That it, that's exactly it, that's precisely what I was asking. Thank you for that fine and comprehensive post Equinoxe. You've exceeded my expectations in places.
No, I'm not trying to recreate that on the Eminent Reaktor ensemble, that is a fine ensemble but lacks the authenticity.
After having purchased GForce's VSM a couple of months ago, I've finally been able to sit down with it, and start playing around with all the different strings. I used Nostalgia and Kontakt up to this time for all the string synth strings, but VSM takes it up a notch or 3.
In VSM they sampled the Eminent strings, Upper and Lower Manual, 4' and 8', as well as Upper 16'.
So I was trying to document the settings for, you know, future use, be it myself or anyone else who needed them.
Experimenting with the Upper manual, which seems to be less raw, more smooth, I'd say that I rather fancy the Upper 4' for the Oxygene 2 strings over the Upper 8' or any of the Lower Manual settings. Same goes for Equinoxe 4, which seems to be Oxy 2's sister track.
For Oxygene 3 strings I'd say he used Lower 8' for the Cm4 chord + bass pedal.
For Oxygene 8 phased strings, 8' Lower Manual
For Equinoxe IV on the CiC album, I'd say he used Lower 4' with some eq.
For Rendez-Vous 2, Lower 8'
For Rendez-Vous 6, Lower 8'
There's also two cases where he uses strings just to fill up the high frequency content of a track, namely Oxygene 2's entire beginning sequence until 0:40, and in Equinoxe 3.
With O2 I think it's either Lower 8' or Lower 4'
With E3, it could be Upper 4'.
Without faith nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.