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

VIENNA SYMPHONIC LIBRARY VIENNA INSTRUMENTS

Vienna Instruments is sold in small instrument collections for as little as $445 and in bundles for as much as $18,000, with a lot of options and volumes in between. I don't own everything Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl.co.at) offers — for this piece I used Symphonic Cube, Appassionata Strings I and II, and Harps — and I am already up to more than 410 GB of samples on my hard drive. This library is the ultimate in sampling, practically adhering to the philosophy of “just sample everything.”

Innovative developments in the custom software interface have recently made navigating the cutting-edge performance capabilities of this library easier than before. However, if you've worked with high-end orchestral bundles such as Vienna Instruments, then you know they are time-consuming to install and take dedication if you want to get the most from them. In the case of VI, the choice of articulations and methods of exploiting them are mind-boggling, but that's the price you pay for playing at the top of the mountain: VI is the undisputed benchmark of orchestral libraries (see Fig. 4).

A common conversation among VI power users goes something like this: “I'm trying to get the strings to do X.” Response: “Well, did you try doing Y in the Performance control page?” or “Why don't you do Z in the Matrix Editor?” There are so many choices and so many ways to do things that it's easy to feel like you're never finished with a piece. In fact, as I write this, I am still tweaking my sequence in VI, always dangerously close to scrapping it all and starting over again, which would not be the first time. Of course, the upside is that using VI is very much like playing an instrument; no two people are going to sound alike on it, because the choices are just too numerous.

At the heart of VI is the proprietary instrument interface, which employs a sophisticated blend of keyswitching, controller crossfades, analysis of player speed and velocity for determining articulations, and matrix switching, for some elaborate real-time control of instruments. Initially you will spend the bulk of your time just learning the library and getting your head wrapped around the various ways you can approach the sampled material.

Although all of the samples are recorded ambience-free, they do not have a claustrophobic, anechoic-chamber feel. There is enough air around them to sound open and natural yet neutral. The user is responsible for creating the desired ambience through processing, and the library can sound close and intimate or big and ambient with equal ease.

VI provides separate first and second flute, oboe, and English horn, as well as an alto flute, Bb and Eb clarinets, and single bass clarinet, bassoon, and contrabassoon instruments. Woodwind ensembles are in trios, which I didn't mind because I was able to accomplish my instrumentation easily with the supplied individual woodwinds.

VI comes the closest to getting it right in the brass section. Although not providing separate first and second players along the lines of the woodwinds, there is a separate piccolo trumpet, trumpet in C, bass trumpet, and cornet (oddly, no trumpet in Bb). Slides are covered with an alto trombone, tenor trombone, bass trombone, and contrabass trombone. Three-player sections of trombones and trumpets, as well as a 6-player trumpet section, are also included.

I used a combination of three different trumpets, depending on the range and sound in various sections of the score to pull off my 2-player instrumentation, and the alto, tenor, and bass trombones made a nice 3-piece section throughout the score.

Unfortunately, it was the French horn section that, once again, was underrepresented for the way I like to write. A single Vienna Horn and Triple Horn are the choices for single players, yet the two do not jell together well enough to stagger them into a 4-piece ensemble section. The fixed-ensemble choices are 4 player or 8 player, and I opted to go with the smaller for this piece — again, a compromise.

Without a doubt, the VI percussion collection is the cream of the crop. The only challenge is to use ambience properly to move the instruments to the back of the room if you're going for that authentic symphonic sound, as the recordings are very prominent and up close. I used an extra bit of early-reflection ambience in the final mix to move the percussion and harp back, and I rolled off some of the extreme high and low frequencies to create distance.

The string sections are versatile in some ways and limited in others. The limitations are that the basic violins, for instance, are a fixed 14-person section. No separate first and second violin sections are provided, so they must be created from the same collection and panned accordingly. However, VI also offers two volumes of Appassionata Strings (larger, lusher, and muted), Chamber Strings (smaller and more intimate), and Solo Strings. Bringing these collections together can create some quite detailed string passages.

In the orchestration presented here, I used various combinations of all the VI string collections to add depth, variety, and animation to the strings. The samples alone are so good that even though I haven't mastered all the available performance techniques yet, the results are very convincing to the ear.

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Rob Shrock plays keyboards with Burt Bacharach and has worked with a who's who of artists.

THE SCORE

This piece of music is based on an original song from my current solo project. It was orchestrated in MakeMusic Finale 2007 (see Fig. A) and can be downloaded as a PDF file at emusician.com/tutorials/Orchestral_Libraries_Fig.A.pdf. Finale includes a subset of Garritan Personal Orchestra for notation playback, which is actually quite sophisticated. I’ve also created an MP3 of the unedited output from Finale using this library (see Web Clip B). The piano part is conspicuously absent from the printed score because I had not settled on an exact piano part at the time I wrote the orchestration.

It would be impossible to cover every instrument as well as all of their possible articulations in a single, short piece. However, I wanted this score to be a piece of music that could be performed with a real orchestra in my live show; hence the smaller configuration of woodwinds and brass typical of what is commonly available. (Because the score is not intended for commercial publication, I have not labored over the details of the layout, either.)

The idea was to try to include as much of the orchestra as possible within a short piece of music. Although this is not exactly what I would have orchestrated had I not also been working on this article, there are some specific things to listen for in the score, as I put them there intentionally to challenge the libraries.

The strings employ mutes for the first eight bars. Note the fast runs in the violins, violas, and cellos in bar 14, which is typically challenging for sample libraries, while the basses use tremolo. Starting in bar 15, the upper strings are espressivo, carrying the melody in double octaves for four measures (typical of Romantic music) before breaking off into a bit of contrapuntal interaction. Although the notation in measures 21 and 22 indicates bowed tremolos, I actually intended that to be fingered tremolos and was just too hurried to notate it that way. As it stands, fingered tremolos are impossible to pull off effectively in most libraries anyway, in which case I employed bowed tremolo in divisi to create the movement.

The bowed tremolo in bar 24 is inten-tional, followed by more contrapuntal action, with divisi cellos and pizzicato basses. Finally, the whispery ascent in the upper strings tests the delicacy of each library.

The woodwinds were written in pairs for the most part, with only a single bass clarinet and bassoon. I tried to give them a good cross-section of ensemble chords, fast runs, melodic lines, and wide dynamics to get an overall sense of their characteristics in each library.

The same holds true for the brass, as far as what I included in the orchestration goes. I thinned the trumpets down to only two players, while maintaining four French horns, three trombones, and a tuba playing chords (a configuration not easily realized in a lot of libraries, it turns out). Bar 15 sees the trumpet at its upper extreme, which is about as high as you would want to take an orchestral trumpet. In the real world, this voicing would probably jump out a bit too much, but that’s one of the beauties of being able to more easily control the virtual orchestra. A smattering of harp, timpani, glockenspiel, and other percussion rounds out the orchestration.