I'm trying to make a song with both strings and brass, but I can't find any native instruments that sound real. Are there any? If not, is there a free vst that makes good string and brass sounds? I have no way to buy plug-ins right now. I'm going for a sound like The Dark Knight and Inception for the brass and for the strings, I'm trying to get both high and low in order to make a creepy feel to them. Also, what are good effects to use on orchestra besides reverb?
Put a chorus effect on the chorus, so you can chorus while you chorus.
But yeah, usually making orchestral or music where you're using a lot of real life instruments doesn't require anything but reverb and an EQ to cut the low frequencies out, and you never really need to use a ton of reverb either. Most of the other effects are for doing special effects that you can't replicate with real instruments or something.
Well have you looked into Kontakt and sound libraries yet? That would be the natural place you'd want to look. Sadly with orchestral its what you pay for or what you don't that decides if it sounds good or not. Most sound libraries are frickin huge and expensive too. Likewise using orchestral samples w/o Kontakt is another option. In both cases you're using pre-recorded REAL samples to make your creation sound real as well. Even Nexus or Absynth as an additional vst synth, while being a lot less realistic, would be better then what comes within FL. Absynth especially has a lot more "treated" orchestral sounds.
Seconding what Raddons said. (I used those soundfonts, coupled with Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra (which is also free, but needs a bit of tweaking to sound good) for basically the entire of this: https://soundcloud.com/lyingpink/other-r-r-wip (I'm sure there are better examples of what it can do out there, but I don't have any to hand, so yer havin' that one.)) In the Strings Part 2 folder in Raddons' link there's a soundfont called 'SJ Staccato Strings Fixed' which is good for beefy, dramatic staccato low strings -- like from about 2 minutes in in this: And if you're still stuck for samples (particularly orchestral percussion), try this.
Trem and vibrato -- with a lot of sample libraries (and pretty much all paid ones) there's variations on each different note, with different levels of vibrato and volume and whatever. Some of the ones in Raddons' link have some of those variations, but you'll need to explore to dig them out. There are free vibrato and tremolo effects VSTs (I use the ones by MeldaProduction) but you'd need to be very subtle with them, or it won't sound like genuine vibrato/tremolo at all.