# Eat my shorts



## Jimmy Hellfire (Oct 3, 2018)

They're crunchy and tasty. Do you like shorts? 

They're my favorite thing. People always talk about legato sampling. But when a new string library comes out, the first thing I'm listening for are the shorts. Having a wealth of great sounding, tightly edited short articulations is one of my top priorities. I think that string libraries actually still have a long way to go in this regard.

I wanted to do a piece that uses short articulations almost exclusively, milk them and overdo it. God bless sampling. Can you guess the libraries? 



Do you have some tracks that showcase a lot of snappy, crunchy, powerful or perhaps feathery, shimmery, beautiful shorts?


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## PaulBrimstone (Oct 3, 2018)

Nice! Short(s) and sweet.


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## Jimmy Hellfire (Oct 4, 2018)

Much appreciated Paul. Your avatar shows your fine taste in music


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## PaulBrimstone (Oct 4, 2018)

Aww, that's just me watching the nightly news...


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## Rob (Oct 4, 2018)

Sounds great, and nice composition... Those fast attacks really work well. The detail suggests a chamber ensemble or solos


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## germancomponist (Oct 4, 2018)

How cool is this!


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## Eliot (Oct 4, 2018)

Have to agree, nice composition and beautiful programming. Envious - just a little. Love the way you played the solo against the tutti strings. Curious to know what libraries you used and how hard you hard to work to get the sense of spacing. Or was it how the strings were recorded? Liked the bell-like tones that filtered through toward the end.


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## muziksculp (Oct 4, 2018)

@Jimmy Hellfire ,

Thanks for sharing this. I'm also a fan of Short-String Articulations, they deliver a lot of energy, motion, and dynamics in a track. I like the overall timbre, performance, and variety of these shorts. I'm no good at guessing which library/libraries they are from, but very curious to know.


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## Jimmy Hellfire (Oct 5, 2018)

Thanks for the comments guys, really appreciate it. I kind of spent quite some time fiddling with it, trying to make it sound like music, that I wasn't sure if I didn't end up with total crap.

The string libraries used are *Berlin Strings First Chairs* and *Cinematic Studio Strings*.
Obviously, the solo passages are BSFC, while for the tutti it's both.

CSS has really great short notes. When the library was originally released, I watched the walkthrough, heard the shorts and bought it instantly.  It's a very nice string library overall.

BSFC is a very particular library. It's not perfect, and it features various inconsistencies and some odd recording and editing choices - but it has a really fantastic raw sound. Also bought it almost instantly because the demos were full of glorious short notes. I eat them shorts, man ... It made all the difference here.

Making it all blend, sound coherent musically as well as tone-wise and spatially was actually quite a bit of work. Lots of fiddling and fine-tuning.

I tried to find a microphone balance for both libraries which would not make everything sound completely out of place. From there, it's a lot of fine-tuning of dynamics, a lot of manual
CC11 and general volume riding as well, trying to make it blend in a musical way. That takes a lot of time and isn't always all that fun ...

After that, since these two libraries differ in timbre and ambience quite a bit, there was quite some EQ going on to make them sit together. Subtractive EQ first and foremost. Focusing especially on the mids and lower mids that contain a lot of what I perceived as "tone" and spatial resonance. It helped "neutralize" the coloration of both libraries a bit and take it from there. There's also a lot of terrible sounding resonant garbage in the lower mids. Taming some of that almost always helps something automatically sound a bit brighter, crisper and more transparent IMO.

Then there's reverb. There's various amounts of EW Spaces - ACME 2.0 - on everything as a send. Careful touches. And on the mixdown there's some of that crazy Adaptiverb magic going on. That's a quite fascinating topic on its own, that one.

Finally, there's the usual suspects like gentle compression and tape saturation that helps color and stereo image a bit.


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## col (Oct 5, 2018)

Thanks for the breakdown Jimmy. Some valuable tips in there. 
As a css fan boy I didn't pick em in the track .
Do you use " gentle compression " on the mix bus or track insert/sends as required .?

Great track !


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## Thomas Kallweit (Oct 5, 2018)

Thanks Jimmy Hellfire,

this is well done and very entertaining! Very melody-metallish in parts.
I like that it's shortsy : ) So rhythm based and sort of hectic, dynamic and one can hear so many details.


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## artomatic (Oct 5, 2018)

The detail. Love it!


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## WhiteNoiz (Oct 6, 2018)

I still think it needs different (more aggressive and more connected) shorts and maybe higher dynamics at parts but still fun to listen to.

(Is there a shorts lover club?  )

Oh, btw, let me give an honorable mention to the EWQLSO shorts (namely the 3-ways and the 6x RRs). Those things are NASTY. So lively. They still give me chills. If you want an example, check this remake of 160 Bpm I'd done:
https://clyp.it/vap4anwq?token=43f351358ae0d30614728b0270360acf (Start at about 2:45 if you don't wanna endure all of it) 

Samples rarely give me chills, but those seem to consistently do the trick.


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## Jimmy Hellfire (Oct 11, 2018)

col said:


> Do you use " gentle compression " on the mix bus or track insert/sends as required .?



Sorry for the late reply!

There's a touch of compression on most single tracks - just to even everything out a bit because a lot of times, the key velocity dynamics of short notes can be a bit jumpy and jarring.

I also slightly compressed the final mixdown using the Waves PuigChild compressor. This one is a quite nice smoothening "glue" compressor.

I bounce all tracks to audio before doing any mixing. The final track is then again bounced to audio for "mastering" / finishing touches. Too many variables and intangibles during actual sample playback.


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## jneebz (Oct 11, 2018)

Nominating this for “Best Thread Title - 2018.”

✅


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