Amazingly realistic and epic brass sounds!
The instruments provided in this all sound absolutely amazing, it's a lot more realistic than the free Muse Brass (which is already incredible). At the time of writing, there are a few cons/improvements to be made and pros (which massively outweigh the cons) with the library.
Cons:
- Only includes standard orchestral brass instruments; there is no euphonium, piccolo trumpet, bass trumpet nor contrabass trombone, which are included in the Berlin Brass Additional Instruments (the original Orchestral Tools product)
- No muted brass
- No rips sounds
- Unconvincing trombone glissandi - Setting the gliss to portamento only produces a legato run (you can hear this in the demo video), which if you are not paying attention, kind of resembles a gliss (This also does not work at all on the bass trombone
- The playback with no reverb at all has a slight white noise, although this is not noticeable by default (with Muse Reverb)
- Vibrato on some instruments (Trumpet 1 in particular) is a bit over-the-top, although you can turn this off with the no vib sound flag, but note this results in reduced quality of phrasing
- Solo horns and trombones (surprisingly) don't have a very brassy sound, even at fff unless they are playing short notes or with "bells up" sound flag for horn ensemble
- Limited range of trills, and no shakes/lip trills
Pros:
- Legato and phrasing is very beautiful
- Staccato and staccatissimo both sound great and DIFFERENT (in comparison to the free brass sounds)
- Multiple sounds (1, 2, 3, etc.) for each instrument means if you don't like the sound of one, you can always switch to another until you get the interpretation and/or tone you want
- HUGE range for each instrument, although the (very) high ranges were likely created artificially by transposing the pitch of the samples (sounding pitch)
- Solo horns C1 to C6
- Horn ensemble G0 to C8
- Solo trumpets and trumpet ensemble C2 to C8
- Solo trombone (incl. bass) and trombone ensemble G0 to C8
- Tuba Ab0 to C8
- The bass trombone is POWERFUL; short notes in the low register are much better than the free sounds
- The instruments don't sound terrible for jazz/big band music, just no slides or shakes
Note, if some instruments don't sound when you first download the library, just delete (hold alt in MuseHub) and re-download.
Overall this library is absolutely amazing, realistic and very flexible. This Muse Sounds version is very much worth the price; it is much cheaper than the original Orchestral Tools Berlin Brass products, as you lose some control achievable with DAWs, although this version is more than enough to produce a realistic mockup, owing to the Muse Sounds interpretation. I highly recommend the Muse Sounds version of Berlin Brass!