Hey Chris, 

I dont really know what your budget is, but my experience is great with the special editions. Even more in combination with Vienna instruments pro, Vienna ensemble and suite. 

What i like about VSL is that you can buy individual instruments. For example you start with a great overall collection (special ed). While using this you learn where you miss certain instruments or articulations which can be bought separately. 

See my signature for my setup, which i'm really happy with. 

Kind regards, Mark 

Hi Chris, 

Vienna instruments Pro - Very nice, feature rich, sample player for all vsl instruments... You could go with the vianna instruments player and come back for this later on but, its a lovely plugin. 

Vienna ensemble - This one is superd, i dont know your hardware but its gonna love this piece of software. For example, my multicore mac had heavy cpu peaks in logic studio as the multicore deviding (is that decent english :s) isnt all that good. In VEP you build up different instances which wil lend on different cores which is way more efficient. Besides that is has some great features as resetting samples and such (check overview video). It does take some effort to learn all the routing and building up the template, but for me this one got as important as my daw :) 

Vienna suite - Very nice low cpu plugins. Really needed? maybe not as there are a dozen good plugins around. BUT, it comes with awesome presets, specially designed for your libraries which gets you going really fast. 

So lets say:

Vienna instruments Pro: € 123,- (limited offer now)

Vienna Ensemble 5 Pro: € 200,- (limited offer now)

Vienna Suite: € 404 (limited offer now)

Vienna SE vol I BUNDLE (which includes the extended library too): € 535,-

Vienna SE vol II BUNDLE (which includes the extended library too): € 565,-

Total: € 1827,- Some money left for your next investment!

Good luck!

Kind regards, Mark

edit: and you will need a vienna key of course which is € 24,-

Special edition is indeed a good starting place. Vienna Instruments Pro is also a really good investment, it will help you get more out of Special edition. Personally, I wouldn't go with Vienna Suite to start with. It's a great product with many useful tools. However, provided that your current arsenal of audio processing plugins is somewhat up to the task, I would spend the money on a good strings library. Strings is probably the weakest part of SE.

If you're not in a hurry, you would be wise to wait for a good deal before making a purchase. Lately, it seems that VSL has had a new attractive deal every month. I remember string collections being of by 30% or so last year. Other special deals has been reduced prices on the other instrument collections, 4 libraries for the price of 3 etc.

I'm confident you will not regret your decision to invest in VSL products. VSL is second to none, both in terms of sample quality, attention to detail, software and customer support.

Good luck!

That depends on your needs and your system specs.

Appassionata Strings is very nice, but not as versatile as Orchestral Strings and Dimension Strings. If you plan on writing complex parts for the double basses, keep in mind that Appassionata strings has a limited set of articulations for the double basses.

The Orchestral Strings (perhaps together with the Solo strings, but I assume solo strings is not your priority atm) are the most detailed in the VSL family, in terms of number of articulations. They are actually the only VSL string library (apart from the muted strings) that I do not own, nonetheless, I think these might be the right choice for you.

If you want to write for divisi, or have the flexibility to adjust the size of the sections, Dimension strings might be the way to go. Although more limited than Orchestral strings with regards to the number of articulations, in terms of realism, Dimension strings are probably hard to beat. Keep in mind that Dimension strings are very resource hungry. An SSD and plenty of RAM would be advisable.

I'm not sure your system would be able to run Dimension Strings. RAM-wise, your system should be fine, depending on what other libraries you are using. Not sure your harddrives will be up to the task though. Remember that the benefit of using SSD drives are both faster reading speeds and access times superior to spin disks. This means faster loading times for samples as well as being able to lower the preload buffers, which in turn lets you load more samples into RAM.

For the other VSL-libraries, your system seems fine.

In my humble opinion, if I were starting out today, and focusing on strings as you said, I would go for Chamber Strings and Dimension Strings first. if Icould only get one, then Dimension Strings first, but both together is great fun. It's very flexible, you can make a big sound with this combination, and many variations from small to medium to large. Great to learn to write as you can split things up into divisi, double up on the dimension strings parts to create second / third strings, use the chamber section to fatten out single lines without having to resort to pitch bending, etc. Next I would get the Orchestral strings, and then solo strings, lastly appassionata strings. That's just the order that in my mind is the most useable, flexible, practical, etc, way to build up your string section giving you flexibilty and sound from the start. Appassionata strings are fantastic, but are the least flexible, because they are extra large ensembles playing single notes (fantastic for soaring lines). Of course the idea is to get everything eventually :)

Good luck choosing! :)