 This is a beautifully put together orchestra library from Project SAM. Great for adding drama and richness to your music, super easy to use and the most amazing thing is it's completely and utterly free. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Yes this amazing library is completely free and it works with the free version of Contacts. Now before you rush off and follow the links for those in the description down below it's worth watching the rest of this video so that you get a bit of a head start in knowing how to use this amazing library. So the demo that we heard at the beginning of this video was entirely created using instruments from this library. I thought we'd have a listen to it again without my voice over this time so you can properly hear what's going on and keep an eye out for this area of the interface where you're going to see some of the names of instruments as they're introduced. And there's really quite a nice range of instruments included. If we go up to the library menu at the top left-hand side here we can actually see them here and we can even preview them before we load them up. Now on the top line here we've got some more traditional instruments things like the horns, we've got some short strings, longer strings and those handy bombastic basses. We've also got a choir in there which sounds like this and you can even change the vowel sounds of that choir as you're playing. We've got some percussion which is this a part of the library called Power Strike. If we preview this we just heard the snare roll there but it's actually a number of different percussion instruments included with that part of the library. Then we've got some more sort of dramatic stuff which I think would be handy for cinematic pieces or soundtracks. Things like ghostly clusters. We've got Pandora Panic and the always handy 2T hits. I also enjoyed using this one, Richard Rises, have a listen to this. Now something which I didn't use in the demo piece was Organ Mystique. That's an organ and it sounds like this. I thought we'd load that up now. Now if I click on that I've got the option to add to the mixer or replace mixer. We'll talk about that later. For now we're just going to go to replace mixer. That's going to be the only instrument loaded up there. Now a lot of these instruments will change in the sense of this big knob in the middle will have a difference as we use it. We'll talk about that or look at some of those later but I want to point out the more common stuff first. On the right hand side we've got controls like attack, release, adding reverb in there, a limiter, a filter which is rather handy. Have a listen to that. I can see myself using that and changing it in real time as I go through a piece and then this stereo wideness. So we can have things like really really mono. Have a listen to this. We could make that organ really really wide. I'll push that control up there. Hands up he'll be tempted to make everything really wide all of the time. Don't do that by the way. You need some things to be in the middle of your mix. We've also got some controls over here. We've got the Master EQ there but this octave which I think is handy. Not all of the instruments have an octave but most of them do. When you switch that on it does what it says. It plays the octave of the note you're playing. So you can get some really sort of big chords going like this. Handy when you've only got 10 fingers I guess. But yeah that is a handy feature to have in there. So that's the sort of overview of the basic controls. In a minute I will talk about this big knob in the middle but first I just want to thank one of my viewers Joe Grint who recommended this plugin in my Facebook cakewalk group. I've noticed a number of people recommending free plugins there recently. I love it. Now it may be worth your while joining that group because I'll be posting a challenge there in the next few days involving this very plugin. So I've got some short strings loaded up here and you can see that the big knob in the middle is labeled saturation. So if we play this and change that then saturation is being added. Now that also has the effect of making it sound a bit louder. But this is not always a saturation control for all instruments. If we load up something else let's go this time for bombastic basses. We'll just add that in there. In this case it's a bass boost yeah. So have a listen. Now if you're listening on your phone speaker you're not really going to hear that but with anything else hopefully you'll hear a nice sub bass introduced there. I rather like that. Looking at some other things here. Luminous choir we talked about this earlier. This is where we can change the actual vowel sound being used. So really nice there. And then finally let's look at wretched risers okay. So in this case it's really suitable. We've got this sound with this kind of crescendo here. Have a listen. Well it's not really crescendo but anyway it's a slide up across an octave. Now we can actually change the the time in which that occurs. So it's linked to your door so it's very musical. This is happening over four beats. We could change this to one eighth note. Yep or we can make it really really long. So over 12 beats. So as you can see this big knob in the middle changes quite dramatically from one instrument to another. So something which is suitable for that instrument. I think that's clever design really really hand. It's not just volume control all the time or something like that. I really do like this design. So far we've just been loading up one instrument at a time but we can actually load in multiple instruments at a time. I'm starting off here with these short strings. You can see the area of the piano keyboard here where they are actually played. Now let's load in some horns. I'm going down to the mixed area here clicking on the plus button. I'm going to add in those horns by clicking there on the horns. So now I've got both of those instruments loaded. And you can see where the horns are played in this area of the keyboard here. Yeah they haven't got such a wide range as the strings. So as we play through we can hear the strings there but then when we go up we can hear both instruments at the same time. Yeah those horns are kind of there on top of the strings. They both share that range of the piano keyboard. So you may not want that to happen actually so you can change that by going to the advanced tab up here and then we get to control where each instrument is played. So with the heroic horns here we can see that they're played within this range. Now we can actually change how sort of wide and narrow that range is there but we can also drag the whole thing. I'll drag it all the way down to the bottom here so that the horns are playing being played at the bottom end of the keyboard. Yeah with the strings being played a little further up. And then you can sort of mix and match them as you wish. Now one of the best examples of this is when we load up some multis. So if we go up to the library at the top here and then go to multis we can see the selection here. I'm just going to load up braving the waves here. Yes we'll click on that yes there. It all loads up. We can actually see we've got four instruments in here. So towards the lower end here yeah got we've got our percussion sounds here. As we get a little further up I played a percussion sound there at the same time as these ones. We've actually got basses and horns playing at the same time here. Yeah and they're not actually playing even the same note. They're actually playing a harmony which can be quite handy. And then further up we've got the strings and they've been set up to play in octaves. So this is really handy I think in terms of saving resources a little bit but also often a better way to organize your project rather than having many many contact instances loaded up. This is an example of a really great free library but not all free libraries and plugins are worth your time spent downloading and installing them. So luckily for you I've put in the hard work and found the best of the free libraries and plugins. I've put them all together in a playlist which you can click on on the other side of this logo. So grab yourself a coffee and start binging.