dannthr

It's better, you feel it's better, you can hear it, that's good, but it's not best. One thing you might notice is that now when you transition between the legato samples or the long samples that there's this SUCKING sound, like the air is getting sucked out as it moves from one note to the next. This is due to two things, one, the release samples aren't playing and it's feeling synthy because it's like some synth patch, and two, we're not hearing the natural transition of two legato notes. Adding reverb back in will help, but it must be a very clear sounding reverb, it can't mush it up, and then using SIPS to simulate a bit of a slide up to the notes will help OR programming pitch bends to simulate that slide could help. The dynamics are still sitting around maximum, that could be smoothed out somewhat--but finally, you will reach a point of diminishing returns on the amount of energy you put in and what you get back from it.

Well, that's a flaw in your writing a tad too, because you have to understand, violins are quiet instruments, they're so tiny. When you look at an orchestra, a symphony orchestra, you see maybe 3 trumpets, maybe 4 horns, maybe 1 tuba, you see 3 clarinets, you see 3 flutes, but realize that this is balance, this is tried and true old-time mixing technique. This means that when you look at the orchestra and you see so few horns and then you see 100,000 violin players, it's because at full volume, they're about equal in power. Violins are quiet things, that's why there's so many of them. Try doubling the violins with the cellos, one octave under, and then double the violas with the basses one octave under or two octaves under depending. See if that helps bring out the orchestra in the track.

Your legatos are going to be more responsive if you use the XFD or the DXF patches, which stands for Dynamic Cross-Fade. It will allow you to control the dynamics of the patch (not strictly volume, but timbral dynamics) with MIDI Continuous Controller #1 (Or the Mod Wheel/CC1). This will allow you to sculpt a HUMAN performance. I also own the old NI-Powered versions of EWQLSO, and one of the things I do is apply Big-Bob's SIPS Legato script to enhance the feeling of a legato slide between notes. When used sparingly, it can be quite convincing, but it would require you to know more about using Kontakt scripts.

Do you have Kontakt? Round robin capable patches are denoted by RR in their patch title.

You have no way of visualizing the music notation? Odd. Well, from this isolation, I can hear a couple of troubling things. First of all, there is no dynamic expression, everything is at fortissimo, giving you a strong SYNTHY feel, like a synth patch rather than real violins playing. You are not using a Round Robin capable patch, also lending your repetition notes to sounding identical, another hallmark feature of a synthetic performance. There are also issues with your release tail programming, as your release tails overlap on repeated notes, giving us the impression of a cloned note or a reinstanced note rather than a naturally repeated note. I think your verb detracts significantly from the natural timbre of the samples which while on its own isn't detrimental, it does compound your problem--it's quite smearing.

Hey, Can you please post a score excerpt of the part?

This is excellent advice, with one exception, and that's the Clarinet sound projection. The clarinet basically shifts between omni-like and projecting from the horn depending on how many holes are closed by the fingering. The lowest note on the clarinet projects straight out of the bottom, and then mid-way through there is a register change where a register hole is opened near the top, and the fingerings start over again from the bottom--at this register change, most of the projection will be out the horn again.

Hey man, interesting project. I like the composition, a lot! I'm not totally sold on the arrangement, there's so much tutti with the piano (generally in the beginning), it almost feels like the cello and the clari don't really have independent statements. I can't help but wonder how it would sound if you pulled back the piano part, distilled it more, and let the instruments do their thing on their own--they're much stronger when they are on their own. The cello has MASSIVE tuning issues, the arco is all over the place. Warming up, some dry runs, and multiple takes would probably be necessary to ensure the cello part was nailed. The mix is weak, everything is generally forward and with the tutti heavy arrangement, the individual timbral elements of the instruments are masked to the point of loss of character, which I think is too much.

For those who don't know how to go about teaching themselves something, I recommend school.

Omnisphere is a good one--Eric Persing programmed old skool Roland patches before moving over to his own Spectrasonics.

Your GOTO places starting out will be GANG and the IGDA, which is the International Game Developers Association. These will be great starting resources for networking. Otherwise, online--so many people online--so many communities online. Gamedev.net is a central location online for game developers of all walks of disciplines--check it out!

Dude, you're doing fine. Music is a temporal art. Sound and music can only exist through the linear passage of time and as such Music TAKES time to develop, to learn, and to work on. You can not instantly observe music as much as you can not instantly understand music--it is not an instant anything. So don't worry so much. From my perspective, your musical growth is observable over time, that's a good thing. What you need to focus on, in my opinion, is developing an analytical sense of hearing. This is not something people are born with as much as people are born like Mozart--this is something that is learned through the practice of listening to music and attempting to break that music down into its smaller parts. What will emerge in its own good time is your own sense of what works and what does not work in music--in your music. What will also emerge over time, is your skill at analyzing the instrumental performance of another human being and replicating and eventually synthesizing that performance with your own tools. I would much rather see you study Music Theory and Fundamentals than focus on Orchestration, but there is still much to be gained in a study on Orchestration and I encourage you to acquire whatever resource seems to the most effective for you. Unfortunately, I can not know which resource will exactly help you. What I can say is that foundational music and instrumentation for traditional orchestra is well over 100 years old and that there are many reliable resources from which to pull information. Tips and tricks will help you in the short term, but if you don't understand where they come from and where they take you, then it will only help you in the short term. And you will be left unable to pursue the next step. There is no true deadline for you to learn this stuff, so be patient, have patience in time but most of all, have patience in yourself. By all means, get the MIDI Orchestration book, if that's what works for you, that's what works, and good! There's nothing wrong with it, I just want to emphasize that the author can't teach specific tips that are useful outside of a very GENERAL sense. There are abstract principles to MIDI programming that are applicable to most situations, which is good to know, it's important to know and understand, and if that book teaches those, then good. But ultimately, your goal should be to develop critical listening skills. MIDI tips will help you now, but critical listening will help you for the rest of your life.

There are only basic fundamentals that can truly be learned about MIDI orchestration as software technology is so rapidly changing, the rest is learning the specific technology you're using to completion--whatever that might be (if you're using East West then you'll use different techniques than if you're using SampleModeling or Wallander Instruments, etc, etc). Your goal is and always should be to develop a comprehensive and analytical sense of hearing so that you can deconstruct what is necessary to replicate in a real performance and rely on your foundational knowledge of your MIDI software to guide HOW you put it together. MIDI is the wild-west, there are no REAL rules, there are only the inherent limitations of the protocol itself--the rest is just answering the question: "Does it sound good?" Writing for traditional instruments, and more importantly, writing WELL for traditional instruments is still the best seed to create great MIDI mock-ups--for all truly great MIDI mock-ups come from a great original composition with an informed sense of instrumentation and performance.

I'm not a Professor, to earn that distinction one must accomplish a great deal more than I have academically. To be clear, I am a part-time instructor at Pinnacle College in LA in their Video Game Sound Design Program which offers both a certificate and an associates degree in game audio (the first of it's kind in the US). It's a cool program and I spend way too much of my free time trying to make it even cooler.

Score study and mock-up practice--I have my students mock up John Williams with EWQLSO from the signature score--the learn a boat load about instrumentation and I supplement their learning with instruction from Samuel Adlers Study of Orchestration.

Yeah, in all fairness, we were pretty fortunate to have Will and Jeff as accomplished musicians playing flute, recorder, and violin, and more--it made all of our jobs so much easier with respect to getting the right sound. For the mock-ups, I did get a Pan Flute library from Precision Sound, but I didn't like them enough and ended up getting all of those sounds replaced by Will. I did however use Westgate Studios Flute libraries on a few cues and it worked well enough that we didn't have to get Will to record on all of them. After all, the dude was super busy making what I consider to still be one of the most complex interactive music systems ever implemented in a shipped game (and the freaking game is 20 years old!). Will is a natural-born awesome killer dude.

Well, to be fair, I only tried it in Sound Forge, and I find auto edits/auto crops to be pretty crude. Have you had luck doing this in Wavelab? Anyway, my point is that GuitarRig, as cool as it is, not necessarily a great all-around-fx plugin.

In games, you deal with non-linear assets that are compiled into a pool of music, sound-effects, and dialog. If you wanted to use GuitarRig, say, as a creature effect on a piece of dialog, and your creature had say 1,000 lines of dialog, efforts, and expressions, then you would enjoy a headache applying the effect in a DAW and then editing out and exporting each sound individually. In games, you need to be able to apply an effect sometimes to thousands of files at a time and you need plug-ins that support that feature. Most VSTs do fine with that. Guitar Rig, for whatever reason, does not.

Guitar Rig is not batch-able, which is a problem specifically for game audio professionals.

Here's a wrench for ya! The guys who built the Alesis One and started Event before they sold it to Rhodes have made their own coaxial monitor series called the Equators. Check out Equator Audio! We use their Q15s in Pinnacle's Studio A. http://www.equatoraudio.com/

Omnisphere is nice, and I have Z3ta, I've used Reaktor and Massive and Fm8, but frankly, the best Soft Synth I have ever used is Zebra 2. Zebra 2 is highly programmable, yes, that's all well and good, more importantly, it heavily emulates the signal flow of an actual modular synth system, but even more importantly is how it sounds. It's the only soft synth I've heard that actually SOUNDS analog. Hans Zimmer said in an interview that he was so happy with how Zebra 2 sounded, he hired Howard Scarr to come in and work at Remote Control and program all the patches for the Score for Inception, which he then admitted was 99% Zebra. Outstanding. I recently had the Musical Sound Designer for Bear McCreary come in and do a chat on musical sound design for my students--he's a hardware synth freak! He has a collection of hardware synths that would make Keith Emerson proud, but when he programs patches for clients, he recommends Zebra as the only soft synth he likes. Omnisphere is good, but man, Zebra is just UNBELIEVABLE.

Unrivaled editing features makes it a necessary evil. Know it, more importantly, know the shortcuts by heart. If you know PT shortcuts, you will be able to walk into almost any post-production or studio job and rock it. If you don't know PT shortcuts and you walk into a job, you'll look amateur navigating drop menus. Also, many DAWs let you change their shortcuts to mimic PT's workflow (PT you can't change shortcuts, so they're the same everywhere you go). It needs a lot of work, even 9. I teach at a Recording Arts College in their Video Game Sound Design program and we train kids to use ProTools only because it's a necessary evil. Otherwise, we train in Cubase which has unique tools appropriate for Game Audio. Push to use VST only if possible, RTAS and AU will be the death of you if you want to do game audio as a career (in games, you need shit to be batch-able and there are no good batch processors that utilize RTAS or AU). Its editing features and it's really freeform signal flow really accommodate the studio workflow, not to mention that many crusty studio managers have been using it since it was Sound Designer... Good luck and enjoy what you can from it (make it look pretty if you get bored)

A full range piano I am currently liking is the Galaxy Vintag D which is a Steinway D Grand Piano run through a really solid, vintage style signal chain. It has a warm mid-low range and a delicate mid-high range. It feels very flexible and paired with a great reverb could definitely tackle a Thomas Newman moment, at least I think so. What really defines his style is a softly played piano brought way up front in the mix and drenched with verb--the challenge with that will always be mixing because there's a lot of harmonics at that dynamic and the verb will lend itself to mud. So some measure of mixing focus will be necessary to pull it off.

Unfortunately I am not able to hear your demo right now, but I have heard quite a few emotional piano demos and feel like it's very much an imperfect piano but would contend that to a certain degree that was the point--I feel like it's VERY harmonically rich which adds to the thick emotional feel from each note and it's what lends itself nicely for those sparse Thomas Newman style moments. I feel it has it's uses, but that it's not for everything.

Yes, the cumulative value of all the products included in Komplete is kind of ridiculous.