Impact SoundWorks Palette Orchestra Complete

About the Library

The Palette collection is the ultimate set of easy-to-use yet powerful orchestral scoring tools.

Recorded in a dedicated hall with world-renowned performers, it delivers world-class sound while making it as fast and simple as possible to get an authentic, realistic result.

Naturally, you can use Palette for everything from epic and dramatic soundtracks to intimate chamber pieces, soaring legato themes, tense underscore, and chilling atmospheres.

However, thanks to its multiple mics and clarity of tone, it can work just as well in pop, rock, metal, or in any track where you need fantastic orchestral sounds without spending a ton of time on tweaking and programming.

With over 50 instrument patches, three mic positions, a lush room sound without too much ambience (1.2s reverb tail), extensive articulations, true legato, 3 dynamic layers and up to 7x round robins, this is truly a one-stop shop for your next orchestral production.

Palette Complete contains four libraries originally created & released by Red Room Audio: Palette Symphonic Sketchpad, Palette - Melodics, Palette - Orchestral FX, and Palette - Arps & Runs. These have been combined into a single product!

Core Ensemble Patches

The core of Palette Orchestra are the strings, brass and woodwinds ensemble patches.

With the players in standard seating position across the stage we recorded the full range of each ensemble in unison, from lowest to highest note.

Instruments play together when their ranges overlap and drop out when they reach their limits, this approach was dubbed "True Ensemble Recording".

The result is a rich, playable patch that's natural and full of life - instantly gratifying and perfect for quickly laying down ideas without sacrificing realism.

To provide you with an additional level of flexibility we recorded our ensembles in two sizes - Full and Chamber.

These were not accomplished by layering samples - they are 2 unique sets of recordings, each featuring a different number of players. This allows you to achieve the ideal breadth for your score, be it powerful and dramatic or tranquil and moving.

Choir, Percussion, Piano, Harp & Bonuses

The 24-piece choir features separate Women & Men sections performing sustains and staccato articulations in 3 vowels (Ah, Oh and Mm).

Palette Orchestra also offers 23 essential tonal and atonal orchestral percussion instruments, sampled in up to 7 dynamics with 5 round robin for both left and right hand (where applicable).

Standard hits, rolls and other unique articulations are included.

The drums, cymbals and auxiliary instruments are combined in one simple GM-style patch to minimize your track count. We also added 6-player ensemble trailer drums and hand percussion patches.

Our piano is a beautiful Steinway B Grand, recorded in the hall with 6 dynamic layers and multiple round robins.

The concert harp patch features standard plucks and a unique "glissandi maker" script, which simulates realistic pedaling to produce hundreds of scales you can perform at any length or speed by simply sweeping your controller's keys up and down.

And no modern all-in-one cinematic solution would be complete without a set of custom sound design and trailer tools for adding instant impact to your score.

Palette Orchestra includes over 250 unique hybrid samples in 7 categories - Impacts, Sub-booms, Reverses, Whooshes & Transitions, Risers, Downers and Braaams - all custom created by our team of sound designers. There's also a dual-layer subtractive synth patch to add extra grit or low-end to the orchestra.

Melodic Combos and Soloists

Write beautiful, dramatic, and powerful melodies with 18 melodic patches.

This subset of the library includes 12 of the most dramatic and powerful pre-orchestrated combos plus 6 soloists, as selected from the works of our favorite film and classical composers.

Each combo was recorded performing together (NOT artificially scripted!). Up to 9 essential articulations per instrument including true legato.

ISW recorded a soaring violin section playing octaves, regal trumpets with horns, playful flutes & piccolo, creepy bass clarinet & contrabassoon octaves, a gigantic and downright frightening low strings & low brass ensemble and many others.

They felt it was also important to include soloists since they are so often used to deliver a melody, so they recorded 6 of those as well. 17 of the 18 instruments in the library have true legato (the exception being our Trombones & Tuba).

You are not, however, limited to using "Melodics" for melodies.

The instruments feature up to 12 common articulations (most include 4 different kinds of short notes!) and can therefore also be used for traditional orchestral writing to add unique colors to your compositions.

The soloists were recorded in standard orchestral seating position with 3 microphone perspectives – close, decca tree and hall. For the combos we added a second close mic (4 total mics) so you have some control of each individual instrument.

Runs and Arpeggios

ISW felt there was simply no better way to capture the emotion and subtle nuances of these unique articulations than to record them in their entirety, versus trying to cleverly combine samples to produce artificial phrases.

Therefore they went the extra mile and recorded both strings and woodwinds ensembles playing scales in 6 primary modes - Major, Natural Minor, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Whole Tone and Chromatic - each with up to 13 variations.

There are also 20 kinds of arpeggios in 4 modes - Major, Minor, Diminished and Augmented.

Every run/arp has 2 round robins and can be performed in every key and can sync to your host's tempo.

In total, the Runs & Arps tool set includes over 1600 performances!

The modern and easy-to-use GUI always displays the notation for the current run/arp so you can visualize exactly what the orchestra is doing.

For composers creating mockups who plan to deliver finished scores to an orchestra, ISW also included the ability to drag and drop MIDI data for every performance to your DAW.

You could also use this to easily layer the performances with other samples.

We've added several convenient Settings features like Downbeat Sync, which ensures that the final note of the performance always lands on count 1 of the next measure.

Tempo controls allow you to sync to your host tempo or set the BPM manually.

The "In Quantize" knob quantizes the start of the performance to the note value of your choice.

Orchestral FX (Aleatoric)

Rounding out the patches of Palette is a set of aleatoric FX virtual instruments for media composers and songwriters.

We were fortunate to work with three outstanding composers from around the globe (George Strezov, Jongnic Bontemps and Tristan Noon) who collaborated to orchestrate a slew of useful FX for strings, brass, woodwinds and choir in 6 categories - Short, Long, Sting, Texture, Rise and Fall.

Many were recorded by all 4 sections, allowing for easy layering. In total there are over 2,400 unique performances that you can use to provide instant drama, emotion, character and life to your music.

Load up one of the 4 section patches and keyswitch through the categories to perform individual samples from your keyboard - or get creative with the powerful FX Builder patch, which allows you to browse, select and layer up to 4 FX with controls to adjust their volume, pitch and timing.

Features

• 18 traditional orchestral percussion instruments (gran casa, snare, toms, piatti, tam-tam, etc), 5 trailer drum ensembles (large drum, snare, tom, taiko, tupan), 4 hand percussion (cajon, djembe, bongos, congas)
• 11 true legato combos such as celli & double basses, 6 french horns, trumpets + horns, trumpet octaves, bass clarinet & contrabassoon
• Custom sound design and trailer tools
• Over 250 unique hybrid samples in 7 categories – Impacts, Sub-booms, Reverses, Whooshes & Transitions, Risers, Downers and Braaams
• Grand piano, concert harp, choirs
• Choir includes both men and women recorded separately
• 3 versatile mic mixes
• Recorded in a medium orchestral hall with a nimble 1.2 second reverb tail. Independently mix between close, decca, and hall positions
• 6 complete orchestral ensembles
• Strings, brass, and woodwinds, each recorded in both full and chamber sizes with detailed articulations, dynamics, and round robins
• Soloists and pre-orchestrated melodic combos
• Solo violin, cello, flute, oboe, trumpet, and french horn, all with true legato
• Real orchestral runs & arpeggios
• Over 1,500 strings & wind runs and arpeggios, meticulously organized with multiple scales, modes and chords
• Aleatoric orchestral FX
• Over 2,400 expertly-orchestrated ‘effects’ categorized into shorts, longs, stings, textures, rises, and falls, all available in strings, brass, woodwinds, and choir
• FX builder included