New Software Review: EastWest Composer Cloud

An early banner from EastWest, promoting their new subscription-based instrument library, Composer Cloud.

It’s funny. For as inextricably tied to technology as we studio rats are, there is often a distinct a trend towards neo-luddism with regards to the advancement of technology in the field.

I find myself hugely guilty of this. You’re sitting atop the bleeding edge if you’re working in the newest Apple OS, and so safety dictates that you should be a about a year behind the curve if you want your studio rig to (mostly) behave.

In this tradition, it is only this past year that we have begun to see within the audio world what has already been a trend in the rest of the software industry for quite some time now: Subscription-based software licensing and upgrade paths.

Adobe has done this for years with the Creative Cloud. And you know that software subscription is fully in the zeitgeist when the lumbering giant, Avid, has caught on.

While this move hasn’t ingratiated Avid much to their extant Pro Tools user base yet (especially folks like myself who have paid huge sums, year after year, to keep a now unneeded HD rig up to date) this kind of subscription-based commerce can actually make a ton of sense for many studio products and services.

Recently, there has been a new major entrant to this style of authorizing digital IP which, in my humble opinion, is an absolutely a genius move for the company in question and brings us to the topic at hand:

Meet the EastWest Composer Cloud

At its heart, EastWest’s Composer Cloud is a subscription-based service wherein a new user, for a nominal fee paid monthly or annually (for a small discount), gains access to a vast library of sounds that EastWest and Soundsonline have been developing since 1988. The tag on their site reads: “9,000+ instruments for $30 a month”.

Just for fun, I made a cart on the EastWest website to purchase all these instruments and sound libraries included á la carte and found my bill would come out to a hefty $6804.00. Even then, I think I may have even missed a few things. For example, I couldn’t find the Symphonic Orchestra Brass, Woodwinds, and percussion as discrete offerings, so this total is likely even lower than it should be. Moreover, EastWest is continuing to add to the pool so the value grows even further over time. During the time I’ve spent with the pack thus far, they’ve already added Hollywood Solo Harp and Hollywood Solo Cello, for example.

So, let’s break down the math: Say you’re getting roughly $7,000 bucks worth of instruments for $30 a month. That means it would take you 233 months or 19 years and change to have covered the cost of what you are gaining access to—Not to mention how prohibitive that sum makes this suite for most users to purchase it all in one go.

In the Download Queue

Ok, so that’s how much it costs to get. But what are you actually getting?

Essentially, your subscription grants access to a few versions of a full symphony orchestra and percussion ensembles, as well as rock sounds (guitars, drums and basses), crazy trailer-style sound design patches and  one shots, all manner of ethnic percussion and world music instruments, several flavors of full-size grand pianos, throwback Beatles-style sounds recorded in a variety of idiomatic ways—and it just goes on and on from there.

I have been living with this pack for three months now, and still haven’t really spent time with everything on offer because there is just so damn much to play with.

In fact, It’s such a vast amount of instruments, it would make this review prohibitively long were I to go through the Composer Cloud pack-by-pack, so for our purposes here, lets keep it in the aerial view.

First, an overview of what instruments and libraries come with the subscription. For just 30 beans a month, you get:

• The Dark Side
• Fab Four
• Ghostwriter
• Goliath
• Gypsy
• Hollywood Strings Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Strings Gold
• Hollywood Brass Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Brass Gold
• Hollywood Orchestral Woodwinds Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Orchestral Woodwinds Gold
• Hollywood Orchestral Percussion Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Orchestral Percussion Gold
• Hollywood Harp Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Harp Gold
• Hollywood Solo Cello Diamond (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Hollywood Solo Cello Gold
• Ministry Of Rock 1
• Ministry Of Rock 2
• Silk
• Symphonic Choirs Platinum (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Symphonic Choirs Gold
• Symphonic Orchestra Platinum (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Symphonic Orchestra Gold Strings
• Symphonic Orchestra Gold Brass
• Symphonic Orchestra Gold Woodwinds
• Symphonic Orchestra Gold Percussion
• Pianos Platinum (ComposerCloud Plus)
• Pianos Gold Bechstein D-280
• Pianos Gold Bosendorfer 290
• Pianos Gold Steinway D
• Pianos Gold Yamaha C7
• ProDrummer Spike Stent
• ProDrummer Joe Chiccarelli
• Ra
• Solo Violin
• Spaces
• Stormdrum 2 Pro
• Stormdrum 3
• Voices of Passion
• 56’ Stratocaster
• Adrenaline
• BT Breakz
• BT Twisted Textures
• Drum n Bass
• Electronica
• Funky Ass Loops
• Guitar & Bass
• Hypnotica
• Ill Jointz
• Aerosmith’s Joey Kramer Drums
• Percussion adventures 1
• Percussion adventures 2
• Phat & Phunky
• Public Enemy
• Scoring Tools
• Smoov Grooves
• Steve Stevens Guitar
• Stormdrum 1 Loops
• Stormdrum 1 MuItiSamples
• Symphonic Adventures

Where to even start?

I will say that almost every instrument I tried found its way into at least one project. Their multi-sampled pianos are pretty much incredible, the woodwind ensembles are great, the cinematic percussion instrument “Stormdrum” instantly delivers huge trailer-style hits, and even the “Fab Four” Beatles pack found its way into something.

At first, I was totally dubious about the idea of a Beatles sample pack. (Kinda ”Yeah, right”, right?) But I have to say, the quality really shocked me once I actually started messing with the instruments. In fact, at the time of this review, I am arranging a few songs for KT Tunstall which are going into a crazy opera coming up in Berlin, and we ended up using the Fab Four drums (specifically, “Ticket to Drums”) as the backbone for one of the two songs.

Ultimately, almost every piece of the commercial composition work that I have been doing in the past three months has had at least one instance of a Composer Cloud instrument in the final mix.

In terms of sound quality, it is useful to note here that EastWest is not just a software company, but one of the most storied recording studios in the world. Formerly (and famously) the home of such luminaries as Bill Putnam, Sr. (when it was known as Western Recorders) and Allen Sides (as Ocean Way Studios), the lineage and gear collection of this place is just legendary. As a consequence, the production quality and personnel who make these packs are folks on the highest level as well.

The aforementioned Fab Four pack was engineered by Ken Scott and the musicians were members of Wings. The other drum sample packs were recorded by Joe Chiccarelli and Spike Stent with Matt Chamberlain and Steven Sidelnyk on the kit, respectively. There are 13 GRAMMYs between those two engineers alone. You get the idea: Bad mofo’s with a monstrous amount of taste and experience are the folks making these packs happen.

In Use

TheCC installer software, displaying a list of packs available for download and their sizes, as well as some that have already been downloaded.

In operation, you’ll primarily be working inside two pieces of software. You get the Installation Center app wherein you can manage the downloads, define download destinations, choose what packs you want, etc.

It is worth mentioning that some of these packs are LARGE. The Pianos Gold pack alone is 53GB. If you live in an area with lousy internet (like almost all of Brooklyn’s commercial real estate), then EastWest also offers a bespoke drive service for a small fee.

You go on their site, choose what packs interest you most, and wait for a fresh 1TB external drive to show in the mail. This is only $99 which, frankly, is a great deal considering that’s not much more than a drive of that capacity would cost brand new off the shelf.

Beyond that, the installation center app does what it should and stays out of your way.

The software package you will spend most of your time in is EastWest’s proprietary “Play” sample player.

Surveying the samples available for use in the browser pane. The lower left window is the macro of each pack and then the first of the three large panes shows the various incarnations of each instrument inside the pack container

Play is a fully-featured ecosystem in which all the EastWest sample packs live. There are several panes that comprise the GUI:

You have a browser which allows you to load one of more instruments into a single instance of Play, an instrument pane which contains the various adjustable parameters of each sample or layer, and a mixer pane which allows for more detailed control of levels and routing (You can send up to 8 stereo sub mixes out of a Single instance of Play.)

Additionally, The mixer pane also allows for control over what turns out to be a pretty hip assortment of FX at your disposal. You’ve got an SSL-branded channel strip which include the famous HP and LP filters, 2 band parametric EQ plus two bands of shelving, SSL’s Dynamics and even a ‘transient shaper.’ There’s also an SSL quad buss compressor, EW’s proprietary convolution verb engine, and even a licensed version of Ohmicide, Ohm Boyz’ crazy multiband distortion plugin included in some sample packs.

Play’s mixer pane offers clear and intuitive control of layers and routing.

The assortment of FX changes a bit sample to sample (and some packs do require an upgrade to use FX in Play.) But being as that is really a cherry on top, it’s a pretty sweet cherry.

Again, much like the Installation center, once you’re up and running, Play pretty much stays out of the way. My rig is pretty beefy (3GHz 8-core trashcan with 32GB of RAM) and so samples loaded pretty quickly, and I could swap instruments in and out on the fly with playback running.

If you are using a controller with assignable knobs, it’s very easy to MIDI-map salient parameters to make CC changes over time in a tactile way, and the patches with multiple articulations do key-switching just like you’d expect in order to quickly cover various expressions on a single instance of a sample instrument.

Summing It Up

The initial state of the CC Play program when instantiated in your DAW.

So much of what is required of a commercial composer these days—especially in the realm of television—is speed.

When you have to make 20-40 minutes of original music every week without fail, then whatever tools get you there the fastest and the most inspired are the ones that will drive the industry.

To that end, if you look at EastWest’s user-base or take a survey across the Film or TV industries, you’ll see a list of names you know, and will find a whole bunch of sounds you’re likely to hear right in this collection.

Due to the nature of sample pack recording, the upshot for EastWest going to a cloud-based subscription model is big. This is a way to make back money they’ve already spent on recordings, and that they can use to create new packs and bolster their user-base while engendering goodwill for a whole host of new users. I see this as a huge win for all parties.

To me, EastWest Composer cloud  really is a no-brainer for any composer or producer that needs access to a wide range of usable instruments. The price for entry is so reasonable and the collection is so vast, I really see no downside.

Even if you already have several dope sample packs, there is almost certainly something in this collection that you don’t have covered that would find a useful home along the packs you already know and love. 

Don’t take my word for it though—there’s even a demo period so you can check for yourself and decide if this collection can be useful in your workflow. Honestly, I’d be shocked if some of the other big pack makers don’t hop on board with subscription-based models because that mindset makes a a huge pile of sense for the sampled instrument industry. Good show, EastWest.

Brian Bender is a producer/engineer and owner of The Motherbrain in LA. He has recently produced albums with Gabriel Gordon, Jose James, Takuya Kuroda, and Bing and Ruth.

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