dannthr

If you really want an indepth book on the history of instruments and why they sound the way they do and their complete limitations, Cecil Forscythe's book is a great read. There is no substitute for studying actual scores. Any local university library worth its weight in balls will have a decent music library with scores available for listening. There is no better way than that and that's what I like about Adler's book, the accompanying CDs really add a great dimension to excerpts and really exemplify varied voicings, etc.

What ever you do, do NOT play Marty O'Donnell, he's a snarky bastard. Yeah, the thing is this... Warm-ups are real exercises. Don't shirk the responsibility of doing a good job when you're warming up because it's truly a reflection of how well your regular routine is. The elements are quite disparate, that's something to work on. If your sketches are coming out like this, then that's a muscle group you need to start incorporating into your routine. There really aren't good excuses. Keep at it though, just take it a little more thoughtfully. I like that you're tackling up-to-date stuff and this track is a real chellenge, there's no shame in actually trying.

I second the Adler book AND I would highly suggest the accompanying audio CDs--every single excerpt in the Adler book is provided including voice explorations of moving a part from one instrument group to another. The pair are invaluable. They are pricy because they are currently in common use as a college text book. I have the Rimsy-Korsikov, I have the Berlioz/Strauss, the Forcythe, etc, and Adler's is my go-to every time.

Now that's just mouthing off...

Can you be specific in regards to the KIND of art you're seeking?

A creative mind flourishes when it is rested and playful--never take a break if you're "in-the-zone" but do go out and take a break if you're creatively constipated (not too long, just go take a walk, work out, get out of the house, don't watch passive entertainment, just do something different than what you usually do).

Nice use of the MELODICA for the main melody! I wasn't as big on the rhythm melodica, to be honest, but it was a fun little cover and it's always nice to see everything played live. Keep up the good work, would love to hear some more monkey remixes on this site (none of mine are allowed ).

Most of your patches will be editable within the Kontakt interface. If you want to add a filter to one of your instruments, you can do so by opening up Kontakt and selecting the particular instruments' edit interface by clicking on the appropriate patch's WRENCH button. Once open, you can apply filters in many different ways. To most mimic the filters you would apply, locate the InsertEffects area (a light gray region if it's already opened up) of the editor interface. Then drop it down if it is not already opened up, once open, you will see a bay of 8 slots, some may be filled some may be empty--the empty slots will be dark gray with the wrods "Add FX" on them, if you click on the "+" button within that slot, then a drop down menu of available fx will appear--filters are the top selection. One of the more powerful features of Kontakt is the Group Insert FX where you can automate FX like filters using a variety of external and internal sources.

Congratulations, man.

PLAY is a sample-software that responds to MIDI. MIDI is how you will be communicating to PLAY and you will want to explore producing MIDI mock-ups more deeply. A lot of the gorgeous Hollywood Strings demos you hear are done by one man, and he is considered by many to be one of the worlds best MIDI mock-uppers. So you have to take the demos by TJ with a grain of salt. I will say that a friend recently got his hands on Hollywood Strings, he's a concert violinist and a composer and whoo-boy, he really knows how to handle the library. But his background as a violinist helps him knock-out great mock-ups that really sing true to the strings natural sound. Hollywood Strings is a beast, in fact, so is QL Pianos (if that's the regular version). The benefits to EW over VSL are that EW is built to be essentially mixed out-of-the-box. It's going for a great out-of-the-box sound, and so, for beginners it's a great place to start. The benefits to VSL over EW are that their samples, specifically their wood-wind samples, can be really, very fine! And more-over, to look at the other side of the coin, you are not LOCKED into a specific mixed sound, you have a little more flex as to how you want your piece to sound. EW's deal is hard to beat though. As far as RAM, my opinion is this. Considering that your mobo has an old skool bus speed, I would say, only get what you need for right now, and avoid sinking money into a computer that you're best replacing in a year or two anyway. When I was like you, and built my machine in 2006, I used DDR2 800 mobos because I knew they'd be around for a while. Whenever I build a new machine, I try to make sure that what I'm using will be around in 2+ years so that parts for upgrades are cheap and accessible.

SC comes with solo Treble, a solo Soprano, and a solo Alto. If you want to be hands off in the mixing dept, then EW is the way to go, VSL will pretty much demand that you work a bit harder to mix stuff together. I would suggest experimenting when you get them though, it'll come to you.

To be quite honest, EWQLSC's strength is actually when it's used with the thought that most choir music is pretty unintelligible. If you want your choir to be big and distant sounding, then you can do a lot with EWQLSC. It's also part of your bundle, so you're getting a deal. Additionally, other choir libraries I might suggest that would be considered "better" sounding, but not necessarily as full featured to control, would require additional software. You see, I am still using the old legacy Kontakt versions of most of my EWQL stuff. So with Symphonic Choirs, I often am chopping up the patches, applying my 3rd party scripts, etc. Doing things you can't do in PLAY (yet). But there are a lot of options, this last year there were a lot of choir libraries out there. EWQL will be a good start, after that, look to expanding if you really find you need choir all the time. It's far rarer than you think. In fact, when I was in your situation, buying my first bit of gear back in 2006, I thought I would be using choir all the time, turned out I used RA far more often than Symphonic Choirs. Sometimes the best libraries are the ones that let you just add a little character or twist to your cue that makes it stand out. That isn't always going to be choirs. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have choirs at your disposal when you need them, but you just don't need them all the time.

The Symphonic Choir expansion includes an integration of samples from Quantum Leap's old Voices of the Apocalypse library. VotA is and of itself a very old library, but I think it picks up the slack where Symphonic Choirs lacks, though this is coming from a user who does NOT have VotA. Symphonic Choirs, honestly there is nothing like it because what it tries to do is bigger than any other developer dreams of doing--so much so that there are a slew of new choir libraries out there now that really don't even TRY to attempt what SC tried to attmept. The problem with SC is that it is by and far out dated as far as samples go, but it's still the only choir that attempted anything NEAR having a choir that will say whatever you want it to say. Let me put it this way: I have been hired to program choirs in Symphonic Choirs because it has a huge learning curve and most people don't want to waste their time with it. Despite the skill, I am still hiring a live choir next month for a project. As far as the HDD is concerned, definitely worth giving it a shot. What I don't like about their deal is this: Hard Disks fail. What do you do when you want to install your software on to a new HDD? If that drive fails, you don't have back up DVDs. Granted, installing that many DVDs blows--it'd be like 40+ DVDs for a collection like that. But it's good for back-up. Additionally, I personally have something like... 300+ GB of samples that I use. I spread them liberally across 6 separate RAPTORS. That means 10krpm. But you should see what kind of performance you get out of the Caviar first. In my current rig, my choking point is my CPU: I have a 6-core 3.2Ghz CPU with 16GB of RAM and 8 HDDs (1 for OS, 1 for data, 6 for samples).

Platinum Pro comes with all three mic positions, they will be built into the Symphonic Orchestra PLAY interface where you will be able to load and mix the mic positions directly in the interface. I own RA, there are some gems there, but I probably don't use half the library. The Shakuhachi, the Cedar Flute, the Frame Drums, the African Percussion and African shakers and African Stringed instruments, those I find myself using a lot. Very rarely will I use more than that. RA is divided into regions covering the entire world. But the samples themselves are quite shallow. Most patches only have one dynamic layer and are often sampled in whole tones rather than full chromatic (although for some instruments that's unavoidable, many ethnic instruments simply do not HAVE chromatic scales). Nonetheless, it is important to find an instrument that adapts to your composition, and so it would have been desireable, and with some instruments, it would have definitely been possible. I would like to have Silk, but it does not have any percussion (SD2 is supposed to cover that). Mostly, I would get Silk for the stringed instruments. Ultimately, whichever way you go, it will be up to you to find use for your palette. Upgrading the RAM will be good, 800Mhz isn't terribly fast, but you'll probably get by well enough. Also, what kind of HDDs do you have there? You will want separate drives to store your samples--the faster the better.

I should mention that PLAY is going to press your mac pro to its limits. But that's growth, all growth requires new clothes.

RA is a survey library, more instruments, less depth. Silk, on the other hand, only focuses on a few select instruments and moreover was developed with the PLAY engine in mind rather than adapted. I think you put together a great package, that's what I would get if I was starting over again and didn't already own half of those. I would like to suggest the SD2 PRO bundle if available, the Pro expansion covers some of the really hot cinematic/trailer drums.

There are a small number of Kontakt based instruments to which you will only want one instance of Kontakt per, specifically the sample-modeling instruments.

Analysis. You studied piano for years, what makes you think you can just jump right into writing for percussion? You have to study that too. Everyone here seems to think that you're looking to create electronica music with your percussion, but from your samples, it sounds like you're trying to understand orch or orch-fusion percussion. Either way, analysis. Your biggest weapons are and always will be your own ears, use them to listen to how other people write percussion--like something? copy it--do this until you feel confident that you've really created something worth-while.

Great site, man, a little hard to read some of the text at my resolution, but really pretty! I would suggest a volume knob on the mp3 player, if possible. Nice tunes too, fun stuff!

Got any dough?

Wwise is great and the designer interface is spectacular and readily accessible to the kind of interface with which musicians are familiar, but if you're starting out on the bottom and you don't have 10 years experience in audio under your belt, you are going to want to tackle FMOD--it's harder to access, in my opinion, as it's much more scripter/programmer oriented (speaking to the design tool), but it's cheaper for indies to license than Wwise (like 15k to 0.5k type difference). It may also be a nice gateway into doing other kinds of engine style scriptors like UDK's Kismet or Matinee, etc. Or NETWORK YOUR EVER LOVING ASS OFF. (actually, do that anyway, no matter what you do)

Think about using the other instruments in the orchestra as they relate to the textures and sound they offer, moving a melodic line around the orchestra can be a very effective and often neglected technique for keeping things fresh and sophisticated.

Hey man, really nice start. If you can get away with it, tell your team you want an intro and loop for this, if they have to make it separate files and just make sure the audio engine is tight enough to loop seamless. The opening makes a great intro, but it lacks the instrumental texture to make it feel like a full composition. When the Timpani comes in, it starts to feel like a full song, but it doesn't add much, and your doubling the low brass makes for a very muddy and buzzy sound. If you can find a way to SHAPE the samples you're using, to give them an articulate definition, that would go a long way in making sure your low brass doublings don't muddy up the whole composition, it's actually difficult to listen to. The other consideration is this, you're working on the iphone, so low-lows don't really mean as much coming from an iphone speaker. You want to make sure your cues sound great on headphones, if the player uses them, but if they don't you want to make sure they get all the information they need via the iphone's internal speakers. So that means taking advantage of the high frequency instruments. What if you added some high frequency percussion to give it some extra energy? Like a tambourine or a shaker? What if your low brass doublings weren't just solid bass hits but actually a counter-melody? What about the rest of the orchestra? Woodwinds? etc... Something to think about.

HOLY CRAP COMPRESSION. Are you using the Hall Noise? Or is that like layered mic-air? You have to be careful when compressing EW samples THIS much, you have to remember that both SO and SC were recorded in a giant hall, and so each sample has some air in it, when you layer AND compress, it can get really messy. What happens is you lose ALL of your energy. I am also guessing you're mixing on computer speakers with some big bass response as there is like NO low-end, even though you have these giant hits. You have to remember that bass boost works in the reverse when you're mixing on your end, so that when it ends up on our end, the bass is actually smaller. I will say kudos for finding a practical and contextual use for Symphonic Choirs' whisper samples. The reverb you've put on your vox isn't quite what you need in order to match the depth of Symphonic Choirs' natural hall.

Did you do the jazz remix of the ME main theme for the elevators in ME1? Sam loves that, it's his iphone ringtone.