Tips for making strings sound more real

Question

Basically i'm having trouble getting my strings from the exsp24 to sound real. mainly the violins. does anyone have any good tips?

Answer 1

It very much depends on what sort of music you are writing and what you want the strings to achieve.
As well as having decent sounding samples, you must make sure that what you are writing are typical string parts. You can have the most wonderful string samples in the world, but if you play "Chopsticks" with two fingers they'l still sound like some chimp playing "Chopsticks" with two fingers.
Broadly speaking, chords should be structured with wider spacing between the bottom notes than the top. Although complex classical music can have chords made up of 8 or more notes, pop music tends to have much simpler writing with perhaps only 4 parts or fewer.
Dynamics are also very important. Listen to any piece of classical string music and you'll notice there is a very wide dynamic range within phrases, and even within the length of a single note.
In general, the sort of sound that comes with Logic are good for long legato lines, or sustained block chords, or perhaps short stabbing sounds (think "Psycho). Because the violin is a fretless, fluid instrument, parts that require more sophisticated articulations will require a more up-scale library that features these articulations, and even then the results are not always great.
  Mac OS X (10.4.8)