I and others have previously complained about Steinberg’s failure to support its own Native plugs (Embracer, Q, DoubleDelay etc etc) within Cubase 9. (I presume they have continued to completely ignore this problem.)
While I am doing my best to work round this, I am really struggling with the loss of Embracer, in particular its ‘Classic Strings’ preset which was perfect for unassuming, static background pads. Padshop is the complete opposite - noticeable, showy, evolving pads that do not sit quietly in the background.
Is there any way within the native Cubase package to recreate the classic string sound from Embracer? Or failing that, is there a 3rd-party plugin I could investigate?
Of course, Steinberg could just offer support for its legacy plugins, but I realise that is way too much too ask.
As you presumably are aware, they no longer work because Cubase 9 is 64 bit only and these are 32 bit.
Some were not actually developed by Steinberg in the first place so can’t just be rebuilt in a 64 bit version. I suspect others that were built in house were built by folk long since departed (been there) so again an update is far from straight forward. Ultimately not enough folk want them or there would be a solution forthcoming.
Anyway, as an alternative I’d suggest Retrologue or even Prologue rather than Padshop but you won’t find direct sound replacements.
Have you tried to bridge Embracer using 3rd party software such as jBridge? Alternatively you can still run Embracer in 9 (just checked and it does work) using the tip suggested in the link below:
As the Steinberg rep says , this works at the moment but may not in future and is un-supported. If you’re going to use it copy the Components folder as suggested. I’d only use the bastardised version when I needed the 32 bit plugin. (I’ve not needed it so far but like to know it works).
Personally, my approach would be use the hack above to load Embracer into Cubase 9 to make it much easier to build replacements for the Embracer sounds by having both it and its replacement available at the same time. Then I’d turn the hack off and use the newly built presets.
Maybe I misudnerstood, but wasn’t Embracer was a synthesized sound as a opposed to a sampled one?
Steiny
Embracer is an easy-to-use polyphonic synthesizer developed especially for generating string pads and other accompaniment sounds. A special feature is the instrument’s additional Surround output. The dynamically adjustable Width parameter lets you create very impressive 360° Surround sounds.
Embracer is a pad-oriented ROMpler. The only synthesized parts are the filters (used by the tone control) and the Attack/Release envelope, which is super basic sample player stuff.
If you play the Classic Strings preset chromatically for example, you can very clearly hear the separate samples mapped across the keyboard. If these sounds were synthesized the transition would be perfectly smooth.
The width control is just a stereo expander. The one included with Cubase is better and more flexible.
The included samples are absolutely nothing special either, and you can easily achieve similar sounds by making very minor tweaks to the presets included with Halion Sonic SE, Padshop and Retrologue.
I’m with Godfrey on this one, I found Embracer sooooo useful and easy to use, I’m sure as has been suggested there are alternatives but those require fiddling whereas Embracer just worked. I did sample Embracer “Classic Strings” and made a Kontact instrument but it didn’t seem to work as well (if anyone wants to try it, PM me and I’ll send it, maybe someone could improve on it).