MIKE: Hey. This is Mike from Agency of Spirits.

I'm a big fan of East West Sounds Online. I mean they make some amazing software samplers. In fact, these are the ones I just got and you can see it but Symphonic Orchestra like it's the brand new, it's the Play Edition. I've had this for a while but the old version of it, but I mean I'm sure you've heard this in a lot of games, TV, commercials, video. I mean the sounds are just amazing. It literally is a symphony.

Ultimately, what I like to use it for is more, you know, symphonic type work, bu in the meantime I just use it like a lot of like the string section and stuff just for backup, you know, like I just like flush everything out, make it thick like a lot of, you know, there's a lot of good sounds in there, and I mean you know now that I find something that fits in my, you know, something that's kind of out of the ordinary, and I like to beef up my electronic stuff with that symphonic stuff.

The beauty of this particular piece is because it did exist in another format before, and that was run on Native Instruments, I think it was the Kompakt synth. It was like basically like a cheap sampler that came with stuff and then basically played like the instrument. It did play the instrument but there was a lot of work involved to get it actually to sound, you know, to actually sound like it wasn't being, you know, programmed via MIDI, but now this is a new thing called Play, and it's made by East West.

It's their own sampler, and right now it's in the sampler playback mode. They haven't actually released it as a sampler itself but it includes like stuff I mean this is more natural, more fluid. The articulations, they sound very realistic. I mean it's just -- now I guess I haven't really tried this one yet but the reports that I'm getting out of it are that it actually works the way it's supposed to work, and you know it's just very flexible. The other one was like yeah, they'll tinker with it a lot and you know, to get good results, it did take a lot, but you know in the end it was worth it but now it's going to be a lot easier.

I've had -- there's other instruments by them, Gypsies, another one in particular, and they have this violin which is just unbelievably amazing. You play it and it's got built-in legato and it's just like wow, you know. People are like, you know, "Is that real?" And I said, "Well, it is and it isn't." It’s sampled but yeah, it's like it's just amazing how good it sounds.

You know, it needs a lot of hard drive space, a lot of processing power from the computers, and in an ultimate scenario, when you use this kind of stuff, you might want to have more than one computer running it. It's just like they build a farm, you know, like each like it has different sections like you got strings, woodwinds, percussion, etc., and it's just each computer runs a different section, so it requires a powerful setup to really run it. You've heard this thing. Everybody's heard this thing, and they don't even know it. I mean they use it everywhere. It's just like even people like Hans Zimmer, he uses it. I mean he's got his own stuff but he still uses it so I mean that should tell you something.