Version 3 of the awesome TX16Wx sampler is now out, featuring a whole slew of new features and enhancements, not the least of which is disk streaming! I have used v2 quite extensively over the years and it's great to see what I think is its only major drawback finally being addressed.
A word of warning though: it seems v3 is plagued by a number of stability/compatibility issues right now, as can be seen on the CWITEC forum, and I have yet to try it as it crashes REAPER instantly upon load. Hopefully a fix will be out shortly, I'm really looking forward to taking it out for a spin.
I recently had a little adventure that I found pretty exciting and figured some might benefit from it as well.
We all use a variety of sample libraries together in our templates and so we all face the issue of "baked-in reverb." Libraries often feature wildly different amounts of recorded reverb on the samples. Our many conversations on reverb can attest to the many approaches and challenges in that area and how, particularly, it effects our own use of applied reverb.
Two of my main libraries are Project SAM "classics" (Orchestral Brass Classic and True Strike 1). Both are for the most part very wet. Perhaps because of the era in which they were released; I'm not entirely sure. Throughout the course of the few projects I've completed I've tried a variety of things, but I've noticed a steady trend toward drying up the samples as I move forward and learn more about reverb and space in a mix. It seems they sound great "out of the box" but as one's ear for VO develops one begins to notice certain things, call them "conflicts."
In the case of Orchestral Brass Classic I had recently begun to err on the side of shutting off the release trails (or sometimes, "reverb tails") on the sustain articulations and to browse the library, experimenting with the other patches for similar programming. I noticed that the release tails were really only present on the sustain samples and no where else (and not even all of the sustains). They were, in effect, a kind of "extra feature" that actually disrupted the continuity of the library over-all.
My "adventure" was in recently discovering that there was a bug I'd somehow only just caught in which many of the staccato and stac-variants did not dry up at all because the knob assigned for that did not work (needless to say I had this fixed by ProSAM post-haste). I had often had an issue with the roominess of some of the staccato articulations in OBC and suspected they were contributing to mud in the reverb of my tracks. It was rather exciting to discover I wasn't wrong! It's since led me to a revelation that there is a whole world of "baked-in" reverb on such samples as these, as well as one-shots and percussive samples that I really should be tweaking in order to better fit these samples to my own projects. I've advanced in my understanding of the relationship and differences between "stage ambience" and release / reverb tails. (This may be common sense to some here, but in my defense VO is complex and not all discoveries are immediately apparent). I've worked with samples before where it was obvious a little cutting back on the release was necessary, but in other cases it was almost as if my ears were perceiving the releases as part of the natural tone of the instrument. So there is another wrinkle on the brain for me.
Now, I'm not saying that releases are in any way a "bad" thing. I think it simply varies from library to library and are an important thing to consider in one's own mix, especially as pertains to the application of reverb.
It would be great to find a complete chamber orchestra along with a strumstick, a bowed psaltery and gayageum for under a hundred bucks sometime in the next two weeks. Any ideas?
Hello, everyone. I'm afraid that I've come cup in hand to ask for some aid in coming up with a good orchestral template. I have on me Edirol Orchestral, the Emu Virtuoso 2000, the VSCO2 CE, and the EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Free Play Edition. As you probably saw from "Hometown Under Occupation", I until now have largely used just Edirol Orchestral, with bass drum, harp, and snare from the Virtuoso 2000.
(I also have the SONiVOX Strings, but using them is such a pain in the ass that I've abandoned them: can't use more than two instances at once, meaning I had to render each strings line independently, and each render would often have static and dropouts, meaning multiple re-renders and sometimes just splicing multiple takes together in Audacity which is not fun. Truly disappointing, too, because I love the sound of the SONiVOX strings, but the interface is unusable.)
However, with the greater depth of libraries before me, I find that I now desperately need to figure out a good, solid orchestral template, something that I can load up and use whenever I please, with all of the standard orchestral instruments and most of the articulations as well. As I have such a breadth of options, of such varying age, I figure I need advice and who better but a Virtual Orchestration Forum?
In particular... what general advice do you have regarding making a variety of different libraries sit within the same virtual space? What about layering - how do I make it work well, especially since it would require multiple instances/libraries of a single articulation to be loaded at the same time? What is your own template while composing, your DAW, your libraries? (Mattias' old article is wonderful but I think I need more opinions and even Mattias doesn't use that template anymore. [An update or 2.0 of that article would be amazing.])
Yours humbling begging... especially if you have experience with any two of these libraries and mixing them together.
I think the motherboard and/or processor in my music machine just died an agonizing death this week. It has been acting flakey for a few months; occasionally when I would try to power it up, the light would turn on and the fans would spin but it wouldn't POST. I could usually get it to work by cutting the power and trying again in a few minutes. Now it won't ever POST, even after about a dozen tries. I even tried disconnecting almost all of the peripherals, using different combinations of RAM, etc., but had no luck.
I took a cursory look at some sites that sell hardware. All of the top offers are these PRO GAMER POWER COMBOS that run so hot that they require a commercial restaurant refrigeration condenser as loud as a jackhammer to keep the CPU below 80° C so that it doesn't turn into magma.
I'm not a big hardware geek, so I don't know where to start. All I want is a CPU that is good enough to support a DAW with a few plugins and runs cool enough that I can minimize the noise of fans, and I don't want to spend a whole month's income on it. I have a slight preference for AMD after the recent Intel debacle... Any suggestions?
Quote:In the works on and off since July, I am very pleased to present to you "Hometown Under Occupation." The heroes, having returned to home after an arduous quest - intending to take a nice break - have discovered to their horror that the enemy's army has occupied it and indeed has occupied it for some time. The peaceful village is as at once familiar and unfamiliar, its peace marred by its occupiers, and yet... it remains home.
I'm thinking of writing a novel with this title... but in the mean time do releases sound the same for non-sustain notes and sustain notes? Do sustain notes even need release samples? I might have known this once but if I did I've long forgotten. Also it is CC64 0-63 for non-sustain and 64-127 for sustain right? Have I ever done this before or was it all a bad dream, I can't remember.
I'm thinking of being less lazy and working on a Maize VSTi version of Sam's Steinway.
I already attempted the VSCO Kiowa as the cleverly named K Piano. Anyone have time to test it? Its on my new thrilling new site colored in black and white with a touch of blue and that new decorative style, white space.
I'm in need of some practical advice. I've attached a link to a little ambient interlude idea I had. It's nothing but a quick idea yet, but I'm shooting for a sort of ambient interlude that is more atmosphere than song, and what I have represented here is essentially an exercise in the "sparseness" that I'm going for.
The idea is that there is a sort of intentionally fake "cosmic sea" or "wind" noise that eats up most of the space, and then some percussion. The sea/wind is Synth1 run through Valhalla Vintage Verb and is supposed to be the most "vast" sounding part, while the taiko and ewe / toke metals are just my attempt to add some color and depth (what I would like to try is a clunky, atonal windchime, but I don't have any samples of one yet). They are running into Valhalla Room with a rather short, "roomy" setting that I think might be a bit too wide sounding for what I'm going for. My thought is that these elements need to be drier than the synth, otherwise they don't give the impression of being out in some open space, though leaving them totally dry doesn't really do it for me, either.
So this is a bit outside the usual VO conversation, but I'm looking for thoughts and tips on the same core stuff--panning, reverb, etc. Thoughts on how to make it an interesting ambient track are encouraged, too. This is basically just me screwing around right now.
I noticed it's a bit quiet (which explains why the waveform isn't showing up, maybe?) so you might have to crank it (sorry).
