Equipment question.

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mewman
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Re: Equipment question.

Post by mewman » Thu Dec 11, 2008 3:40 pm

Hi 151Just to add to the great feedback you've gotten already...I don't know if you have a Mac or PC, or any computer for that matter, but if you are a Mac guy, the new Logic Pro 8.0, comes with some of the Vienna strings and offers a lot of instruments that sound really good right out of the box. Frankly, I think the sample of your stuff you posted the link to sounds pretty good as is. Still, it's true that the new samples sound fantastic. I'm hoping to spring for EWQLSO myself soon. Check out the tunes members are posting in the Peer to Peer section. You can hear what some of them are doing in the way of orchestral pieces as well as other stuff.I look forward to hearing more of your arrangements.Mewman

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by georginasaint » Thu Dec 11, 2008 10:07 pm

Hi 151 - I was in your shoes less than a year ago! I did all my music on a Korg - an M1 back in the olden days, and then on a Triton. When I joined Taxi, my first pieces were sequenced on my Triton! (but got forwarded, just for the record). I just listened to your link and it's really good work - but the sounds would never be mistaken for live players. You will love EW I'm sure but there is a huge learning curve because you have to become a bit of a computer geek to install it all and start actually using it, and then bringing realism to it is another step which I still have not mastered. I have found that using EW has changed the way I compose because so often the sounds of the samples suggest musical ideas that seem to almost write themselves rather than it coming first from my head and the piano with pencil and paper. The individual samples are inspiring. As a result, I write far far more than I used to. (Partly because of having listings and deadlines). It's amazingly inexpensive, for what it is. Follow the advice on this forum, they are really knowledgeable, generous people, and have guided me right through the process of getting out of the dark ages!!!Georgie

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by mojobone » Fri Dec 12, 2008 10:25 am

Yeah, and more than one learning curve to deal with, if you're learning a sequencer along with a sampler, but it helps that you've worked with multitimbral keyboards; you may even find the user experience to be superior, what with all the extra screen real estate.
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Re: Equipment question.

Post by 151 » Mon Dec 15, 2008 4:04 am

I've been looking at the East West library, basically what I want to do for now is just get a decent enough sounding orchestra to submit tracks to evetually possibly get some kind of deal doing work for..well, whomever, I guess. I guess just for that purpose the Silver would be good enough? It doesn't look like the kind of thing I can just plug in and start playing like I can on my Fantom. I have been out of the loop on virtual instruments pretty much ever since they came out. I have always just sequenced my tracks onboard my workstation. Thank all of you so much for even taking the time to point me in the right direction. I am still amazed at some of the demos on the East West site, I can't even imagine what kind of creativity having an orchestra like that in front of me to use can spark. I just don't know how the hell long it's going to take me to figure out how to use it.

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by mazz » Mon Dec 15, 2008 4:24 am

Most of the orchestra listings want music they can take and use as, is so it usually has to sound better than decent. Oftentimes composer listings come through where someone is looking to hire a composer and in that case you're competing with people that have been doing this for a while so it has to sound way better than decent.I don't think that you can circumvent the learning curve if you want to do excellent sounding orchestral music. If you already have sequencing chops, then you're ahead of the game, you just need to learn to apply them to the orchestral sounds. IMO, I think you'll go further with the Gold orchestra, it has many more articulations and more flexibility along with that big impressive sound.Good luck!!Mazz
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Re: Equipment question.

Post by 151 » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:17 am

My forte is being able to sequence the crap out of something in a very short time, I've been doing it ever since the days of the Roland MT-88 and Alesis sequencer that use to lose all of the data when you would turn it off (it wasn't supposed to, haha). I'm just lost on how I use the Gold library, it doesn't really explain it much, how do I get the articulations? How do I use my Fantom sequencer with it? or do I at all? is the sequencer in the program itself? Is there a tutorial I can read somewhere?

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by davewalton » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:35 am

Dec 15, 2008, 6:04am, 151 wrote:I've been looking at the East West library, basically what I want to do for now is just get a decent enough sounding orchestra to submit tracks to evetually possibly get some kind of deal doing work for..well, whomever, I guess. I guess just for that purpose the Silver would be good enough? It doesn't look like the kind of thing I can just plug in and start playing like I can on my Fantom. I have been out of the loop on virtual instruments pretty much ever since they came out. I have always just sequenced my tracks onboard my workstation. Thank all of you so much for even taking the time to point me in the right direction. I am still amazed at some of the demos on the East West site, I can't even imagine what kind of creativity having an orchestra like that in front of me to use can spark. I just don't know how the hell long it's going to take me to figure out how to use it.For purposes of having a good working mindset for doing this, I have to really re-emphasize what Mazz pointed out... it's true everywhere but especially in the film-tv/orchestral music genre, the orchestra has to sound ultra-realistic. Silver is good for anyone adding some orchestral touches and flavors to their existing music but there's really no chance of a composer getting a deal doing composing work with anything like Silver or Garritan Personal Orchestra or anything else that isn't a flagship product in the orchestral realm. If you intend to make orchestral instruments the centerpiece in and of itself or of whatever music you're doing, adding rock or electronica or ethnic to that centerpiece as a way to expand your horizons, then something like EWQL Gold (or other packages in the same league) is pretty much mandatory. Of course like anything else musically speaking, the learning never ends and the beginning of the learning is sometimes daunting. I started going little snippets 10 or 20 seconds long and expanded from there.HTH,Dave

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by davewalton » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:53 am

Dec 15, 2008, 7:17am, 151 wrote:My forte is being able to sequence the crap out of something in a very short time, I've been doing it ever since the days of the Roland MT-88 and Alesis sequencer that use to lose all of the data when you would turn it off (it wasn't supposed to, haha). I'm just lost on how I use the Gold library, it doesn't really explain it much, how do I get the articulations? How do I use my Fantom sequencer with it? or do I at all? is the sequencer in the program itself? Is there a tutorial I can read somewhere?Gold is a virtual instrument meaning that it runs inside of your computer and in this case inside of a DAW (sequencer) program like Sonar, Cubase or Protools.The Cliffs Notes version is (using my software setup): Open Sonar Open Gold as a virtual instrument within Sonar Pick an articulation (an instrument sound) Play/record on track (using midi keyboard)In your case (assuming you had a computer, DAW, and EWQL), your Fantom does nothing but send midi information to the DAW. It gets vastly more complex because you can, of course, record many, many tracks of many, many different instruments, etc. The best thing to do is to find someone in your area (or within a decent driving distance) that uses this software and have them take you through how they work. I guarantee that in a short period of time you'll be saying "Ohh... OK... I get it" once you see it. Explaining much more than that in a forum post... probably not enough disk space on the servers to store all the info and definitely not enough time to post it all in the first place. Tutorial videos are inexplicably rare or non-existant.

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Re: Equipment question.

Post by mazz » Mon Dec 15, 2008 6:25 am

You'll need a pretty powerful computer to run any of these libraries. In addition, you need a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) which allows you to insert the library in as a plug in and then address it with the MIDI tracks inside the DAW. Using a DAW gives you more flexibility in sequencing because you will have to do keyswitching between articulations and many times a line is split between multiple MIDI tracks due to articulation changes. You could conceivably have over 100 MIDI tracks for a complex orchestral piece due to multiple articulations. I think your Fantom sequencer might become a hindrance at some point. The Fantom probably makes a great controller and probably has great synth and keyboard sounds in it so it's still going to be useful, but you really need a computer and a DAW to make full use of the orchestra libraries. As Dave said, it's too deep to go in to here but there are books and websites and forums out there that have a lot of info on them.These things are tools and if you want to take your music to the next level orchestrally, you are going to have to tool up. With the Fantom you could probably create broadcast quality electronic oriented stuff all day long, but for orchestral, you need the latest, best sounding tools.Mazz
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Re: Equipment question.

Post by ernstinen » Mon Dec 15, 2008 10:03 am

I use Gold on a Vision DAW, and a lot of (older) Giga samples on a separate PC, as well as (occasionally) Siedlaczek strings on an EMU E-6400 sampler, a JV-90 with orchestral expansion, and some woodwinds on an ancient Proteus 2.What's important is to match the ambience of Gold with a reverb on the "dry" samples to get them to blend.Here's one of my latest pieces, "The Power Of The Sun" :http://www.box.net/shared/15on53qri1Ern

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