 What you're seeing here is some of my favorite free orchestra plugins, but you're only hearing my number one pick Let's find out which one it is as we go through my top five free orchestra plugins Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well Everything you're going to see in this video is Absolutely free if it's a library and it needs a player then the player will be free as well Now we're going to do this of course in reverse order finishing off with my absolute favorite But first here's one you may like the sound of this is orchestral tools layers and before we talk about why it's in my top five And indeed why it's at number five in my top five. Let's just have a quick listen Now it is a free library, but it needs this player the sign player But the great news is the sign player is also completely free And I'll be putting links for both of these in the description down below now The library itself is made up of four parts the full orchestra woodwinds brass and strings And as you can see I was using all four of those in the demo there So let's use the full orchestra, and I'm just going to play one note on my keyboard Now as you can hear although I'm playing just one single note We're actually hearing a chord and that's how this library works We actually play chords with our keyboard and we can change the type of chord by using the key switches at the Bottom you can see those in beige on the left-hand side. So when we're playing a C we get a major chord A C sharp gives us a minor chord A D gives a suspended chord And then that sequence repeats but with staccato chords, yeah And then the last two key switches actually give us single notes, but only in the bass end so they sound like this and staccato I mean, I think they actually sound really really great But the reason that this is in here, but at number five is because it's not that Versatile it's great for these chord sounds and really sort of rich backing sound, but you can't really play melodies on this However, remember I mentioned that this sign player is free where there's also a bunch of other free libraries That you can download. I think they call it their factory libraries or something like that Now I've downloaded a couple of them. You can see them here The first one is a really nice grand piano Which I'd recommend and then you can see I've also downloaded this one It's called helix and it's a free string ensemble. So let's just remove our full orchestra there for a moment And then just load in this string ensemble and have a quick listen. So we'll listen to the sustains first of all Yeah, you could definitely play some melodies on that and we've also got spiccatoes as well So, you know what I really think it's actually downloading this To get the player and then forgetting some of the other free libraries as well as this orchestral tools layers. This is the Vasillion Chamber Orchestra Community library and let's just take a moment to take in this interface I hate to criticise free things, but this could possibly put me off However, I did give it a chance and this is what I managed to do in terms of a demo and Despite this rather intimidating looking user interface It got in at number four here because of the versatility of this instrument It's actually made up in this case and I'll explain what I mean by in this case later of four different plugins There's the string section here of which there's four different types of string I've got violins violas cellos and bass in there. There's the woodwind section again made up of four different parts There's brass again for different parts and percussion for different parts You can load into each of these when you go into one of these you can swap out any of those So I could take these violas for example here and you can see the range of different sounds available to you So this is a really big versatile Library now this interface is not in my opinion the best interface in the world But it is very functional. There's lots of things you can do in here You can a change that you can change the sort of envelope attack decay sustain release. There's filters in there There's EQ all kinds of nice stuff like that if you really want to mess around with the sounds But the reason you're probably going to get this is just the versatility of it the range of sounds now Here's the interesting thing about this I'm using one version of this library which actually uses for free plugins But there are free versions of this library which also load into contact or some that load into Omnosphere or Sample tank and other different types of players some of them pay players some of them free So you may not necessarily get this interface at all if you use one of those other versions When you go to the page which I'm going to put a link for in the description down below if you want to get this version Just make sure you get each of the four plugins and you get each of the four sample libraries as well. I Think this is worth having just because of the versatility of sound. However I'm going to say it's a little bit weak on the percussion side. Okay. I was just looking for some nice Symbols in this nice crash symbols. I couldn't really find any So my demo didn't quite end in the way. I wanted it to but however, I do think this is worth experimenting with in a number three we have VSL big bang orchestra I've got to tell you if I done this video even a few months ago I wouldn't have had this in here at all even though this library was actually available We'll talk about why in a moment, but first of all, let's just have a quick listen Now this is of course by Vienna symphonic library and they do actually make really high quality commercial orchestral libraries with this particular one We do get a few different articulations. It is a full orchestra sound. So we've got some short notes here for example And at the moment, I've got it in the velocity sensitive mode you can hear there. Let's play some long notes We've got some sort of interesting ones like these these sort of Runs that you can hear here That makes things a little bit more interesting a really high quality sounding library actually Now there are a few different modes that we can use here. So you got you sort of basic sound We'll just play one note here with that basic sound. Yeah Just on the short notes and we can go to this enraged mode Majestic Glacier ringing Drunk and stutter You get the idea that there's lots of variations in sound in here Why am I so pleased to have this in here at number three? Well up until a few months or a year or so ago Although this worked in this free synchron player that we have here You did actually need a hardware key Okay, and from memory that used to cost about $25 actually had one. Okay, because I've got some of their commercial Libraries you don't need that anymore. They got rid of that. Thankfully. So, you know You can actually get hold of this today if you want to but There is a but they are using I lock now Let me be very clear about this because I think there's sometimes some confusion about I lock That doesn't mean you need to have a USB key or anything like that. You just need the I lock software, which is free Okay, lots of people find that hassle I think it's a shame because you're saying goodbye to some really great libraries here It's entirely up to you and I will quickly mention as well This is with the free synchron player and there's other there's some other free libraries available as well You can see them here. There's a flute. There's a really nice Grand piano in there some celestial strings some a harp a few different free libraries that you can actually get for this as well So it's not just this free library, but I do think this sounds great, especially when you want some sort of impact I really like the the sort of short notes the stabs and things this library is very appropriately named It's called the free orchestra is from project Sam and it sounds like this It's a very very versatile orchestra this is why it's in at number two very easy to use nice user interface It's completely free and it works with the free version of Contact okay, let me say that again. It works with the free version of contact when I reviewed this recently a number of people grumble This it's not really free because you need contact. It doesn't need to pay version Okay, folks, I'll put links for both of those in the description down below It's here at number two because of the sound and also because it's really versatile It's got a lot of nice sounds in there. We're looking at the library here. It's got horns like this It's got a couple of different strings some basses a choir in there All those kind of traditional orchestral useful sounds and there's also some sort of more unusual sounds in there like wretched risers dystopian drones And wild winds as well as a very very nice organ as well So it is here at number two because it's very very versatile very easy to use and it sounds great Now if you want to see my full review of this Just click the little cards that's at the top right hand corner of the screen at the moment And I did a full rundown of this there. Let's go on to number one Even if you've already got this library I'm going to tell you a couple of things about it in a moment that you may not already know It is of course bbc symphony orchestra discover edition And it very much deserves to be at number one for a number of different reasons before we talk about that Let's just have a quick listen to it Why is it number one because it's very authentic It's got the authentic sound of an orchestra with lots of variations to them and you can easily just choose them So for example, I'm on the celli section here at the moment But I can easily change to say the violins here We could go to the horns And what about some percussion Yeah, we've got all the different parts of the orchestra there. We can easily select them Now once we have made a selection, then we've got some articulations You can see them here on the interface. So the celli are on long at the moment And let's change to spiccato Pixicato Tramelo And of course all the different sections of the orchestra have got their own types of articulations Here's the first thing that you may have missed if you didn't look at the instructions or didn't play around with this enough We can of course change these with key switches Where are they? Well, if we change the range of this visible keyboard here using this little control When I go down you'll see some key switches there Yeah, they're the four ones in green there for our different articulations. Okay Now it's not very convenient to have them all the way down there really So if you go up to this little icon that you may not have noticed here Just click on it and hold it and then just drag it to the side You can actually move all your key switches to a place on the keyboard. It's a bit more convenient for you Okay, there's a couple of people there watching now. Let me know in the comments down below If you'd missed that if you've already got this library The other thing I want to tell you about this library is when it was initially released Many of us got it and what we had to do was fill in a little questionnaire and wait for 14 days And it was worth the 14 day wait to be honest with you Well, the news is you don't have to do that anymore You can download it right away by following the links in the description down below Now, of course as well as having these free libraries You're going to need to be using them in some music recording software And I've got another recommendation for you on that and that is the free cake walk by band lab cake walk Is great not only because it is free But because it's got some great midi composition tools in it really good for orchestral work Now this may be a little bit intimidating for you if you've never recorded music on your computer before So of course I've created a course if you follow this link right here or the one in the description down below You can find out about my absolute beginner's guide to cake walk. I'll see you there