Moseph

4/17 only -- Waves Kramer Master Tape on sale for $29. http://www.waves.com/plugins/kramer-master-tape

The short answer is to do whatever gets the job done with results you like. If you want to be complicated with it, then you should do whatever allows you to access all the articulations you need for each of the five orchestral strings sections (violins 1, violins 2, violas, cellos, basses). So yes, either keyswitches for multiple articulations on each section's track or multiple tracks per section with one articulation each. Each way has benefits and drawbacks. I think EWQLSO is set up more to work with one articulation per track, but I know it has at least a few keyswitched sets. It's a pain, especially with larger libraries. My EWQL Hollywood orchestral template was so large that I ended up splitting it into one project file per instrument/section and then just bouncing things down to import into a master project with just audio and no VSTs. SONAR really didn't like my trying to fit everything in one template (something like 2000 tracks including the many, many audio tracks for mic positions fed separately out of many instances of PLAY). (EDIT: I wouldn't have been running everything at once because I don't have the computer for it -- I'd have been loading samples section by section then bouncing down like I do now, but just in a single large project.) It's enough of an issue that even in the pro market, there are companies offering libraries that combine all of the string sections into one big blended section to make it easier to write quickly without getting bogged down in library minutiae.

I know some of the instruments/effects that come with SONAR are DirectX, but I've never seen anything use the format beyond those. I don't think anyone's actively developing plugins with the format at this point.

Gold and Platinum have the same articulations, but Platinum includes two additional mic positions and 24-bit samples rather than 16-bit. If you don't look at multiple mic positions and say, "This is a thing that I need!" then Gold will probably be a better choice. Silver has fewer articulations than Gold/Platinum (there's a comparison chart somewhere on the EWQL site). I haven't used Silver, so I can't comment on how useful it is, but from what I've seen online, Gold seems to be the most popular of the three among people making their first big orchestral library purchase. EWQL SO runs on PLAY, which is included with the library. Gold XP is no longer available -- I think it added the extra mic positions to Gold that are currently available as part of Platinum. I'd advise against getting EWQL Choirs unless you're okay with an extremely steep learning curve on the word builder. It is the most difficult library I've ever used and it requires a lot of fiddly detail work to get it to sound decent. Granted, you don't have to use the word builder at all, but if that's the case then there are other newer and cheaper choir libraries that might serve you better.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that this brings the number of kazoo libraries I have to two.

Arnold Schoenberg, who was one of the early pioneers of atonal music, hated the term "atonal."

Just normalize it in Audacity to bring the level up as high as it can go without clipping. Noise floor shouldn't be an issue. Or am I misunderstanding the issue? Are you getting spikes in the audio that prevent it from being normalized to the usual level of chiptunes?

Unless you're going to perform live or just really, really prefer the workflow that a hardware synth gives you, you'll get more for your money by doing everything in software. Maybe check out NI's Komplete 9. 24 gigs of RAM is probably overkill unless you're doing heavy-duty sampled orchestra stuff, but do at least get a motherboard that supports that much even if you're not going to use that much right now. The video card isn't important at all as far as music goes, and since you're not trying to run new games, I'd say spend as little money on the video card as possible. I have a 512MB Nvidia GT 240 that I got in 2010 (which was low-end even at the time) and can still run games well enough that I haven't seen any point in upgrading from it.

It's nice to see the EBU R128/ITU-R BS 1770-1 loudness metering standard finally starting to make its way into free plugins.

There, now it's art music.

Try These 3 Weird Tricks To Improve Your Video Game Music! EA Hates This!

TBH, I think the biggest single problem with that Dual Shock director's cut basement track is the godawful brass samples. Play it on a piano, and it wouldn't sound nearly as bad.

brb remixing imma call it "Ghostwriting the WIP"

I recently got EWQLSO with the intention of using it to supplement other libraries (rather than as a complete orchestra in itself), but I haven't yet had a chance to sort through it and figure out what I want to use. I'll most likely spend a couple of days going through patches and setting up track templates for everything so that if I decide I need an EWQLSO instrument in a project I can just drop it in with all the proper articulations already routed. That's what I've done with the Hollywood series, anyway. In general, my preference for sample loading is to load all available articulations and mic positions for any given instrument. This increases loading times and overall system resource use, but it allows for more flexibility in programming and mixing. And I'm moving toward a workflow where I just work instrument-by-instrument and bounce everything down to audio before I mix it, so system load isn't necessarily a big issue for me.

Of course old school game music is catchy/memorable. It can't not be catchy, because trying to do subtle and/or environmental music in a chiptune/lo-fi context ranges from difficult to disastrous. If you're going to have old-school music at all, it has to be catchy and melody oriented because anything else will be unpleasant to listen to for any length of time. The catchiness is a hardware limitation. We have now overcome that hardware limitation and are no longer forced to use catchy music where other types of music are actually more appropriate.

And if you use more heavily modified chords, you end up with strange modes that don't really show up in classical music theory but are used widely in jazz. For example, if your C maj7 chord had both a #11 and a #5, you'd have what's known as Lydian-Augmented mode.

Yes, II-V-I refers to a progression. Particularly in jazz theory, chord numerals are sometimes written without the uppercase/lowercase distinction. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I think it may be because jazz theory often deals with extremely brief tonicizations where bass motion is more important than chord quality, which is often changed improvisationally.

The most basic harmonic relationship (in both classical music and jazz) is the relationship of V to I. Books have been written about why exactly this is the case, but that the relationship is important can pretty much just be taken as a given. One of the ways jazz fleshes the V-I relationship out is by duplicating the V-I harmonic motion with chords that aren't actually V and I. For example, II moves to V by going down a fifth just like V moves to I by going down a fifth. You can extend this even further backwards to get progressions such as III-VI-II-V-I. The short version, II-V-I, is particularly popular because it works as a turn-around -- you can extend a given chord by playing a quick II-V-I progression on it (using the chord in question as your I) and you end up right back on the chord, so you can use the gesture just to fill in space that would otherwise have had no harmonic change in it. Things get even more interesting when you start changing chord qualities. For example, if we're in the key of C major, II-V-I will be minor-major-major, or minor-dominant-major since a seventh is typically added to the V chord. We can take the idea of imitating V-I for things that aren't V-I even further and change II from a minor chord to a dominant seventh chord (like the V), which makes the relationship between II and V even more like the relationship between V and I.

VSL SE was my first orchestral library -- I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a starter library unless you have or are committed to developing very good production skills. Reverb is the big issue -- since they're recorded extremely dry, it's very difficult to place VSL libraries spatially in a mix, and it's the sort of thing where you likely won't hear problems unless you already know what you should be listening for (or it was for me, anyway). I also find that VSL stuff needs much more corrective EQ'ing than EastWest stuff. If you go with EWQLSO Gold (or VSL SE, for that matter), you ought to be just fine putting it on your main drive.

I can't speak for what the Hollywood Gold libraries would be like, but I'm running the Diamond libraries from the CCC2 Pro USB3 drive, and load times are horrendous. Granted, I'm loading all four mic positions, which most people don't do, so that doesn't help matters. I clocked a cold load of one of the violin sections with four mics and most of the articulations at around a half hour. And it used up all the open RAM. And I have 16 gigs of RAM. They're hardcore libraries, is what I'm saying. I think my workflow is flexible enough to actually work around load times and patch size (I compose outside of the DAW and bounce individual tracks to disk), but I'm still setting up templates and I'll need to do a couple of projects with the libraries before I'm sure how things will work. There may have to be an SSD in my future. Keep in mind, though, that I'm not setting things up for real-time playback of the full orchestra since I plan to load only one instrument at a time then bounce to disk -- I could scale things way back and everything would certainly run better and load faster, but where's the fun in using a hardcore library if you don't push it to its limits?

To me, the main benefit of using physical knobs/faders is not for tweaking convenience but for automation quality. It's often a lot easier to get smooth, musical automation curves -- particularly on sampled instruments such as strings -- if you're moving a physical object in realtime rather than dragging a virtual fader with a mouse or drawing non-realtime automation curves. I've started using a drawing tablet for this (routed through MIDITab and LoopBe1), which gives me CC values from both the X and the Y axes as well as from pressure sensitivity. I find that this makes automating things such as strings' dynamic level and vibrato much easier. I may look into breath controllers in the future.

Are you looking at the Silver/Gold version of the Hollywood series, or the Diamond version? The system load with the Diamond version is potentially far, far higher than with Silver/Gold because Diamond is 24-bit, has more articulations (than Silver, anyway), and has more mic positions.

This is my first guess as well. There was a thread pretty recently where someone was having a similar problem, and the default sound enhancements from the built-in sound device turned out to be the culprit.

And I may be stating the obvious here, but even leaving aside issues of melodic creativity, Action Strings doesn't have sustains, which means that it would be really hard to use it as a workhorse strings library without a traditional sample library to back it up.

There's a really good (and long!) tutorial/discussion of how to use the library .I have Action Strings but haven't gotten a chance to install yet. (Next week, maybe.) If there's been no discussion in this thread by the time I've actually had a chance to get into the library, I'll try to remember to bump with my first impressions.