Garritan offers two high-quality, affordable orchestral libraries: Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 and Garritan Instant Orchestra. If you’re wondering what’s the difference (or are trying to decide which one would be best for you), you’ve come to the right place.
Garritan Personal Orchestra 5
Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 (GPO 5) gives you everything from pristine solo and section violin, viola, cello, and bass to a complete orchestra including strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion, keyboards and more. See the complete list of 500 instruments. Also included are a wide variety of instrument-specific articulations and techniques, performance spaces and reverbs, and instrument body resonances, all engineered to provide incredible realism and authenticity to your music.
If you conceive of each instrument of the orchestra as a separate staff or track, GPO 5 is for you. Of course, working in this way allows you to control the velocity, balance, panning and more of each track or staff individually for ultimate control, regardless of whether you work in a notation program or a DAW.
Hear GPO 5 in Action
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Garritan Instant Orchestra
While Garritan Instant Orchestra (IO) also offers spectacular orchestral sounds, it really is something entirely different. IO reinvents the way orchestral music is created by simplifying and streamlining the process. It is designed to create full cinematic orchestrations from just a few lines of music (or a few tracks in a sequencer or DAW).
With preset combinations and mash-ups, mood-based presets, and orchestral effects, you can instantly evoke a wide range of emotions and moods. IO provides an empowering experience where almost any musician can sound like an A-list Hollywood composer.
If you’re more interested in quickly creating an orchestral sound than producing an orchestral score, IO is your ideal solution.
Hear IO in Action
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Conclusion
In short, GPO 5 and IO serve two very distinct purposes. If your ultimate goal is to produce a notated score that musicians will perform – and you want to have ultimate control over how that score sounds – GPO 5 was designed for you. If, on the other hand, you want to quickly and easily create some compelling orchestral music, IO may be the better fit.
But who’s to say that you are an either-or type of musician? Many of us work on multiple projects with drastically different musical goals. If you want to maximize the available options in both your sonic palette and your creative flow, consider them both.
