EastWest Hollywood Pop Brass is an essential and detailed collection of punchy, 4-piece brass ensembles (2 trumpets, trombone and saxophone)—the desired line up for tight articulation and great sounding brass studio recordings. Also included is a collection of 5-piece ensembles with an additional baritone, tenor, or alto sax as needed for additional phrases, motifs, “punches” and licks.
Produced by Doug Rogers and Nick Phoenix, the top players in LA were recorded in both Studios 1 and 2 at EastWest’s Hollywood studio complex by Grammy award winning engineer Moogie Canazio.
The Play 6 engine (AAX version 6.1.2) that powers all the EW Play libraries opens with the Player displaying all the loadable libraries selectable from the Browser window.
Just like my experiences recording brass ensembles ‘back in the day,’ Play 6 has the Mixer window that allowed me to carefully mix, blend and add reverb to the trumpets, bone and sax in just the right ways.
For a Rock song I used three articulations: Sustain (crescendo and diminuendo), Short (stabs, marcato and staccato) and Effects (falls and rips of various lengths). It is fun to use Mod Combo that combines multiple articulations and uses your controller’s Mod Wheel to switch between them. Licks has complete riffs at 120 BPM while Phrases includes riffs at different tempos.
I alternated playing between HP8 CresFast, CrestLng, and CrestMed variants in the Sustain folder and, by double-tracking, I could not have asked for a more dramatic and huge, pad-like brass behind the track. From the Short folder I added realistic sounding punches using HP8 Marc, Stabs, and Stac.
This is all so much fun and I’ve only barely scratched the surface. All possibilities are here from deep and detailed orchestrations to instant brass sweetening, EastWest HOLLYWOOD POP BRASS is available for purchase for $399 and is a free addition for all subscribers of EastWest’s Composer Cloud.
subscribers of EastWest’s Composer Cloud.
