midi orchestration advice

[mickomoo]

I made a breakthrough in terms of composition a year ago, but I've felt stagnant ever sense. I needed again, a brief series of whatever tips available.

Also I had a question to start this off. For those of you who use libraries, do you avoid the "master" samples that allow you to switch articulations on the fly (via keyswitch or whatever) and instead hand pick the articulations and tones from the actual sample sets themselves? That is for example, instead of having a master keyswitch patch for a violin you would literally pick out legato, sticcato, ect. patches and treat them as different instruments? I'm getting all sorts of different tips from people and their processes

[Moseph]

Regarding keyswitches vs. individual tracks, it really just depends on your workflow preferences. Using individual tracks makes it easier to blend articulations. I generally use keyswitches because I find them to be more convenient.

[mickomoo]

Do you layer keyswitches master patches with one another or with individual patches?

[dannthr]

[SnappleMan]

Whenever I do any orchestration I always use keyswitches because I play all my parts live, and going in after the fact to change articulations never works well.

[Moseph]

Do you layer keyswitches master patches with one another or with individual patches?

If I ran into a situation where I needed to do a bunch of layering, I'd probably add a second identical keyswitched track. For occasional layering, though, I don't bother with this. VSL, which is what I use for most orchestra stuff, lets you set up layered/crossfaded articulations within the master patch and trigger them with keyswitches -- so when I need to layer, which isn't all that often, I usually just do that.

[avaris]

Cool video, great to see the process for selecting the right sample/sound for each note.

[SnappleMan]

You just gotta keep in mind that you'll never fool the people you're trying to fool with samples. Casual listeners (for the most part) don't care if you recorded live strings or not. All that matters in the end is that you use things that sound cool and give character to your song.

If your goal is a more generic sounding "orchestral" motif that's meant to be used in a movie, game or something like that, then you can get away with using a sample library, just layer different articulations cleverly to hide the lack of realism in legato and slurring.

[mickomoo]

Yeah I want the convience of key switching, but the depth created by layering... there are just some instances in which my music sounds flat despite using articlations. I think part of it is a lack of the reverb I want, but it seems to be also something else... I cannot put my finger on it

[dannthr]

There's a reason I call it "Old Skool" in my video--stitching multiple articulations together either through keyswitching or multiple patch usage (back in the day we'd use Program Changes which is really what Keyswitching was designed to avoid) is old fashioned. I have several excellent VSTs and Patches that are so well programmed, that articulations can be controlled by performance context or through manipulation of continuous controllers.

I don't consider either method superior over the other because I consider them both inferior to better scripting or programming.

I don't like keyswitches personally, because I don't perform my parts in (generally) so I don't benefit from the real-time switching capabilities, and I don't like my MIDI Rolls to be littered with keyswitches, I like clean MIDI parts that only represent the actual music data.

Edited April 23, 2013 by dannthr

[Moseph]

... and I don't like my MIDI Rolls to be littered with keyswitches, I like clean MIDI parts that only represent the actual music data.

Agreed. My life got so much easier when I figured out how to use Sonar's drum maps to set up labeled keyswitches on separate tracks from the music (sort of like Cubase's VST expression thing). It's become so much a part of the way I deal with keyswitching that I tend to forget that not everyone does this/has a DAW that can do this.

Edited April 23, 2013 by Moseph