Review: The Orchestra Complete 4 by Sonuscore

The latest update to Sonuscore’s fully-featured virtual orchestra for modern composers has been out for a few months now. Josh Turvey of NoiseQuest shares his thoughts on The Orchestra Complete 4.

Summary

Sonuscore’s ‘The Orchestra Complete 4 (TOC4)’ is a deeply sampled, all-encompassing orchestral library that excels at music composition for a wide variety of genres, as well as film, trailer, and game-scoring. Housed in Native Instruments’ Kontakt, TOC4 is enormous in its scope and scale, covering a staggering array of instruments, articulations, and performance-related features.

Pros:

An incredible selection of premium, high-quality orchestral instruments.
The library is extremely versatile in its use and application.
The ensemble instrument is feature-rich, giving users maximum control over orchestration, playability, and implementation.
A superb range of articulations create depth and realism.

Cons:

Due to the size of the library, browsing the collection of single instruments outside the ensemble can be an arduous experience.
The included content is best suited for traditional, compositional purposes, so users looking for experimental orchestral textures and avant-garde sound-design should explore other options.

Intro

Based in Main, Germany, Sonuscore is a joint venture between the esteemed Dynamedion studio and sampling giants, BOOM Library. Established in 2012, Sonuscore specialises in the creation of premium, virtual instruments and soundware that has received widespread acclaim throughout the music industry. The quality of their craftsmanship has seen them collaborate with EastWest on multiple, highly acclaimed projects, further underscoring Sonuscore’s pedigree.

As their flagship product, The Orchestra Complete represents the apex of Sonuscore’s prowess and ambition, and with the release of its fourth iteration, the developer has sought to furnish the library with more playability, flexibility, and an increasingly streamlined workflow. Weighing in at 30 gigabytes, TOC4 features 300 instruments, 1000 presets, and a host of new features designed to make the user-experience more fluid than ever before. Below, we explore this titanic orchestral library and the benefits it brings to one’s compositional workflow.

Design & Features

TOC4 is packed with countless single-instrument libraries spread across the sampled 80-piece orchestra and its additional instruments. Although some of their features differ, most of these individual libraries are similar in form and function. As such, this review will focus on the ensemble instrument (see image below) due to its extensive feature-set.

The interface is divided into the following sections:

Header (Green Box): Access to MIDI Export for external DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) processing, and instrument settings, which contains options to humanise the instrument and change the interface design.
Preset Browser (Blue Box): Contains an extensive factory preset library. Users can also save and edit custom presets.
Main Panel (Orange Box): The centre of the interface is dedicated to the main instrument parameters determined by the currently selected page.
Page Selector (Purple Box): Switches between TOC4’s three pages (Main, Engine, and Mixer).
Keyboard Range (Red Box): Depicts the playable range of the ensemble across the keyboard, with visual cues for Key Mapping (blue keys) and the four Key-switches (red keys). The green keys highlight the portion of the keyboard where users can expect the most consistent performance between the five instrument layers (discussed below).

Preset Browser

The ensemble instrument features a comprehensive browser (see image below) that contains multiple filtering options. The experience is intuitive and efficient, allowing users to find presets with minimal friction. Conveniently, it’s also possible to browse within the five libraries included in the suite (green box)—with Forces of Fury being the latest addition to the lineup.

The presets have been expertly curated, offering valuable inspiration whilst being simple to tweak, manipulate, and customise. The preset browser is therefore an excellent resource to mine when starting a project or trying to overcome writer’s block.

Voicings Section

Situated in the main panel, the Voicings Section (see image below) is the heart of the ensemble instrument library. Arranged into five rows that each represent an instrument layer, users can stack multiple instruments within the ensemble to create rich and evocative orchestral arrangements.

The six columns offer further control over the instrument layers with the following options:

Purple Box: Solo and Mute each layer.
Red Box: Independent, single-instrument browsers for each layer.
Green Box: Up and down octave transposition.
Orange Box: A choice of three engine modes (Free, Arpeggiator, and Envelope—discussed below).
Blue Box: Each instrument layer is capable of stacking an additional, higher octave.
Yellow Box: Engine icons. When the Free mode is selected, this column also provides multiple options for the instrument layer’s Orchestration Selection settings (discussed below).

The options provided on this page alone give users a massive range of flexibility to create orchestral arrangements, either by manipulating existing presets or by building them from scratch.

Sonuscore TOC 4 single instrument browser

As mentioned before, the main preset browser may serve as an excellent source of inspiration, but TOC4 demonstrates its malleability by equipping each instrument layer with an independent single-instrument browser (see image above).

These browsers provide quick access to TOC4’s extensive collection of single instruments, which can be filtered, selected, and combined with other layers. Users can therefore customise existing presets with ease, transforming them into unique ensembles that complement the task at hand.

Once the instrument layers have been selected, users can determine how each layer is triggered upon receiving MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) data. TOC4 is equipped with three modes (Free, Arpeggiator, and Envelope), which can be selected in the Engine Slot (see image above—green box). These modes will be discussed in detail below, but it is important to highlight that the instrument selection determines the type of engine that can be applied to that layer:

Free: Works on all instrument layers and allows users to freely play the selected instrument via their MIDI controller.
Arpeggiator: Works with short (e.g. percussive, pizzicato, and staccato etc.) instrument libraries. TOC4 has three arpeggiator engines that can be customised by the user.
Envelope: Works with long (e.g. Sustained) instrument libraries. TOC4’s envelopes are freely customisable, offering an excellent way to add expressivity.

In terms of operation, TOC4’s Free mode (see image below—blue box) will likely be familiar to most users. This mode mimics the standard behaviour found in most sampled instruments, and simply responds to the notes triggered on one’s MIDI controller.

TOC4 takes things up a notch with their Orchestration Selection settings (red box), which provides multiple options that affect the incoming MIDI data. This brings a whole new dimension to working with the five instrument layers because users can create tailored orchestration settings that determine the role of each instrument in the composition.

To illustrate this, upon playing a simple triad (a three note chord) on one’s controller, a user can instruct each instrument layer to respond to different notes within the chord. For example, a violin layer can be set up to respond only to the highest note of the chord, a cello to the middle note, and a bass to the lowest note. This way of working eliminates the muddiness that can result from each layer triggering all three notes within the triad, therefore creating a sophisticated arrangement that adheres to the principles of orchestration—all from playing one chord.

In total, there are nine orchestration settings to choose from, and when combined with the previously discussed transposition and octave-stacking features, this fosters plenty of creative potential. Finally, this feature can also be applied to the Arpeggiators and Envelopes, albeit not from this window but their dedicated pages (discussed below).

Ensemble Engine

Switching to the Engine page will reveal TOC4’s three Arpeggiators and two Envelopes. Both of these engine types can be used to add movement and expression to the five instrument layers, and once accustomed to their features, both modes can truly elevate the library’s sonic potential.

Arpeggiator

The Arpeggiator (see image below) is equipped with multiple features that are identical across the three engines (blue box). Additionally, users have access to a Sequence Customiser and a menu to easily copy settings between the Arpeggiators (green box).

As expected, users have full control over the Arpeggiator’s Pattern, Steps, and Rate (red box), and the previously discussed orchestration settings can also be independently set for each Arpeggiator (yellow box). Lastly, the bottom of the Engine interface features some global settings (purple box) that influence all the Arpeggiators and Envelopes, controlling their time signature, speed, and swing.

Users can also use this area to copy and edit the behaviour of the ensemble’s four key-switches, which is a convenient timesaver when orchestrating different song sections.

Sequence Customiser

The Sequence Customiser (see image below—yellow box) works in tandem with the Arpeggiator, and it mainly functions to add melodic variation to the arpeggiated pattern.

Users can re-pitch each step in the sequence (green box) according to the notes within their chord. This is a quick and efficient method for building chord-focussed melodic lines, perfectly complementing the rhythmic influence of the Arpeggiator.

Envelope

TOC4’s two, looping Envelopes (see image below—green box) are freely customisable simply by clicking and dragging in the envelope window (red box).

Options are provided to determine the envelope’s length, its looping behaviour (yellow box), and the aforementioned orchestration settings. This feature excels with the creation of pads, as well as String, Wind, and Horn risers and swells that can sound deeply evocative. Overall, this is a highly creative feature that’s worthy of exploration and experimentation.

Mixer

The Mixer (see image below) controls the overall balance of each instrument layer in the ensemble. Ubiquitous parameters such as: Solo, Mute, Pan, and Volume are provided.

There is also one reverb send (blue boxes), as well as a pre-routed Equaliser and Compressor (red box). Users can also route each layer to a separate output (green box) within their DAW, but this will require additional configuration within Kontakt and one’s DAW to correctly setup up the multi-timbral device.

In Use

Given the enormous size and scope of the library, TOC4 is an absolute pleasure to use. The excellent selection of curated presets makes it a breeze to get up and running, and once acclimated to the libraries various features, not much effort is required to customise and tweak the various presets to suit any orchestration task. This speaks to Sonuscore’s design ethos and the thought they’ve put into making TOC4 accessible for users of all skill levels.

Whilst the previously discussed orchestration capabilities elevate TOC4’s utility, it’s also worth mentioning the brilliant use of key-switches in the ensemble (see image above). The four red keys switch between different ensemble configurations that can each contain independent Arpeggiator and Envelope settings, therefore making it easy to build unique patterns and sequences for the different sections of one’s composition. As expected, it’s also possible to copy and edit each key-switch, so users have ultimate control in bringing their ideas to life.

Conclusion

The latest iteration of The Orchestra Complete is an extremely comprehensive library that is worthy of its name. It represents the pinnacle of sonic excellence, versatility, and flexibility, with each of the included instruments being expertly sampled and packaged into a library that encourages professional orchestration, without sacrificing creative exploration. This makes for a rare and powerful combination that will likely enhance the compositional toolkits of many producers.

Additional features, such as the upgraded browser, orchestration settings, and key-switches are indicative of Sonuscore’s commitment to the library, boding well for its future evolution, which—based on this experience—looks incredibly bright.

Technical Info

Comprehensive instructions are provided to download, install, and authenticate the library. New users may find this process convoluted, given that it’s required to have a Sonuscore and Native Instruments account.
As an instrument library, The Complete Orchestra 4 requires Native Instruments’ Kontakt to run. This includes the Full and Free versions of Kontakt.
Kontakt is supported on Mac and PC in the following formats: Standalone, VST2, VST3, AU, and AAX.
A detailed manual is available online and as a downloadable PDF.
The library is well optimised in Kontakt and a single ensemble engine runs impeccably with up to five layers of instruments. Multiple duplicates of the whole Kontakt ensemble across different tracks will significantly increase the CPU usage.

Disclaimer: This review was conducted on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 48 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD (macOS Sequoia 15.6). User experience with the reviewed software may vary with different technical specifications.

Alternatives

Users are spoiled for choice when it comes to premium orchestral libraries. Rather than listing specific alternatives, it’s recommended to explore the numerous options from the following developers:

If Josh’s excellent review has you interested in The Orchestra Complete 4, make sure to visit the Sonuscore website for more information, and audio & video demonstrations.

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