The really funny thing is that if one visits Northern Sounds forum, you'll see plenty of people bitching about how EWQLSO Gold doesn't sound realistic or whatever. Wa wa wa. If any of these people actually 1/ studied orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, and 2/worked with the resources they have, they'd find they have a lot to work with.yeah, check out my score to HUNTING HUMANS. It was done with around 150MB of RAM, two samplers, and teh Miroslav Vitous sounds about 5 years ago.
http://www.cafepress.com/evanevans.11301825
Evan Evans
Yes, exactly. Some really nice writing although harder to appreciate given the bandwidth of the examples. But I totally see your point. I was doinf full orchestral sketches on a Proteus 2 and U-20 back in the early '90's and they sounded all right. It's just a matter of to the strengths of your palette. If you have a bad sample, don't use it.
This was the case in the EWQLSO Christmas competition. I had an old piece that I adapted for the SIlver Edition entry but found that the oboe was less than ideal (it goes flat which sounds....well blechy). So I substituted it with a bassoon and transposed the line down the octave. Surprisingly, it worked even better because of the harp/glockenspeil/flutes going on in the upper register.
Being limited to a single sound library is actually kind of liberating as the composer is then forced to solve his/her problems compositionally and orchestrationally (if that's a word).
As for William's response to Evan's claim. Well, if you have written for film, you know that temp tracks make writing a completely original score almost impossible. Remember, the composer is employed by the director/producers. They want a certain product, not necessarily a mind-bending original piece. And honestly, what is truly original these days? Given our 12 tone equal tempered system, there are only so many permutations that we can eke out of it. And listen to the mess music ended up in with modernism. Not that I'm knocking it. I really dig Varese, Ligeti, Cage, Crumb, Xenakis, etc. But music moved away from its visceral sphere of influence to a cerebral region that alienated much of the concert going patrons. Not that I believe in catering to the mindless masses either.
This is an expansive issue and one that cannot be solved in the span of a single post. Varying perspectives are needed and wanted to wring this topic out.