@Conquer said:
I agree it would be nice to have a complete VSL string quartet, but I can't see how it would have been "a lot cheaper" to record two violins rather than one. Both players need a session fee, they obviously can't play their samples at the same time, and at the end of the two sessions you'd have 60,000 samples to program rather than 30,000.
Well, all the way through there would be "organisational" savings. For example, they would record each sample one after the other, so while one player is performing the sample, the other player is getting ready for the next one. Also, recording the two samples sequentially would save on editing time because the second sample would be so similar to the first that the editor could do whatever they had to do more quickly. It's a moot point anyway, they didn't do it so the cost of creating a second violin set would be well over one quarter of the cost of making the Solo Strings set, but would still hardly be economical as a stand-alone volume. The number of people wanting a second viola or cello is probably small, so it wouldn't really be economical either to make a "Second Solo Strings" set. Hence my point about if you were going to do it, the only sensible way would have been to do it at the same time as the other solo strings. The incremental cost would have been small, but the benefits great.