Live playing

Hi Newbie here. I am looking to use GP to play in a live band via my Midi keyboard. The most common sounds I will need are a Hammond Organ, piano, strings. Can anyone who plays live can give me some some good plug in ideas for these sounds please? Thanks

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There are so many. First of all, GP4 comes with a reasonable hammond organ (HANON B70) that you can use to get started

Here are some others ā€”
Blue3
Arturia B-3
VB3-II
Acoustic Samples B5 (runs on UVI Falcon)

For acoustic piano I personally prefer Modartt Pianoteq but others may have different views

If you go with the Arturia Modeling collection (to get the Arturia B-3), thereā€™s also an emulation of the ARP Solina

If you want ā€œrealā€ sounding strings, then NI Kontakt with string samples is the way to go.

Happy playing.

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Welcome to the family! :beers:
As David already mentioned, i also would recommend the Arturia Collection as one of the best ā€œall in oneā€ packages, even if it seems a bit lopsided towards vintage synths, but the organs and the piano/e-pianos are quite good.
A very good source for all those bread & butter sounds is Korgā€™s Triton extremeā€¦ maybe this might also be a nice candidate for your start into the wide world of plugins.

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I have been happy with Neo Soundstation 2 as a ā€œbread and butterā€ option for lots of sounds (strings, brass, etc). It is only $30.00.

I tend to think Kontakt (6 or 7) is pretty helpful because it opens up to access to sample libraries by smaller developers (I do not use their factory sounds very much).

Jeff

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Thank you for the replies

I bought NI Komplete 13 (380 euro, summer sale, but now around the same price for Black Friday). It contains a hammond, several acoustic/electric pianos and indeed a real sounding strings. And you get a bunch of other synth sounds and many ā€™ probably never going to useā€™ sounds.

What I missed mostly was some ā€˜normalā€™ strings, like an ensemble; the NI has mostly a small group of sounds). For this free VSTs can be used like BBC Symphony Orchestra / Discover from Spitfire Audio, and recently found Numa Player from StudioLogic, In Numa Player, I switch off the piano and keep the string sound, then blend it with the others.

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I recently rediscovered that I had purchased Spitfire Audio BBC Symphony Orchestra Core last year when it was on sale. Iā€™m very impressed with the sound of the instruments for the amount of RAM they take. Iā€™m sure the free version is worth checking out for a more limited selection, but watch out as youā€™ll soon want to upgrade as I (apparently) did.

I should probably go through my email and make a master list of all the plugins Iā€™ve purchased over the years

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There is only one whoā€™s the best and original and in cooperation with ā€œHammond/Suzukiā€
The B3X of ā€œIk multimediaā€ :slight_smile:

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Lol. It sounds good, to be sure, but how is it the original when all the others mentioned predate it?

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Welcome to GigPerformer. I bought Native Instruments Complete 13 and Iā€™m pretty happy with it. For the rest I use a bunch of free plugins.

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Because they may use the original brand names of Hammond and Lesley.
That are copyrighted brand names

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Hi Packhorse
I use Acousticsamples B5 V3 for Hammond, Ravenscroft 275 for piano, and Spitfire Epic/Intimate strings for big sections, NI Session Strings for smaller sections. They all work really well for me live.

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I like the B-3X from IK Multimedia best for Hammond organ and are very happy with the Ravenscroft 275 .

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I bought B-3X a while back after trying the demo. I still like it a lot playing by myself compared to all the others I have used and demoā€™d (as B5 doesnā€™t have a demo itā€™s the only one I havenā€™t tried). However I found that on stage with the band I did not care for B-3X at all and went back to VB3II with T Racks Leslie. I also find Blue3 a lot of fun to play though havenā€™t tried it on stage and I find it to have a distinctive slight synthy type sound. Someone on here did a blind listening test of a bunch of them and I could correctly identify Blue 3 in very instance (the only one I could do that)ā€¦

I am always amazed that Arturia B-3 makes it on these lists. I find it so uninspiring to playā€¦ and while that may be a personal thing, the fact that the overdrive doesnā€™t behave in the way a real B3/Leslie would is just crazy. Whatever distortion you dial in is just there the same regardless of how many notes you play at the same time or where youā€™re at with the expression pedal. The V Collection is a great deal though (but wait for a sale generally 1/2 off)

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Iā€™ve been using UVI Workstation more as a general purpose sampler and I like it more with each use. I had bought their Scratch Machine sample pack to do some DJ scratches live and just got Percussion Factory. This is a nicely sampled percussion library thatā€™s easy to customize the sounds to create a useful percussion set for live playing.

It has plenty of host automation slots that can be assigned for direct control of individual sample levels via GPā€™s widgets, which is much more flexible compared to samplers like Kontakt. I was also able to add my own samples easily and it seems to be pretty resource efficient with reasonably sized sample libraries available for purchase

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