I have absolutely zero experience with horns - no idea how to arrange or mix them. But I've been having some great fun with Native Instruments' Session Horns. There are some great melodic and rhythmic presets to get your started if like me you have no idea what you're doing with horns but need to add some horn color to a track. Here's a little example of a horn part I started playing with recently. It's just looped a few times - absolutely no mixing done at all, just an EQ preset on Session Horns, the bass sound is just a placeholder for now and the plucky sound I need to work on as well. Basically it needs a lot of work because the mix sounds like crap. Like I said I've have no idea how to arrange horns, but I know a thing or two about chords, so I've just given Session Horns a chord sequence to work with, chosen one of the Latin presets and set it to "rhythm only" so that it's playing my chords in a Latin rhythm & articulation. I really like what it's done! There are tons of presets in different styles and there are also lots of presets to set up the section in terms of which instruments play, which come forward in the mix, how the voicing brain handles too many notes etc. You can set the swing, dynamic settings and "humanize" the timing and the tuning.
There are a ton of mix & effect presets as well. I think I'm just going to end up routing the parts to their own tracks and mixing them myself. I think you can only do this output routing if you have the full version of Kontakt.
Anyway I added a quick bass part and voila! I'm really liking fooling around with this library. Having never done anything with horns before I really feel like I could get obsessed with this and start overusing them
https://soundcloud.com/sh...-session-horns-example