VO = Consumerism and digital slavery?

[payoak]

Hi everyone and hope you well in these quarantine days...
First saying that I am writing this post because I just wrote another one in a well-known spanish virtual orchestration forum, asking for opinions on VSCO Pro and Amadeus Symphonic Orchestra. The thing is that the majority of comments went in the direction of "better save your money and buy a better thing", "you need the BBCSO from Spitfire if you are looking for the best value and realism", "Subscribe to EW Composer Cloud and don't buy that shit" etc. You know, that kind of answers.
After reading all of that, I thought, WOW! these people have to be amazing composers! But the whole point was that I couldn't find a single release from any of them. And, in the best case, one of two demos or a single CD, one recorded by a real orchestra with an orchestrator writing the actual arrangement for it, because the composer didn't know how to put his own music into paper.
Are we really in that consumerist loop? Do we really need those expensive libraries? Do I am crazy or only poor? 
#stayathomecomposeanddon'tspendallyourmoney

[Chris Spyratos]

I am feeling this too, an ongoing craze for which library is the most realistic, the most "playable", the most "pro" and so on... My only advice would be to save your precious money and only invest in stuff that in some way help you develop your craft. Do you need to have a full orchestral set to compose for orchestra and experiment with timbre? Sure you do! Do you need all this articulations and mic positions and super realistic scripting? Maybe, it depends on whether that would really make somehow your composition shine.

Every person with some experience on libraries can carry an opinion. However, I would care more about the opinion -and ultimately the workflow- only of those whose music I admire. Maybe next time take the other way around and after listening to something you like, ask it's composer about their tools.

[Mattias Westlund]

I would bet it's not the professionals making great music who sit on the internet forums talking smack about sample libraries, so I would say their opinions are pretty safe to ignore. I have even stopped asking questions about libraries online except for maybe on here, since I know what the response is going to be. I.e. snobbery and blind praise of the latest and most expensive stuff. The VO world has always been like that and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon, if ever.

The latest orchestral libraries will be old hat to these people in a year or two, to be followed by some new fad, so their recommendations aren't worth much anyway. So I would suggest just getting a lib that

1) you like the sound of
2) looks to have the features you need
3) you can afford

and use it to make the best music you can. Leave the discussions of what is "best" to the VO-philes.

[Samulis]

The only thing that matters is that the tool feels 'right' to you. Having been on both sides of the user-developer relationship, I'd personally argue that there is no such thing as a best tool, or in some cases, even a better tool, just different tools for different jobs. Yeah, there are some that just generally suck or are a bad value for your money, but you can create beautiful music with almost any library... or as the pundits hate it when pointed out, no libraries at all, just like composers have done for hundreds of years!

I can't really describe it right, but each library has a different feel at your fingers. They want to do and achieve different things, and even the best libs have weaknesses. EWQL SO for example, I used for maybe 10 years straight and it's still something I reach for even though it's like 20 years old and has been greatly superseded by other libraries because the feel is right for some stuff. VSCO 2 Pro I use regularly too, even though I have EW Hollywood and Albion and whatnot (maybe not the latest gen anymore, but still strong enough that it doesn't matter to the average listener), because the direction and sound that VSCO 2 Pro gives is something you just cannot do with Hollywood/etc... and vice versa.

Most of it I think comes from 'tribalism' mixed with the concept of 'loss aversion': humans are in general very afraid of losing things, including the idea of losing the power they exercise when making a purchase. No one likes being wrong, and especially no one likes spending more money than they might actually need to or, God forbid, making a choice that isn't demonstrably the most obvious best choice ever. As such many will go to great lengths to justify their large piles of VI's or top picks, often to the detriment of the choices of others. I routinely receive or see e-mails, comments, reviews, forum posts, and videos about VSCO 2 CE or affordable libraries that comically miss the point; such people either never were the target market to begin with, or view the world in such a hierarchical, black-and-white way that reasoning with them is generally not possible. They also don't seem to realize that most people starting off in VO are doing so coming from somewhere else, and either may not have the assets to drop a bunch of dough on a particular lib and may not even be sure if they want to pursue it as a career or even a hobby yet.

The thing that bothers me most is the idea that people think they can buy their way into being a good composer by buying the right instruments. Personally, I think the only way to be a good composer is to (1) practice composing and ear training, (2) become intimately familiar with your tools, (3) have some level of basic keyboard or instrumental skills, and (4) start with only what you need and work towards what you want. I have seen more talented compositions and even superior sounding mockups rendered with 15+ year old sample libraries than some created using modern $1000+ flagship libraries. This suggests to me two factors: (1) a superior tool doesn't make you better at something, only faster/the process easier/more compelling, (2) your tool is only as good as you are familiar with it. When I started, I had nothing more than free soundfonts and LMMS. I learned to appreciate and use these tools, and when I was ready for more, I upgraded. I slowly worked and learned my way from incompetence to marginal competence over the course of a decade, 300+ compositions, and half a dozen game scores, all without having to buy more than a few hundred dollars in VI's and along the way learned a heck of a lot more than I would have if I dropped $2K on sample libs off the bat or something.

Edit: as a side note, when writing for real instruments, I use literally the default Soundcanvas soundfont in Finale or a very basic sample set. The playback only exists in that case to help me check for mistakes or make easier decisions and a lot of fancy instruments behave poorly with notation software anyway...

[Mattias Westlund]

I joined a Facebook group called Virtual Orchestration some year ago. And it's f'n depressing. Never have I seen so many people arrogantly touting tools over skill, except for maybe those PC Master Race type "gamers" who spend all their money buying only the best hardware only to run benchmarks and bask in the glory of their super-high framerates. While not actually playing and getting into (and good at) any games.

If it weren't for the fact that useful things are occasionally posted there, I would leave the group. It's kind of sad that an enthusiast community like that actually makes me loose enthusiasm for the genre, but that's VO snobbery for ya I guess.

[Samulis]

(05-04-2020, 08:57 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: I joined a Facebook group called Virtual Orchestration some year ago. And it's f'n depressing. Never have I seen so many people arrogantly touting tools over skill, except for maybe those PC Master Race type "gamers" who spend all their money buying only the best hardware only to run benchmarks and bask in the glory of their super-high framerates. While not actually playing and getting into (and good at) any games.

If it weren't for the fact that useful things are occasionally posted there, I would leave the group. It's kind of sad that an enthusiast community like that actually makes me loose enthusiasm for the genre, but that's VO snobbery for ya I guess.

That kind of thing sickens me, especially when it consists of putting down new members for enjoying freeware or cheap libraries, just like when PCMR folks put down people who use older or cheaper hardware for not having RTX or whatever the latest thing is. 

e.g. You can happily and very capably make relatively complex music on even a Core i3 or a Ryzen 3 now; even my 7-year old i7-3770 had no flaw with its ability to use even the latest VI's. When you realize the minimum spec for Kontakt is a Core 2 Duo (which came out what, 10-15 years ago?), and that home computers were fully capable of multi-track audio recording in the mid 1990's, it is silly every time I see someone touting the only reasonable computer for VI must have 16 cores and 128 GB of RAM or something like that, and yet I see posts like that on many boards and groups dedicated to this field.

Honestly-
(1) I miss the 'simpler' days of slashing my way through scores with "easy" libraries like EWQL SO. I realize now music is much less fun to create than it used to be, even if my work sounds better. 
(2) Sometimes I just want to not even bother with VI's; I've had a lot of fun creating scores using live instruments only, e.g. through free improvisation.

[peastman]

This is maybe a bit relevant.  I just got a Yamaha digital piano.  This means I can practice without disturbing my wife.  Very important when we're both stuck at home all day!

Of course Yamaha boasts about the amazing piano samples built into it.  They're beautiful, realistic, with lots of advanced features, the best thing since sliced bread, etc.  You know how it goes.  Most reviewers seem to agree with them.

My own assessment after trying out the built in piano sounds for a while?  Eh, they're ok.  Usable but nothing special.  Salamander is way better in almost every way, so that's what I'll mostly be using.

We've reached a point where free tools aren't just "good enough".  Often they're better than a lot of the commercial alternatives.   Too many people don't realize that and think if you're using free tools, you can't possibly create anything good.

[Samulis]

I think digital pianos are often a funny sticking point. Current commercial piano sample libraries START around 5-10 GB, while afaik even the largest ROMs for digital pianos are maybe a few GB at best, spread across maybe a dozen piano sounds. For some people, maybe it is that the built-in sounds are just good enough (like me using built-in Finale sounds when compositing for live instruments: the quality isn't the point, the idea/convenience is). For others, I think it may even just boil down to a lack of education on the matter, not knowing what a VST is or how they can use a computer and their keyboard to access all these other sounds.

I get an e-mail at least once every other day asking such basic questions as how VSTi work and what a SFZ is, or confusing the difference between a .wav file and a .mid file... things that to probably everyone here seem so fundamentally basic. I think perhaps there are just a lot of people slowly entering this world of digital music, and for many the built-in sounds on a keyboard may be as far as they go. For others, it'll be loading patches in Kontakt Player or EW PLAY. For others still, it will be occasionally editing Kontakt patches 'under the hood' or altering a few values in a SFZ. Then for many of us on this forum, it will be making our own tools and building upon an open world of sounds. It is hard to get from point 'A' all the way to point 'Z' I think, much less being in a position to appreciate how capable we all have become along the way.

[Mattias Westlund]

(05-06-2020, 07:22 PM)Samulis Wrote: (1) I miss the 'simpler' days of slashing my way through scores with "easy" libraries like EWQL SO. I realize now music is much less fun to create than it used to be, even if my work sounds better. 

I feel much the same way, yes.

[Mattias Westlund]

(05-06-2020, 08:47 PM)peastman Wrote: We've reached a point where free tools aren't just "good enough".  Often they're better than a lot of the commercial alternatives.   Too many people don't realize that and think if you're using free tools, you can't possibly create anything good.

I wouldn't go as far as to say "often" (assuming we're still talking about sample libraries here), because the commercial offerings are undeniably superior to the free ones in terms of features, articulations, detail, etc. But what the free stuff lacks in the instrument selection/mic positions/dynamic layers/round robins department, it makes up for with forcing you to be creative. You can't just sit back and let the sheer grandeur of your library do the work for you, you nedd to coax it and tweak it and combine it with other stuff, as well as make sure that every note and every harmony has musical meaning. And hey -- suddenly you have music that sounds alive and interesting. Which is more than I can say of the music from some of the proponents of "the more expensive the better"