Something Sam said in a different thread prompted me to ask these question (and we need to spark some more conversation around here).
For a composition that will only ever be played by virtual instruments, how far do you go to make it realistic?
For example:
do you ensure your virtual woodwind and brass players would actually have a chance to breathe?
do you ensure they won't become exhausted by playing too long at the top of their range?
do you ensure you don't use more instruments than would actually be in an orchestra? By this I mean do you take care not to end up with something that would actually require a hundred string players or 40 horn players?
do you consider if a part you've composed would be boring for a player to play?
Along with the above, I'm particularly interested in knowing if anyone else takes it this far:
is there enough for each virtual musician to do?
There have been times where I really only need a single whole note from the Tuba in the middle of my composition, but I imagine a real composer would consider the absurdity of hiring someone to play one note and instead find other places to add Tuba just for the benefit of a Tuba player (and to get their money's worth out of the Tuba player)
I personally like to imagine that my virtual players are real in as many ways as I can. It makes me feel more like a real composer.
As a percussionist, (I'm probably exaggerating a little here) I've played pieces where I count 40 bars rest, hit a bass drum, count another 20 bars and then tap the snare drum a few times. Boring! I felt under appreciated by the composer. I don't want to do that to my virtual players if I can avoid it.
Things are getting a bit... crickety. After ousting our dear lunatic Jerry I'm not seeing a whole lot of activity here. I will be removing the WP-based mattiaswestlund.net blog soon (I haven't posted anything there since July 2020) and I have to ask: has Scoring Central run its course as well?
I'm not into the VO thing anymore, so I don't contribute with much. At the same time, it's not a problem keeping this place around, if you want it.
On a related note, my VO articles will go offline when the blog thing does. If there is interest, I might make some pdf version of them for posterity.
Sorry for my absence as of late. Been busy working on decidedly non-orchestral music for months now, and I've felt that I don't really have much to contribute with. I'm eternally grateful to everyone who keeps stopping by, keeping this place alive
I had promised myself that no matter what, I would stick with my old passive Digital Designs studio monitors because I've had them for upwards of ten years now and I know them. Which is more important than having super-flat and super-accurate monitoring.
Problem is, they're too big for my tiny home studio. In fact, I'm not even sure they're actually near-field monitors. I can't be bothered to post pics of them right now, but they're the typical big, deep monitor variety with two woofers and a tweeter in the center, meant for lying on their sides atop a huge studio desk. They worked well enough in my old apartment where I had more room for setting everything up. Where I live now, I end up sitting too close to them, and it feels like the sound projects somewhere behind my head. So, not ideal.
Then the cheap little stereo amplifier I've been using for powering them started flaking out. I went looking for a more expensive and reliable one, and instantly balked at the prices. I realized that if an amp alone is going to set me back $100-150, I might as well get myself a pair of powered monitors more suited for small/home studio use and solve all my issues in one fell swoop.
I ended up getting a used pair of Behringer Truth B2030A monitors. I got them for around $160 and the guy I bought them off of claimed they've only been used very sparingly. I believe him, since the monitors are in absolutely immaculate condition. They're probably a number of years old, since they have the old Behringer logo, but there's not even a speck of dust on them, and they work perfectly.
Now comes the fun part though: getting to know these buggers. I could tell right off the bat they're more detailed and has better stereo imaging (which lends credence to my suspicion that the old monitors are actually mid-fields). Other than that, they sound COMPLETELY alien to me and it's going to take a lot of reference listening and experimentation before I'm able to make any informed mixing desicions with them.
Uh... help. I bought Kontakt sometime last year but I have yet to get the factory library. Really didn't seem all that interesting to me seeing as it's all some pretty dated and limited stuff, and I was mostly after all the 3rd party content.
Just for fun I wanted to install it today, but Native Access won't let me. The Factory lib weighs in at 23GB. I have less than that available on the SSD where I keep all my bigger and more demanding libraries, and Kontakt has for some reason decided that's where ALL my libs must go. What's up with this? Surely there must be a way to tell Kontakt that I have other drives with more free space on them?
Well, so I thought to myself:
Before I start releasing projects with my new and nearly finished Extreme-Lib (freeware), I would like to introduce some history with the old ones:
"Clapgroup"
A colleague of mine brought me a mastertape with a genius mix out of saxophone, hammond, breakbeats and ripped Sade samples. I'm so impressed that I want to mimic this in my own song, but with no skills in making a decent house/electronic track especially with breakbeats the outcome was always something completely different; name it a funtrack. I had no chance to copy the tape, so I had to replicate the sounds from memory - from one-time-hearing. Involved were JV-1080 (expanded), JD-990 (expanded), Ultra Proteus, and the ASR-10 for hosting the user-samples and for the ping pong delay:
"Imagine"
The same colleague gave me another mastertape (copied this time ) with the Wavestation SR as the main sound source, and a solo line which I learned playing hearing out the track. Instead of "close my eyes and imagine" I began a 1:1 conversion from this noisy tape, and add my improvements afterwards. I had a WS/AD already, so I add the JV-1080 for bass and filter sounds, Alesis D4 Drums, and again the ASR-10 for all the user-samples:
After that I gave up on the house/electronic realm, and quickly switch to the soundtrack domain where I'm felt much more comfortable:
"The Rain"
My first soundtrack attempt. (And everyone can hear that it's my first attempt.)
I had the first idea back in schooldays, and tried to realize it with several tape machines, the c64, a bontempi keyboard, and a watch for "syncing" it all together -> you do NOT want to hear that!
For the "modern" version I used a 01/W, a K2500 (for 2 patches, only 4 MB), two Rolands for Bread, Butter and Wind (JV-1080 and JV-2080 with the orchestral expansions), a Alesis D4 Drum-module and the Sample Cell for all user-samples:
"The Impossible Mission Story"
My second soundtrack attempt. Started with an old friend of mine from schooldays we never took it too serious with the speech recordings, so they were placeholder first. Unfortunatly they never got re-recorded, so pardon the "gouvernator"-style throughout the whole project.
IM is a first true milestone in gaming history imo, but sadly had no music or game-OST. And therefore we try to change the situation. What I also wanted to show was, what's possible only with freeware even in that period, apart from studio gear of course like two XV-5080 with orchestral expansions, but they were not the main sound source. Instead the hosts for almost all of the instruments were Kontakt1, Kontakt4 and the STS-5000. Starting the production I was not aware that at the same time two guys working on a remake of the game, Ian Price from UK (coder and mod at retroremakes) and Mikkel Christensen from Denmark (Visuals and GFX). That gave me a strong motivation to finish this endless delayed project:
The only thing missing yet is a youtube-vid where I show the dynamically changed background music in action and the brandnew SFX/Speech.
"The Crisis"
Two "brute-force" short films, the only time where I made use of AMT Building Blocks, where you can combine Loops and Snippets (also Freeware). But major sound source was Dark Adventures obviously:
So that's it.
Due to health issues, I strongly hope that I can release the first snippets with the new library next year.
For a sneak preview what to expect you can visit:
I guess this could go in the Technology section, but since it's not necessarily only related to music, it could impact other things too (like gaming etc.).
Are there any Linux users here? I've been thinking for awhile about switching over from Windows on my next build. But there appear to be a lot of compatibility issues. Reaper will work, I know that. But Native Instruments' stuff requires something called "Wine," and even that isn't a guarantee things will go well. What about other plugins? I know FL Studio is not compatible with Linux, or so they say.
I'm not going to hold my breath that developers who aren't on board will get on board, so I'm exploring options. I figure I have a few years before I absolutely HAVE to make a choice as to whether I'll switch or not. It all seems very complicated: which version of Linux to use, which version of whichever version you choose, the necessity of "wine" (which I'm guessing is a kind of wrapper?) and so forth; but it seems like it could be worth the effort. All the info I find online is pretty chaotic, though. Some people have no problems, others have all sorts of them.
I figured I should just use an old laptop for experimentation. Anybody know where to start with Linux?
Well, Project SAM has updated one of my favorite libraries, True Strike 1. Might be worth looking into for anyone who is interested, as it's on sale right now.
I can't say whether I'll use the new interface much as yet, though. I can't even say anything about the new features yet because when I try to open it there are EIGHT THOUSAND files missing, and it's taking hours for Kontakt to find them all (after which point I'll resave the patch and hope I never have to do this again). By the way, anyone have any quick fix answers for that? I thought about trying Batch Resave, but it says I might have to manually find the missing files myself anyway, which puts me back in the same place. This kind of thing is not new to me, but when a patch wants every sample in the library, it seems a bit ridiculous... The reason it wants all the samples loaded at once is the new interface is some kind of all-in-one thing, I guess.
Edit: the update was apparently missing files. I emailed Project SAM about it. Not sure WHY it was missing files, since I didn't do anything out of the ordinary. Guess we'll see what happens when they respond...
Something a little different from me here. No orchestra this time. I'm responsible for drums, bass and guitar in this collaboration (and I made the video)
![[Image: vpo-100k-downloads.jpg]](http://virtualplaying.com/w/images/vpo-100k-downloads.jpg)