Peter Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra 5 - Percussion & Harp

This disc features cymbals (of varying sizes), timpani drums, Gran Cassa, snare rolls and hits, orchestral bells, Tam Tam/gongs, Chinese gongs, triangles, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells — oh, and a harp. It starts with a huge number of long, sustained cymbal crashes, rolls and crescendos, then moves onto the wonderfully rich and harmonic timpani samples (pp, mf, and ff).

The snare drum programmes are especially useable, with up to five different levels of snare roll and hit in one patch, plus various speeds of crescendo and velocities of hit. This is just the kind of attention to detail that makes this whole set a real joy to use.

The tubular bells take up a massive amount of memory (the full set needing more than 28Mb) but are well worth the wait. This is true for most sounds in this library, and if you don't have the sample space you'll quickly get very frustrated.

The harp collection is packed full of every imaginable glissando and strum, but somehow fatally neglects to provide us with a full multisample of the instrument! This spoils an otherwise faultless volume and means that if you want your harp to play anything other than the (admittedly wide) selection of sounds here, you will just have to look elsewhere.

Overall, though, if you want orchestral percussion samples you really should be looking at this disc.