# A "speaker orchestra" ?



## Guffy (May 4, 2015)

This is something i've been wondering about.

If you make an orchestral mockup, using only dry solo instruments to form ensembles, like 12 different tracks with solo violin to play the 1st Violins melody, and so on, and so on. (obviously with slight variations to each track to make it sound human)

If you did this with the whole orchestra..


What would happen if you went to a concert hall, placed a speaker in each player seat and make sure you have all the solo instruments positioned correctly as a real orchestra, give each instrument their own channel/speaker and recorded the mockup like you would record a live orchestra?

Assuming the mockup was very high quality, samples more or less completely dry, and everything balanced, i'm curious as to what it would sound like being recorded like that.

Has anything like that been done before? 

Might sound like a really stupid idea, but i'm curious. :D


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## sleepy hollow (May 4, 2015)

Fugdup @ Mon 04 May said:


> What would happen if you went to a concert hall, placed a speaker in each player seat and make sure you have all the solo instruments positioned correctly as a real orchestra, give each instrument their own channel/speaker and recorded the mockup like you would record a live orchestra?


The result would be a mockup with a very nice reverb. :mrgreen: 




Fugdup @ Mon 04 May said:


> Has anything like that been done before?
> 
> Might sound like a really stupid idea, but i'm curious. :D


Yes, I'm using real world rooms to get certain sorts of reverb. I do that pretty often, mostly on drums. Never done that with a Midi orchestra. I'd consider doing that with a couple of string tracks which were recorded in a very dry room. That might actually get you pretty close to the real thing.

And no, it's not a stupid idea. If you have the means to do something like that, then go for it. Doesn't have to be the orchestra mockup in a concert hall, a much more simple setup can be quite educating. You can learn quite a lot (and maybe even end up with a great reverb) when doing this. Sure, it' an unconventional technique, but that doesn't make it a stupid idea.


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## Hannes_F (May 4, 2015)

Fugdup @ Mon May 04 said:


> If you make an orchestral mockup, using only dry solo instruments to form ensembles, like 12 different tracks with solo violin to play the 1st Violins melody, and so on, and so on.



I have done this with sampled solo strings (but placed in a virtual room instead of your speakers). Depending on your mockup skills the result can be very nice.

However if you play in the lines individually the consummation of time can be enormous. In total you might use up much more time than good players, while still not being 'there' very often. But as a test and learning experience it is totally worth it - do it!

BTW there are two sample products that work by that idea, VSL Dimension strings and KH Spotlight strings.


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## Hannes_F (May 4, 2015)

Oh, and your speakers idea has been realized within an acoustics dissertation in Finland just recently if I remember that right.


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## JonFairhurst (May 4, 2015)

Of course, it's not exactly the same. A violin puts out sound in a spherical shape with high frequencies aimed at the ceiling, low frequencies towards the floor, and not much passing through the player. 

Still, it's closer to "real" than convolution.

I seem to recall a classic surf tune with the guitar recorded dry and played back for the final recording inside an empty Los Angeles oil tank. Doing this with a full orchestra takes it to the next level.


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## Daryl (May 5, 2015)

With certain instruments it would sound good, providing that your sample source was recorded in the correct way. However, if you intended to use a multi mike system, the more close mic position you use, the worse it would sound. You can't disguise the sound of a speaker, when compared with a real instrument.

D


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## Joram (May 5, 2015)

It is not a stupid idea at all but a bit theoretical.

Let's start with saying that a microphone is actually the same thing as a speaker but then the other way around. So your idea to reproduce with a speaker what a microphone catched is perfectly ok. It happens all the time!

So now your idea to put different speakers in the same room to reproduce an orchestra. It works! I can tell you that. Of course you have to take in account that the directivity of most speakers is a bit different than of the instruments they are reproducing but I am sure there could be a solution to that problem. Whether it is a practical solution.....

What's good to know is how Philips producer/engineer Volker Straus worked. His idea of recording and reproducing music was not to record an event but rather the score. So he recorded orchestras with lots of microphones (up to almost 100 mics - close-miking groups and soloists) with multitrack recorders at the concerthall. After multitrack editing the recordings he would go to the Juliana Church nearby the Polyhymnia (the Philips Classics recording centre), play the edited tracks through a few Quad electrostatic speakers and mix and record with the reverb of that church. 

Many Philips recordings you think you hear the sound of the Concertgebouw, Berlin or Boston Concerthalls have indeed the Juliana Church reverb. Search at for example at allmusic.com, find out which recordings Straus produced and listen for yourself. 

side note 
- As you can imagine, Straus' extreme approach let to discussion at the Philips Recording Centre dividing the crew in two opposite camps: the recording purists and the score purists. When I worked there as freelance engineer you were not supposed to work for the other camp. Although I have never witnessed a real fight, colleagues reported yelling, name-calling and even tape-throwing :shock: (btw it seems that I have been a victim of the situation and it took some time to be asked back after I worked on a Straus-production as tape editor).

[edit: I attached an interview with Straus]


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## synthetic (May 6, 2015)

I believe that some scoring engineers mix scores in (often empty) LA scoring stages so that they can use the stage as a reverb chamber. Bruce Swedien used to do this on Michael Jackson records, running the synth parts through the room for some ambience.


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## Amey Ghule (May 6, 2015)

12 tracks of same solo violin sample playing the same melody....will that not cause phasing or a chorus plugin kinda fake effect??


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## Saxer (May 7, 2015)

Amey Ghule @ 7.5.2015 said:


> 12 tracks of same solo violin sample playing the same melody....will that not cause phasing or a chorus plugin kinda fake effect??


yepp. but not nessecarely 12 tracks of different samples of the same solo violin. still better are 12 different violins sampled. even better 12 different violin players with different violins  
(that's the concept of dimension stings but with 8 violins and players).

i also thought about "reamping" an orchestra... or at least a section of it.

i will try that some day with samplemodeling brass section here at home at my wooden staircase (not big size but a nice "funky" room). so more band and pop style.


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## lux (May 7, 2015)

I think the cones would completely affect the whole thing making it sound like an electric orchestra.


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## Daryl (May 8, 2015)

Saxer @ Thu May 07 said:


> i will try that some day with samplemodeling brass section here at home at my wooden staircase (not big size but a nice "funky" room). so more band and pop style.


Yes, I've actually tested this in a large recording studio, and once you have messed around with adding early reflections to the trumpets, to put them more in line with the other Brass, it works very well.

The two caveats (as I said earlier) is that a speaker sounds like a speaker, so you can't get too close, but the fact that all the sounds are reacting together in the room makes a much better noise than just using reverb, and much better than samples recorded note by note in an ambient room.

FWIW I have also done the test using a Violin recording (that wasn't done in an anechoic chamber, but a small, dry studio), but it doesn't work anywhere near as well as with Brass and Woodwind, for that matter. It seems that the actual Violin reacts in a much more violent way to its surroundings than either Woodwind or Brass. I would imagine that a series of Violin recordings played together would just exacerbate the issue.

D


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## JonFairhurst (May 8, 2015)

Good loudspeakers are a must!

I attempted to assemble a small kit for performing solo winds in a community orchestra electronically. My large format monitors wouldn't be practical, so I finally broke down and bought some small monitors - a pair of JBL LSR305s.

Unfortunately, when playing Sample Modeling French Horns loud and alone on this setup, the lack of deep bass and various frequency response and distortion/resonance issues can make it sound more like a sax or clarinet than a horn. (Boost the high-mids and you get a sax. Drop them and you get a clarinet.) The thing is that subtle changes in the high-mids can totally change a sound from complex and nasal to flat and dull.

Note that I'm not dissing the LSR305s. Mixed music sounds very good on them. It's just that loud solo instruments are unforgiving on speakers.

The end of the story is that I scrapped my sample playing idea and took up the violin. Yeah, my sub-$1000 instrument isn't perfect in the mid-highs either, but at least it always sounds like a violin. It might sound like a grade schooler is playing it at times, but it's clearly a violin.


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## Joram (May 8, 2015)

synthetic @ Wed May 06 said:


> I believe that some scoring engineers mix scores in (often empty) LA scoring stages so that they can use the stage as a reverb chamber. Bruce Swedien used to do this on Michael Jackson records, running the synth parts through the room for some ambience.


Last year I recorded a band but the trombone player was not able to attend the session. He recorded the part in bedroom and after I played and recorded his track via the recording room where the rest of the band played I was able to mix quite easily. It's not about the reverb but more about first reflections. (btw...the recording was for a birthday present for Swedien's 80th birthday!


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## Hannes_F (May 15, 2015)

Joram @ Tue May 05 said:


> [edit: I attached an interview with Straus]



Joram, I would like to hear this interview, however the file does not have a suffix. What kind of file is this? Thanks.


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## sleepy hollow (May 24, 2015)

Hannes_F @ Sat 16 May said:


> Joram @ Tue May 05 said:
> 
> 
> > [edit: I attached an interview with Straus]
> ...



You'll never hear this interview - it's a PDF file. :mrgreen: Open with Acrobat Reader.


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## Hannes_F (May 24, 2015)

... after renaming ... OK, thanks very much!


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## Syneast (Mar 3, 2017)

During one of my manic periods I had this exact same idea, but I wanted to take it one step further and create a sample library using this technique. Because, you know, logically it makes sense.

Firstly, I wanted to know if something similar has been done before, which it has:








The image above uses omnidirectional speakers, because unlike regular directional loudspeakers, instruments shoot out their sound in all directions, to varying degrees, like this:






Since I didn't want to start building omnidirectional speakers, I decided to simplify for the sake of experimentation, i.e. use whatever speakers I can get my hands on for free.

Some mild theorizing on my part showed that at a large enough distance from the speakers to the listener (d), it shouldn't really matter how many speakers you are using. Simply spreading your recordings across the stereo field and using two carefully placed speakers, and adjusting for the volume difference that comes with using less speakers, should in theory be the same as playing each sound on it's individual speaker. Here's my extremely complicated math to prove it:






Fortunately, everything that works in theory also works in practice. After recording myself playing the same thing on the violin 16 times in a "dry environment", I gathered as many speakers as I could find and did some "elaborate experimentation" in the garage:






What I found from the resulting recordings is that there is no audible difference between using five speakers or just two speakers. As predicted, at a distance it all blends together anyway. You are better of just panning your 16 or whatever violins evenly across the stereo field and placing two speakers on the stage roughly where the violinists would sit. Because, you know, building 16 omnidirectional speakers and buying two surround soundcards so you can output 16 individual channels gets expensive pretty fast.

That's pretty much as far as I got before my manic period ended and I realized that even the Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra could be considered affordable compared to this little DIY experiment.

Hope it helps.


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## Hannes_F (Mar 6, 2017)

Kudos Syneast for trying something! Now you know.


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## Wallander (Mar 7, 2017)

Syneast, I can appreciate what you did there! Just one question, did you do an omnidirectional approach to the recording as well? If you record from a single angle, that's like taking a small chunk out of the spectrum pie in your 3rd picture (instrument directivity) and amplifying just that angle with a concert hall. 

Because you've built a three-dimensional reverb here, you must also feed it with a three-dimensional audio signal, or you're no better off than using a regular one-dimensional reverb. That is, you should ideally record the sound of every angle of the instrument, and let the concert hall mix these angles together during the acoustic reverberation. 

I thought and experimented about this in the early WIVI days as I did many anechoic recordings. My conclusion was that the problem isn't the hall or even reverb part, but the problem is capturing three-dimensional source materials to get the entire spectrum of each instrument, to feed into the hall. 

I have a suggestion to try for anyone doing string section work (Hannes?). Lets say you have 8 channels to work with. I would say your best bet is to arrange 18 seats for a full violin section in your dry studio, and then arrange 8 microphones appropriately spaced (representing each speaker in the hall). Then record the music 18 times, once from every chair (in 8 channel audio). So that each violin is recorded from 8 unique angles. Then just mix the dry takes together and play through 8 speakers, appropriately spaced, in the hall. Alternatively, you put a *different* IR on each channel and mix digitally. I'd be willing to bet on this approach over existing section building solutions. 18 instruments is overkill btw, I'd try 4-8 violins as a starting point.


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## Hannes_F (Mar 7, 2017)

Arne,
I am not doing exactly what you propose but I am following the same line of thought (since years)  Understanding the rationale of what you are doing is very important for this kind of work.



Wallander said:


> I'd be willing to bet on this approach over existing section building solutions.


But you don't exactly know what the existing solutions are, do you?  Not everybody plugs one or two mics in front of a violin and calls it a day.


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## Wallander (Mar 8, 2017)

That's brilliant.  Of course you know all this (and more) already.  I can't even pretend to play the violin, and I'm only speculating here without anything to back it up, really. 

And you're perfectly right, I have no idea what kind of tricks you're up to. I was only thinking in a narrow perspective of section-building with already existing sample libraries, and making dry samples or recordings sound like they're in a room, in a good way.


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