Exactly. This is how they set the recording process:
The room they recorded the Symphonic Choir was a damn good sounding concert hall.
The mics are placed in different importand spots, for example the conductors position that’s a part of the “main” mic position you will hear.
The choir will than take position in their respective place of the concert stage and perform.
This will result in a very natural sounding panned sample for the conductor mic.
The only exceptions are the close mics: they are placed directly infront of the section and therefor are not naturally panned.
The close mics are only in the platinum edition (diamond for hollywood series like hollywood strings)
One way would be to stereo double your samples, or to combine the channels into one mono channel and than use stereo widener plugins. Again from the channel source dropdown, you can choose to combine the channels
I mean it would make a lot more sense in this day and age where most people aren’t orchestra conductors to let people decide the panning of each section for themselves, to me that’s like giving someone a synthesizer that only plays sequences of arpeggios and no individual notes, but I’ll look for the channel options and give it a try and see if I can salvage anything from these strings, thanks.
Well, there are different approaches to this topic, all of which have good pro and con arguments.
East Wests take was to record the most natural way form an orchestral point of view and add close mics that are fairly dry and perfectly centered.
The point with recording on-stage is, you get a very natural hall sound that can’t be simulated! (Just listen to some Spitfire Sample lib Demos, they were recorded in Air Lyndhurst, one of THE best places to record orchestras. No one can fake their sound, if you go big hollywood, go spitfire)
I’f you’re after dry sounds, go for some NI Libraries or perhaps VSL, but VSL is really hard to set up.
I mean the staccato of most sections on their own is useless to begin with. In addition to the panning which lowers the volume after correcting, all alternating notes are robotic-ally similar to each other when played in quick succession and not just for staccato but for every articulation which I did not expect, I would have thought there would be algorithms in place to slightly adjust panning, tune, phasing and harmonics in a natural way over time with each note that was derived from analyzing their samples, but wrong I was. That noise is bad though, unfortunately they said the noise was not something they could take care of, in fact they said something like “sorry, the library doesn’t win awards…” which I guess I thought it did, I should have done more research but in all the videos and demonstrations everything seemed perfectly centered and noiseless. I suppose though they were using all sections at once and the reverb was so intense that you couldn’t hear the noise and collisions of the bows on players violins and cellos.
You don’t need to have a dry center mike, why not combine the audio information from both the left mic and right mic and then allow people to pan that? If you pan one side and then combine with another channel that’s panned to the other side it will have the same rich sound. Real shame that the samples are inherently recorded to have panning, or I guess more unfortunate that one cannot adjust it without the platinum version.
By the way, what is a good plugin to widen or narrow the panning of a sound? I was looking for some plugins that could control how mono or stereo something sounded but I didn’t find much.
Well, I see we have two very different approaches.
But first to clarify: The staccato on Hollywood Strings comes with extensive sampled Round Robins ( up to 12 or more per velocity leyer I guess?), there is nothing robotic with HS staccs.
Only Problem with noise is some background rumbling in the staccs at low end. This occurs when recording and not editing the samples. To take care about that, you should assign the release tail length to a CC and adjust it where it’s needed.
The noise of the bow is a noise that is VERY USEFUL to achive that realistic sound. It’s also characteristic for stringed instruments and is part of their timbre.
The thing is, it’s not the panning that is importand. It’s the early and late reflection of the concert hall. You loose this information when recording in any other way.
In your daw there should be a stereo manipulation plugin. Other than that, I’m no expert at this question, you may need to open another thread.
I know of IRCAM Spat, but that’s probably not your budget and contains far more tools than you need for stereo widening. Than there is Izotope Ozone of course, but that’s also too expensive just for stereo widening.
Though I do find that the bow noise to sound realistic much like fret noises on a guitar, I do not find that it adds to the commercial viability of a song or the usefulness in something like a game or movie, if anything its a distraction. If I was actually in front of a live audience and what I wanted was a piece that was as realistic as possible in an actual concert hall where the intention was to overlay a track with a real live orchestra, then sure, but for everything else it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, you don’t hear game background themes and commercial logos littered with fret noises.
I could see the loss of information to some extent, but again I’m not saying to only use a mic in the center, I’m saying to use all mics at once as the default setting so that every sound is centered and you can control the panning of each channel manually.
It adds to the commercial viability by connecting to the listeners own expectation of how different instruments should and shouldn’t sound.
If the listeners were huge fans of classical music and/or had a level of OCD that led them to care enough about the realism that where were willing to long for distracting and unexpected bow noises, sure. But, that’s not every person and that mindset doesn’t fit every project. If there was a way to set up the strings so that it could include bow noises but wasn’t stuck with them, that would be a lot better. The listeners don’t have expectations of a commercial song before they listen to it, they don’t have expectations of any song before they listen to it unless they hear something about it first. If they hear it’s an orchestrated classical piece done in a live concert hall, they’d expect bow noises. If they hear it’s a rap song? Not so much. If they here it’s realistic strings used in combination with an electronic band performance? Still not so much, I’ve heard that before and I rarely hear bow collisions. If they hear it’s a song done entirely with strings? Still like 50/50, some people like completely smooth and flawless string, depends also on if its live or not.
I get your point.
East West probably is not the way for you to go if you’re not a fan of their approach.
From an orchestrators (arrangers) point of view you’ve got to choose the sounds that suite your texture and function.
On top notch hip hop tracks I did hear live recorded strings tho 
And every good rock band records real strings if they use them.
Maybe all our expectations got ruined by the synthy pad approach to choir and string writing in modern music?
you can overcome the bow noises with correct reverb techniques by the way. If you seek for a nice and smooth string sound, apply some reverb via channel send, and EQ the high and low freqs out before the signal hits the verb.
Nope my expectations were formed by living with people who play instruments for a living and being in a few bands and almost never hearing them make those noises and never have an issue with panning when they perform. EastWest is close to being good, if I had more control… but from my experience it doesn’t seem as good as LASS. LASS seems to have better sounding strings (in some areas) with twice as much compression (so you don’t have to wait for all those slow-loading samples like you do in PLAY).
I would say EastWest weak-point is definitely shorter notes versatility, but it’s strong suites are a complete rich sound for all sections and good slow transitions and slurs. Until it over comes those weak-points I’ll always be looking to see what other companies have.
Now LASS is far more raw and harsh sound than EW HS.
Interesting that it sounds better to you with your approach to music. The panning is centered tho, very easy to control and change the sound stage you prefer to achieve.
Lass does seem raw doesn’t it? But the sounds you hear in the playback aren’t as high quality as eastwest. It’s hard to tell that because lass actually acknowledges that you’re using a computer and everything is quantized. Developers that specialize in making samples and sounds and synthesizers that don’t brag about working within the confines of a digital system rather than analog and focus on making the most of being digital usually have more success, that’s because analogue is far different than computer-made digital sound and there isn’t an easy conversion between the analogue world and the digital world, it takes a bit of fine tuning.
Ahhh, never quantize orchestral performances! (nothing against correcting you rhythm, but not to the level of 100% quantized parts)
I see, my approach is really different from yours.
Well, I hope I helped you out in some questions regarding the symphonic choirs.
This thread shouldn’t turn into an argumentation about personal style preferences.
Yeah I’ll try the trial version of the choir, see if it works out. Really what I’m interested in that word thing where you type something and the choir sings it, that’s something I gotta play with and doing that with such a high quality library seems like a real feat of audio engineering, I could spend hours with that. Btw does that come with the whole symphonic choir software?
“Never quantize orchestral performences” didn’t you ever hear dubstep live? 
You purchase EW Symphonic Choirs and PLAY + Wordbuilder (extension to play) is included.
Don’t expect immediate results with your word typing. It takes quite some knowledge about how humans actually form vowels and speak words and some reaaly painful fiddling with the wordbuilder to make it sound convincing. Singing and recording yourself is useful to analyze vowel transitions.
In context with other instruments it’s easy though because you don’t have to concentrated on the words too much.
Dubstep? HipHop? Charts? Uhhhmm. I actually don’t listen to any “modern” kind of music. Just the pure orchestra with all it’s lovely nuances
One day, when I’ve mastered orchestral composition and orchestration, I’ll have a look at those modern elements. My theory is: After mastering the orchestra, everything else is just reduced in complexity and therefor easier to achive. (you can verify my theory by comparing formal, textural and harmonic complexity of top orchestral works to other style works)
Now I’m going to take cover against a whole argumentation why non orchestral style is not reduced in complexity compared to the orchestral writing. Well. That was just my opinion of course, there will be a ton of arguments against it.
“I don’t actually listen to any ‘modern’ kind of music” well that explains our differences in expectations quite a bit then. But it just goes to show my point, there’s nothing inherently wrong with EastWest sounding like a concert hall, but it could have been so much more if it wasn’t confined to an array of such niche demographics.
Btw, what happens when you tell it to sing “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”? Yes, that is a word.
Totally true.
The product is niche and the potential for wider use was reduced with the decision to record the natural stage. But for exatly the niche of orchestral mockups, it’s top notch.
(the very decent close mics are good for other styles aswell. Esp. mixed with the main/mid mics)