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

FIG. 1: EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Pro XP.

EASTWEST QUANTUM LEAP SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA PRO XP

The EastWest Quantum Leap Sym-phonic Orchestra Platinum Complete bundle ($1,195 [MSRP]), which includes Platinum Pro XP, takes up 138 GB of drive space. EastWest (soundsonline.com) offers several smaller collections that will suit some users. Currently, EWQLSO requires Native Instruments Kontakt 2.2 or later (see Fig. 1). However, EastWest says its custom PLAY software interface will be available for this library soon. (PLAY will be 64-bit compatible and tailored for enhanced performance control of the company's sampled instruments.)

The Platinum Pro XP edition provides an extensive collection of instruments and articulations. The samples are phase accurate and can be mixed and matched to create the desired ambient balance of stage to hall and/or surround mixes. EWQLSO sounds especially suited for bold, epic pieces and movie scores, but it is very demanding on computer resources when utilizing multiple perspectives at the same time.

The library samples are recorded with three mic perspectives: Full, Close, and Surround. I decided to use mainly the Full microphone placements in my final mix because I was not creating surround mixes in the context of this article, and using all three perspectives can be a bit much in a stereo mix, especially if you feel that the particular hall the instruments were recorded in isn't right for the type of music you're doing. I tried using all three positions simultaneously and they worked great together: there were no phasing issues, and EastWest seems to have thoroughly matched and mapped every corresponding program and sample properly. Kudos to the company for executing this feature so well.

Layering a touch of the Close mics with the Full perspective for certain instruments is just the ticket for getting a specific melodic line to jump out or to add clarity to a part, much like bringing up a few close mics on a recording date. Just copy the part to a new track, change the instrument to the Close mic version, and add to taste. This feature works very well and really makes EWQLSO stand apart from the other libraries in this regard. You can hear it employed in several of the woodwind lines in my piece.

Obviously, the tax on your computer setup is much higher if you want to hear all three perspectives at once, because the number of voices is doubled or even tripled when layering two or three patches per instrument. Most users seem to work with the Full set and add the other perspectives toward the end of the recording process. If you do want to render all three perspectives and mix them together at the final stage, it's not that hard to duplicate your setup with the alternate programs and render the various mic positions separately. However, it's a rather time-consuming process, as care must be taken to match each corresponding program exactly.

The muted strings in the opening passage sound great, although I had to edit the level of the release samples in several of the Mod Wheel crossfade patches because the level would really jump out on key releases. EWQLSO does not provide separate collections for first and second violins, and only the 18 Violins patch contains con sordino (muted) violins, so the same patch had to be used for both sections and panned differently. There is only one patch of sustained con sordino per instrument in the string section, with no variations for runs, trills, and so on, but they sound good in this restrained context.

Although the list of included ensemble string articulations is not exhaustive, I had no problems re-creating everything asked of the string section in the orchestration. The runs in bar 14 and the bold, melodic expressiveness in measures 15 to 18 were a piece of cake for EWQLSO. The articulations speak nicely over a wide variety of dynamics, which is hard for many libraries to do. But this one does it effortlessly.

EWQLSO has a decent selection of brass that is consistent from patch to patch and sounds pretty natural, but not without some compromise to the process. The biggest problem I have with the provided brass is that you are stuck with either one or two solo instruments or fixed larger ensembles.

For instance, I wrote for four French horns playing individual parts — not an uncommon configuration. However, there is only a single solo French horn or a 6-piece ensemble to choose from in EWQLSO. Using the same solo instrument four separate times for each part ends up sounding unnatural. But playing four separate notes with a 6-player patch results in 24 players!

The compromise was to back off the Full perspective on the French horn sections and use mainly the Close programs. This gave them a little more immediacy, with the chorusing of multiple players acting more as ambience. I actually tried going the other way by making the ensemble patches more distant with the Surround mics, but that just got muddier and more indistinct.

The same problem exists with the trombones: you get one solo trombone or a 4-person section to choose from. For the three trombones in the score, I used the same solo trombone for all parts. In neither of these cases were there ideal solutions. However, there are two separate solo trumpets, so I was able to use keyswitching and multiple programs per instrument to create better-sounding, fluid lines there.

The woodwinds in EWQLSO suffer from the same limitation of offering only a single solo instrument or a fixed ensemble. However, enough patch variations are available in the solo woodwind instruments that two different programs can usually be found to mimic two different players, or the same patch can be used without it being as obvious as it is in the brass instruments. In general, I would have preferred to have had at least two complete (and different) solo instruments for most of the brass and woodwinds so I could build up more-convincing 3-part — or even 4-part — ensembles by staggering the two players.