# How CineBrass Sounds Through Finale



## Rodney Money (Jan 1, 2017)

I had to rescore these couple of pieces for a college brass ensemble and a high school marching band. Both of these were CineBrass Core straight out of the box played by Finale. Since I was writing for live ensembles I did not really care about a final rendering, but it was still an interesting outcome that I thought I would share here for fun and curiosity.


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## Paul T McGraw (Jan 1, 2017)

Awesome work! I really love the *Festiva Fanfare*. And the rendering was really good for both pieces. I had no idea that Finale could do such a good job with VST instrument playback. The Festiva has a lot of drama and emotion. The builds are very effective.


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## Rodney Money (Jan 3, 2017)

Paul T McGraw said:


> Awesome work! I really love the *Festiva Fanfare*. And the rendering was really good for both pieces. I had no idea that Finale could do such a good job with VST instrument playback. The Festiva has a lot of drama and emotion. The builds are very effective.


Thank you so much for taking a listen to both pieces, Paul. It means a lot. Yes, I was surprised by Finale also. It actually has some humanization features that I wished DAWs such as Cubase had especially concerning renderings for particular styles. Festiva Fanfare was kind of like an ode to my high school and college days where it seemed as though we always played Latin music, lol. I even took one of my favorite pieces from those days borrowing the chord progression honoring my past directors and the arrangers of our music.


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## Paul T McGraw (Jan 3, 2017)

I have never used Finale. I used pencil and paper in the 1970's and 1980's then used a program called Encore in the 1990's, and switched to Sibelius about 2002(?). I love how easily the NotePerformer soundset works with Sibelius and creates a good enough rendition to use for composing with minimal resource use. However, Sibelius is very, very finicky about using VST sound libraries. So after a bunch of attempts I just gave up on using samples with Sibelius. Have you ever worked with Sibelius?


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## Rodney Money (Jan 3, 2017)

Paul T McGraw said:


> I have never used Finale. I used pencil and paper in the 1970's and 1980's then used a program called Encore in the 1990's, and switched to Sibelius about 2002(?). I love how easily the NotePerformer soundset works with Sibelius and creates a good enough rendition to use for composing with minimal resource use. However, Sibelius is very, very finicky about using VST sound libraries. So after a bunch of attempts I just gave up on using samples with Sibelius. Have you ever worked with Sibelius?


Unfortunately I have not. I started out with staff paper also, discovered Finale in 1999, and did not ever feel the need to look any place else. One of the things though, because of quantization, is that it struggles with legato, and another issue since Finale wasn't 64 bit the memory would tap out shortly after I started loading more instruments on top of my brass, so that's when I bought Cubase. Plus, I always felt Finale was playing my music and not myself. With Cubase I can physically play it in. Here is a demo of first Finale playing a line, then me playing the line: https://app.box.com/s/8mxufvyw0czgyqgsshwlne55fhpwto08 Now that Finale is 64 bit I am sure it could handle more vst's.


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## Paul T McGraw (Jan 3, 2017)

Rodney Money said:


> Unfortunately I have not. I started out with staff paper also, discovered Finale in 1999, and did not ever feel the need to look any place else. One of the things though, because of quantization, is that it struggles with legato, and another issue since Finale wasn't 64 bit the memory would tap out shortly after I started loading more instruments on top of my brass, so that's when I bought Cubase. Plus, I always felt Finale was playing my music and not myself. With Cubase I can physically play it in. Here is a demo of first Finale playing a line, then me playing the line: https://app.box.com/s/8mxufvyw0czgyqgsshwlne55fhpwto08 Now that Finale is 64 bit I am sure it could handle more vst's.



Honestly, they both sound OK. I don't know if it is my age, the many years playing with amateurs, or perhaps I was just never that discerning, but I have a wide tolerance for performance variables. It's amusing that as musicians we work for years to nail the pitch, play with perfect timing (of course not in a solo setting), and to maintain consistency of tone and volume, then along come samples and we find out that it actually sounds better if everything is actually LESS than perfect!


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## Rodney Money (Jan 3, 2017)

Paul T McGraw said:


> Honestly, they both sound OK. I don't know if it is my age, the many years playing with amateurs, or perhaps I was just never that discerning, but I have a wide tolerance for performance variables. It's amusing that as musicians we work for years to nail the pitch, play with perfect timing (of course not in a solo setting), and to maintain consistency of tone and volume, then along come samples and we find out that it actually sounds better if everything is actually LESS than perfect!


I know exactly what you mean. It's funny that in Sample Land imperfections can be beautiful, but in the "real world," dang it lol, my goal is to sound like one concerning rhythm, pitch, and tone color.


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## Elephant (Jan 3, 2017)

Hi Rodney ! Very interesting. If there are any Sib users here who have Cinebrass and you would be prepared to let them have the Finale file in musicXML so we can do a comparison of the playback quality using Sib, that would be fascinating. Did you use any special humanise playback settings ? I use Sib and I am really having some ossues with the quality of the internal sample library mainly because they are out of tune. If it helps anyone try Cinebrass on Sib, there is a free soundset here http://www.soundsetproject.com/soundsets/cinesamples/cinebrass/
BTW which version of Cinebrass Core were you using ?
Rgds
E


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