10-10-2018, 12:41 AM
The truth is your template will be very much the result of your own gear and your understanding and use thereof. It will also change a lot (A LOT). I've been seriously pursuing VO for about three or four years (not counting the many years spent futzing and basically doing it wrong before that) and I still don't have a really hard fast template I can rely on. Certain things have become convention, for sure, but I'm always tweaking.
I usually build on a previous project that was successful and use that as a template. Having a template that has EVERYTHING available is just not feasible and will only exacerbate what I feel is the biggest deterrent to productivity in VO: clutter. You aren't going to use absolutely everything in a track and as you really get into a piece you're working on you just might make a mess of it anyway.
One of my biggest issues is workflow. I can get a tune started in many ways, but like you I find it can be daunting to figure out how I'm going to drop things into a functioning orchestra without a lot of time spent building it up. To that end, I've begun focusing on what conventions / building blocks I typically follow and actually more on things like mixer states that I can call up in a pinch. My current template musings focus more on just getting the skeleton in place so I can easily add instruments and get them in position as I like them. That is, trying to get some of the technical legwork out of the way as best I can, which includes routing and color coding what I feel are enough tracks to cover what I think I might need in a particular instrument family, and so forth. Again, it's impossible to prepare for every variable or possibility, so it's sensible to keep it simple. It's worth mentioning that I have made no practical use of this particular template yet; I'm still just experimenting and primarily reusing existing project files.
I use FL Studio and primarily Kontakt based libraries. Two instances of Kontakt (which is slowly morphing into three these days). I also supplement with other plugins here and there, like Sforzando et al. Kontakt is multitimbral which means I can get sixteen individual patches loaded up per instance and routed to internal MIDI controllers and mixer tracks withing the DAW. I route everything to three (sometimes four) instances of reverb. Some of my patches include key switches for articulations and some instruments require a single patch for each. But again your template is going to be based on your stuff, and I have no experience with any of the plugins you've mentioned. As for mixing those libraries together, again, it's going to have to come from hours of working with them and listening to how they interact. I typically avoid making changes until I notice something out of place and then decide what to do, be it EQ, more or less reverb, stereo image fiddling, or what have you. A big challenge I've faced is varying degrees of baked in reverb on all the different libraries I use.
So I might suggest simply worrying about it a little at a time, but continuing to just make music. I've tried on numerous occasions to set up a "be all end all" template and have not succeeded, yet.
I usually build on a previous project that was successful and use that as a template. Having a template that has EVERYTHING available is just not feasible and will only exacerbate what I feel is the biggest deterrent to productivity in VO: clutter. You aren't going to use absolutely everything in a track and as you really get into a piece you're working on you just might make a mess of it anyway.
One of my biggest issues is workflow. I can get a tune started in many ways, but like you I find it can be daunting to figure out how I'm going to drop things into a functioning orchestra without a lot of time spent building it up. To that end, I've begun focusing on what conventions / building blocks I typically follow and actually more on things like mixer states that I can call up in a pinch. My current template musings focus more on just getting the skeleton in place so I can easily add instruments and get them in position as I like them. That is, trying to get some of the technical legwork out of the way as best I can, which includes routing and color coding what I feel are enough tracks to cover what I think I might need in a particular instrument family, and so forth. Again, it's impossible to prepare for every variable or possibility, so it's sensible to keep it simple. It's worth mentioning that I have made no practical use of this particular template yet; I'm still just experimenting and primarily reusing existing project files.
I use FL Studio and primarily Kontakt based libraries. Two instances of Kontakt (which is slowly morphing into three these days). I also supplement with other plugins here and there, like Sforzando et al. Kontakt is multitimbral which means I can get sixteen individual patches loaded up per instance and routed to internal MIDI controllers and mixer tracks withing the DAW. I route everything to three (sometimes four) instances of reverb. Some of my patches include key switches for articulations and some instruments require a single patch for each. But again your template is going to be based on your stuff, and I have no experience with any of the plugins you've mentioned. As for mixing those libraries together, again, it's going to have to come from hours of working with them and listening to how they interact. I typically avoid making changes until I notice something out of place and then decide what to do, be it EQ, more or less reverb, stereo image fiddling, or what have you. A big challenge I've faced is varying degrees of baked in reverb on all the different libraries I use.
So I might suggest simply worrying about it a little at a time, but continuing to just make music. I've tried on numerous occasions to set up a "be all end all" template and have not succeeded, yet.
