realms of anything traditional, but definitely could be used for sound design and very contemporary scoring.

Assigning MIDI controls to the ASDR envelope and just playing the strings more as a synth patch works extremely well, especially when layering in a chorus, drive and any number of other available FX available in Falcon.  I found creating FX-heavy patches still retained some of the original flavours of the orchestral but allowed much more interesting experimentation adventures.  As an example, hitting the viola patch with an analogue crunch distortion, heavy compression and routing into the SparkVerb fairly radical spacial effects gave me some brilliant nasty foundation beds I could build on with other synths and instruments in the library.

In fact, if your goal is to scratch-build totally new and weird instruments you will be spoilt for choice with Falcon’s flexibility, especially if you own a few of UVI’s expansion synth libraries.  All the instruments in Orchestral Suite bring an organic texture layer to any synth patch I made.

Overall, actually, I found much less frustration and more inventive freedom creating synth patches using the strings category than trying to force them into more traditional orchestration roles.

Conclusion

The UVI Orchestral Suite presents a mixed picture, with some aspects being quite disappointing while others showcase impressive sampling innovation. Overall, it offers a compelling selection of DSP instruments that come with a minimal storage footprint. However, it falls short in the string section, which may be a deal-breaker for some users.

Perhaps I have been unfair to Orchestral Suite’s string category in this review due to my experience with the likes of Spitfire Audio, ProjectSAM and EastWests’ excellent offerings, but I do expect the strings to sound somewhat like the product demos on the website right out of the box, but alas they don’t. The key takeaway here is to prioritize the small data footprint and not anticipate miraculous results from a 5GB orchestral library.

On the positive side, Orchestral Suite, along with Falcon/UVI Workstation, excels in its seamless integration within the platform. Even combining the free factory synths with Orchestral Suite offers tremendous flexibility and access to contemporary and cutting-edge sound ideas. If you happen to own one of the expansion packs, especially something as epic as Cinematic Shades, you can create some truly impressive patches.

If your music production focuses on genres like hip-hop, EDM, pop, or similar styles where hyper-realistic orchestration isn’t crucial, and you value creative sound manipulation, Orchestral Suite could be an excellent fit. Moreover, in terms of value for money, it stands as one of the top options available. I strongly recommend considering the full UVI Falcon, as it not only includes a comprehensive synthesis and FX package but also comes with a $100 voucher towards the purchase of Orchestral Suite or any other sound bank library, making it a sensible financial choice.

Despite its shortcomings, Orchestral Suite offers an abundance of creativity and flexibility at an affordable DSP and purchase price. Ultimately, it provides a compelling solution for those seeking a rich palette of sounds for their music production needs.

For more information and purchasing options, check the official UVI Orchestral Suite page www.uvi.net/orchestral-suite

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