Master Class: Virtual Orchestra Virtuosity

Jun 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rob Shrock

           
 

USING FOUR OF THE TOP LIBRARIES IN A REAL-WORLD SITUATION

Long gone are the days when professional composers would need a wall of fully loaded hardware samplers just to provide a few hundred megabytes of memory in which to realize a virtual orchestra. Today's computers can stream dozens of gigabytes of symphonic samples to provide an almost limitless collection of instruments and articulations. Recent developments in software interfaces allow unprecedented control of performance parameters for heightened realism. Orchestral music on the computer has never sounded so good.

However, all of this power comes with a price. You have to be willing to shell out the bucks for the latest in computer technology and have speedy hard drives for the massive amount of samples required. The better orchestral libraries are not cheap, and the time that must be invested in becoming intimate with the contents, mastering the enhanced performance techniques, and maintaining a working system is greater than ever before.

The goal of this article is to document the experience of working with several high-end libraries in order to realize a single piece of music. This is not a shoot-out between sample libraries or a comprehensive review of the featured products. My intention is to demonstrate the differences in capability and character between four top-notch libraries while explaining what I had to do to create each realization. Overall, I want the libraries to speak for themselves.

For a test subject, I orchestrated a short introduction to a song that will be featured on my upcoming solo CD (see the sidebar “The Score”). Next, I sequenced the piece entirely within a single library, using only the sounds included in that specific collection. I then repeated the process from scratch with the next library, and so on. This resulted in multiple realizations of the same piece of music that ultimately sounded quite different from each other, allowing me to compare and contrast the libraries within a common musical context. (To hear the audio examples, see Web Clips 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.)

Piano is also featured in this orches-tration, as I am a piano player. Although some of the featured libraries contain pianos, none compare with a dedicated piano library. I leveled the playing field by using the same exact piano performance and sound with the same tempo map for all the renditions: what you'll hear between the different versions is a change in orchestral instruments, while the piano part stays the same. For the piano, I used 2008 EM Editors' Choice Award winner Modartt Pianoteq 2 ($380), an excellent physically modeled software instrument.

I also decided to do whatever it took to get each sample library to sound its best in realizing the orchestration, even if it meant tweaking one library more than another. I wasn't interested in a General MIDI file approach that forces each library into an existing construct. Rather, I wanted each library to sound its best and to document whatever process was required to achieve that end. Obviously, some libraries are more complex and capable than others, which is reflected in the amount of time and work necessary to realize the orchestration to the fullest capabilities of that particular collection. However, I was primarily interested in the final results, which, in my opinion, are what matter most.

Additionally, I decided to create a version that would employ what I consider to be a “best of” from the various libraries. The reason is a simple and pragmatic one: each library has its own sound as well as its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. Mixing and layering samples from multiple libraries as we see fit is exactly how composers work in the real world. In that spirit, the final version (see Web Clip 5) includes instruments from all four libraries as well as from other libraries not featured here, because the point of that rendition was to make the music sound as good as possible with what was available to me, and to let you know how I achieved the final sound.

MEET THE ORCHESTRAS

There are many orchestral sample libraries on the market, but only a few met my criteria for this article. For inclusion, each library had to contain a complete collection of orchestral instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. That immediately eliminated several otherwise good libraries, because there would be no fair way to compare an incomplete collection (a strings-only library, for instance) to the comprehensive libraries within the context of a full orchestration. Also, the quality of the included libraries had to be at the highest level, which eliminated several inexpensive and midlevel collections. (A couple of manufacturers never responded to inquiries about inclusion in this article and were dropped from consideration.)

I eventually settled on four libraries: East-West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Pro XP, MOTU Symphonic Instrument, Soni-vox Sonic Implants Complete Symphonic Collection, and Vienna Symphonic Library Vienna Instruments. Each of these libraries sounds great, but they also sound quite different from each other, with some lending themselves to certain styles better than others.

Setting up for this article was harder and more time-consuming than I had imagined. Just getting all the libraries installed, authorized, and running properly on both my desktop and laptop systems was a major endeavor. The libraries contain huge amounts of data comprising the instruments and articulations, and the only way to learn each library was to put the time in and go through it thoroughly. In addition, I had to learn three different software interfaces: Kontakt, MachFive, and VSL's proprietary instrument (more on all this later).

Because this is a master class, I will not touch on the basics of each program. Details about the included instruments and interfaces can be found on the manufacturer's Web sites.