Best Free Orchestral VST & Kontakt libraries
Today I’m going to take a look at 4 amazing free orchestral VST plugins and Kontakt libraries! Including: Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra, ProjectSAM Free Orchestra, Orchestral Tools Layers, and Palette Primary Colours. Check out my YouTube review up above, or keep reading to find out how they stack up!
Palette Primary Colors from Red Room Audio (Kontakt)
This is a pretty powerful free Kontakt library that I keep forgetting about. And I’m glad I revisited it!
What’s a little different with Palette is that you have one single Kontakt instrument that loads all the patches simultaneously, and then you have to use keyswitches to change instruments and articulations.
Personally, I’m not crazy about keyswitches, but the developers give you options to change what triggers the articulations (keyboard note; MIDI CC, etc), so that helps.
For me, I found it was easiest to load a separate instance of Kontakt for each instrument. That’s how I’m used to working anyway.
Tension and Excitement
Another nice detail they included is the option to control vibrato, tremolo and expression on the instruments. This is great for creating more tension and excitement in your composition. I rarely see options like this on completely free instruments!
For me, this is very impressive for free. This could easily be a go-to for any production, and it would be hard to not recommend this.
The only downside would be that I’d prefer to have the option to load each instrument separately. Maybe their paid libraries are like that, I’m not sure. But on most modern machines, it shouldn’t be an issue to load separate instruments. Indeed, this is a real winner.
ProjectSAM The Free Orchestra (Kontakt)
Next up is The Free Orchestra from ProjectSAM. This is basically a taste of their superb Symphobia Collection. These guys really know how to do dramatic cinematic sounds, so I was looking forward to this!
Now this set is very limited, in terms of range and sound selections. For instance: you only get short, staccato-style basses; sordino (muted) strings, and other cool crescendo effects. But that limitation can be inspiring, as I found out when I used it.
The “Bombastic Basses” patch actually has horns that blast in on the top velocity layer! Very exciting.
So, the dynamics on these patches..wow. This essentially sounds real for the most part. I thought the sharp release on the sordino strings might sound fake, but with a couple elements playing over it, I didn’t notice anymore! What I really love about this collection is how DRAMATIC it sounds. Damn, this is making me want the full library from these guys! Especially those horn stabs...they’re giving me shivers like a Bond soundtrack…nice.
This does sound very realistic and can work well for quick scoring scenarios. But you’ll probably want to upgrade to their full library at some point (and that’s probably the idea!)
Orchestral Tools Layers
Next we have Orchestral Tools Layers. Now, this is an unusual one. This is designed to play only chords, and you need to keyswitch between major, minor, and suspended-4th chords.
A nice detail is that the chords are arranged in divisions and inversions that would be played by an actual orchestra—so that gives a more realistic, professional sound.
I can say this just sounds huge and really symphonic. With everything playing layered chords, like a real orchestra, it pushed me to make my composition more epic and mysterious—kind of pushed me into a Phillip Glass zone (Koyaanisqatsi, anyone?). I like this a lot more than I expected, since I’m stuck using only basic chords.
Some other cool features: the plugin window shows you which keyswitch is being used, there’s a mixer where you can blend between 4 different microphone positions (I only installed the close mic and the “tree” mic (short for “Decatree”, a common recording method for capturing orchestras ), and more detailed options where you can change the keyswitches and controllers.
All in all, this is very powerful tool if you’re okay with keeping track of major and minor chords via keyswitching. This can get confusing, quickly. But this can deliver a real punch!
Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra
Finally we have the popular Spitfire Audio Bbc Symphony Orchestra. You can get this for free by applying on their website. I’ll provide the link below.
This one has a very clear, easy-to-use interface that I think will be a big help to first-time composers. This one is pretty straightforward: you choose your section or instrument out of the coloured shapes up top. And you can choose from 4 different articulations in the lower-right.
When I play a single note, I can tell there is little variation in the samples, like an old-school sample library. I don’t think there are any velocity layers or round-robins happening here, so I can expect more of the machine gun effect with this sound set.
Also the reverb is printed onto the samples, even though the reverb slider goes to zero. So you’re stuck with the ambience they give you.
That being said, once I have everything playing together in an arrangement, it sounds quite impressive. It’s quite easy to get up and running with this library, nothing complicated here. Not bad at all, BBC…
And the Winner is…
#1: Palette - Primary Colors
excellent sound, no limitation on key ranges, round robin samples, control over the note expressions and articulations.
#2: Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra
wide variety of excellent sounds, easy to use interface, no Kontakt needed, but reverb is printed on samples and there is no variation of the samples
#3: ProjectSAM The Free Orchestra
has the best, most-believable sound of all these libraries, and you can make some amazing sounds with this, but it breaks my heart how limited it is.
#4: Orchestral Tools Layers
this sounds almost as good as ProjectSAM, but I can only recommend this to a composer that understands basic music theory and is comfortable switching between the chords. And you just can’t do basic scoring things like shadowing the melody in a song. You can make this sound incredible, but it sits in a strange place between easy to use and difficult. Also, at the time of this video, I was having an issue with out-of-tune samples in the brass patch. I’m working with Orchestral Tools support on this, could be just a local issue.
So there you have it! I encourage you to try each free orchestral tool and see which one is right for your songs!
If you haven’t already, feel free to sign up for my newsletter and you can get a free mixing cheat sheet, plus I have some exclusive Kontakt sample instruments coming out very soon!
