Sonuscore and Best Service have been teasing The Score for weeks, building plenty of anticipation in the composing community. Now it’s finally here: a new orchestral engine that promises to strip away some of the hurdles of writing complex arrangements while still giving composers hands-on control.
First Impressions
Installation is painless, and if you’re familiar with The Orchestra Complete, you’ll feel at home with the interface. Presets are organized into “Stories,” browsable by style or genre, each with a helpful preview and tempo suggestion.
At its core, The Score uses the same sequencing system that powers many Sonuscore-based orchestral libraries—from The Orchestra itself to EastWest’s Hollywood Orchestrator and NI’s Action Strings. Here, though, the scale is expanded: more channels, more articulations, and more opportunities to sculpt evolving arrangements from a single chord.
The “AI” Question
Let’s address the elephant in the room.
Sonuscore markets The Score as a tool that bypasses some of the technical hurdles of orchestral composition, enabling users to achieve complex, expressive pieces without deep music theory knowledge. Understandably, traditional composers may see this as a shortcut that undermines the craft.
In reality, The Score isn’t an “AI composer.” It simplifies certain processes, but it doesn’t replace genuine compositional skill. Like many so-called AI tools, it’s better thought of as an advanced MIDI manipulation engine: a creative catalyst rather than a creative replacement.
A novice won’t magically create the next Star Wars soundtrack, but they may spark ideas that would otherwise take hours to discover. Experienced composers can use it to generate sketches, explore different voicings, or find new directions.
Crucially, The Score still relies on “HI”—Human Intelligence. It’s your decisions, shaping, and musical instincts that transform the raw output into something special. Used wisely, it expands rather than limits your creative horizons.
The Competition
A number of MIDI-driven orchestral libraries exist, and most are powered by Sonuscore’s technology. EastWest’s Hollywood Orchestrator and Fantasy Orchestrator, as well as NI’s Action Strings, Action Strikes, and Emotive Strings, all use the same underlying engine.
Sonuscore’s strength is its arpeggiator and modulation system, and in this niche they largely dominate the market. There are alternatives—Kirk Hunter Studio’s Chamber Strings Adaptive offers a complex but comparable approach, while Scaler 2 (paired with third-party libraries) can generate rich orchestral voicings. Even Toontrack’s EZkeys can be adapted for orchestral writing, though it’s piano-focused; its MIDI morphing tools can be surprisingly effective when exporting phrases into a larger orchestral project.
Features in Depth
- Stories & Articulations: Each preset contains five articulation states, from intro to climax to outro, mapped to keyswitches. The mod wheel controls intensity, allowing surprisingly nuanced performances with minimal input.
- Chord Studio: A built-in sequencer where you can define chord progressions and hear them voiced across the orchestra. Timeline mode encourages structured writing; Jam mode is better for experimentation. Generated melodies are hit-or-miss, but occasionally strike gold.
- MIDI Export: Drag-and-drop MIDI export is included, but in practice it’s clunky. You’ll need a large template and patience to remap everything. Useful for replacing instruments with higher-end libraries, but tedious for everyday use.
- Editing & Workflow: Editing Stories takes time to learn. The GUI, while attractive, can be confusing, and navigating pages of notes feels clumsy. Still, once you start reshaping presets, the engine reveals real depth.
Unpacking The Score
As per all Sonuscore products, downloading and installing the library is a breeze. Fully installed the library weighs in slightly under 20 gigabytes, which is nearly the same as The Orchestra Complete 3.
The GUI is fairly minimalistic in design though a little confusing in layout. Its difficult to see what section you’re working with at a glance, and though the artistic design is attractive I would personally prefer larger LED indicators and level meters plus more space dedicated to the instrument layouts rather than the logo.
Editing parts in the play section means you need to constantly swap between pages of five instruments. I’m not sure why all ten could be displayed on a single page, this would make way more sense visually.
On the whole I found the factory story presets excellent, and always enhanced greatly from my own input and editing of the instrument sequences. The GUI is very inviting to experimentation and fishing for happy accidents.
Each story preset has five discrete articulation states. These are controlled using key C1-G1. The first (C1) represents the story’s intro and tends to be more simple, quieter or more subtle. The next articulation (D1) builds up more, introducing more elements and complexity. The third stage (E1) is the most intense with all instruments in full complexity. The fourth state (F1) is the outro and normally brings everything back in intensity and reduces the complexity, with the final articulation (G1) simply a staccato hit ending chord.
Each articulation state is affected by the mod wheel which drives the intensity. With this simple yet ingenious system, you can perform surprisingly complex arrangements with relative ease.
The clever use of bipolar faders to define the notes mod wheel controlled velocity we’ve seen before in Elysion and Dark Horizon is really put to great use here in The Score due to the extended number of instrument slots on hand.
You can select from a preset note order or customise your own using the pin grid, which is rather experimental but fun to use.
Another clever function is the slightly hidden global accents. This allows you to overlay a slight note accent across your entire arrangement. There’s a bunch of presets to choose from, or create your own. This adds a subtle but noticeable shift in the rhythm and again is unique to each articulation slot.
MIDI Export
Like all products in The Orchestra range, The Score features full MIDI drag-and-drop export to your DAW. At first this seems like an incredible function, but in reality I found it rather pointless unless you’re intending to use other sample libraries to swap out instruments.
The Score can’t playback the exported MIDI because they are exploded instrument parts and the software only reads single note or chord inputs. The only option is to map out each and every instrument onto seperate channels of your DAW like a giant orchestral template, then tediously assign each exported MIDI part to its matched instrument.
Good in theory, tedious in reality.
Chord Studio
The Chord Studio is a sequencer in a similar vein to Scaler, in that you can define a series of chord scales for the instrument to play along to. This provides a great opportunity to hear how certain chord structures play with each other before committing to your arrangement.
There are two main workflows, timeline and jam. The timeline process uses one to eight, eight-bar pages to sequence chord ideas. Whereas the jam workflow offers eight customisable chord slots designed to be used in real-time performance, then captured by the MIDI recorder and dropped into your sequence.
The timeline option offers a lot more structure and planning to your ideas, though the jam workflow allows more spontaneous and creative ideas, particularly with timing.
I do wish you could import MIDI, it seems like a massive missed opportunity to be able to manipulate your own prewritten passages, particularly when trying to fit The Score into your project.
The “AI” generated melodies tend to be quite bad as you would expect, though every now and again you’ll strike gold with a decent melody. It pays to export often and keep generating to increase the odds. This tool is only for when you’re completly stuck for creative ideas, or perhaps a complete musical novice. Either way, you’re get much better results some just noodling with a piano.
The DSP Requirements
Performance-wise, The Score can be a bit of a bear. The core engine does an excellent job and feels very optimized, but you can’t expect a modest PC with low RAM to play this many high-quality instruments with automation and effects flawlessly.
Reducing the FX count will help, and in some cases a better option to run a global external reverb anyway. But overall if you’re still clinging on to that 3rd gen circa 2000 PC, now might be the best motivation to pick up some new hardware.
On our 16gig i5 system I found The Score to perform quite well, but near to the edge of our system limits. Certianly when layering more tracks from Dark Horizon, Elysion or The Orchestra I needed to render down tracks to free up memory. Again, not expecting miracles on our far-from-cutting-edge machine.
The Sound
So all this technological magic is great, but how does The Score sound as a orchestral library? I think this is a two-state answer, and it depends on how you’re planning to use the tool.
The sound is on the whole quite well balanced with a noticable mid-range enhancement coming from the violas and cello sections. There is a rawness to the sound that benifits from addition EQ shaping and reverb, but its not unpleasant. I found when layering with the likes of Spitfire Audio or EastWest libraries, The Score usually required a little scooping in the mid range to sit in.
There is also a noticable lack of low-end, sub range sounds. I think because the product is designed as a MIDI arpeggiator, this is perhaps intentional to reduce muddiness. But The Score definatly benefits from some extra low-end boost from something like sub-bass synth or perhaps a organically bassier orchestral library like ProjectSAM Symphobia or Spitfire Albion range.
If, however, you plan on using The Score as part of the Sonuscore ‘Orchestra’ family, incorporating The Orchestra, Dark Horizon and Elysion you are in for a treat. Dark Horizon is a perfect match for inducing punch and power in the low end, while Elysion brings more contemporary elements to the mix.
The presets have generous smoothing’s of reverb, perticually on percussion elements, creating a larger than life sound. The arps all tend to sound quite familiar after a while, even though there is a large amount to choose from.
Individually the instruments mostly sound excellent, if lacking in dynamics to a certain degree. The instruments have all been recorded in a way as to work better with the MIDI arps, so it’s little wonder there is not much character or movement in the playing.
I found most of the orchestral winds and brass to be very convincing on their own, with the strings a little less so. The dynamics control sounds more like just plain volume to me. This meaning the strings sound more like they’re getting closer or further away as you modify the fader, nothing like a real sound of string intensity depending on the pressure applied by the bow.
Other patches like the grand piano and orchestral harp sound somewhat lifeless and flat without plenteous splashing’s of reverb, while most of the percussive and band instruments, particularly the 12-string guitar, sound excellent. Quite a mixed bag.
The patches are clearly designed to work as part of a larger animated sequence. With that in mind, playing through the presets I found everything sat well and sounded fantastic.
Each individual instrument has a three-slot rack that can house any one of six tailored effect processors: filter, compressor, delay, modulation and reverb. Each is perfectly adequate, with nothing jumping out as being particularly ground-breaking. Again, all working well together as part of the large picture.
Conclusion
After the triumph of The Orchestra series and its strong expansions (Elysion, Dark Horizon), The Score arrives with less impact. It promises endless possibilities but feels more like a side-grade than a true successor to The Orchestra Complete.
There’s been plenty of debate in forums about the risks of AI in music composition, but rest assured there’s no danger of accidentally clicking a button and producing a fully fledged Beethoven-level masterpiece here.
Sonically, The Score integrates reasonably well with the Orchestra family, particularly if you’re building a massive template that draws on multiple libraries. Still, its convoluted workflow means you’ll likely rely on The Orchestra for most of the heavy lifting, turning to The Score primarily for solo lines or unusual instrumental pairings.
At $399, it’s a tough proposition for students or casual hobbyists. Professionals may find it too gimmicky as a core orchestral tool. But for composers already invested in—or willing to commit to—Sonuscore’s extensive catalogue, The Score has its place. It adds another shade of colour to an ever-expanding ecosystem.
For more information and purchasing options, head over to the Best Service website right here.
