One thing that would be helpful in any critique is that once problems are mentioned some solution is put forth to actually help the poster with the perceived problem.
I totally agree,
José, but unfortunately, mocking up the classics, and particularly anything pre-romantic, creates a whole set of problems for which there is, in my opinion, simply no solution. (Ever heard a good Beethoven or Mozart mock-up? I haven’t.) Hence my inability to offer constructive suggestions. I would love nothing better than to be able to point the opening poster, or anyone else who’s interested, to library X or Y knowing, from experience, these products to be the right tools for the job, but as I said before: such libraries don’t exist. Nearly all orchestral libraries today are developed, from the first sampling session to the final script edit, with a ‘music for media’ purpose in mind, for perfectly understandable reasons of course. Developers think in terms of ‘cinematic’, ‘soaring’, ‘emotional’, ‘nordic’, ‘fit for trailers’, etc. and they assume, perhaps wisely, that we all want (or need) to sound like Williams, Zimmer, Newton-Howard, Richter, Jóhannsson or Newman. None of them assumes that some of us might want to sound, occasionally, like Concentus Musicus Wien, or the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, or Le Concert Des Nations, or The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, or the Freiburger, or Gli Incogniti or any other dedicated ensemble or bona fide ‘classic’ orchestra.
There is to my knowledge no developer, and there’s certainly no product that suggests there might be one, who, while planning an orchestral library, is thinking: “we’ve got to make sure that this is going to be great and sound right to do Haydn, Schubert and Stamitz with”, or: “let’s do an orchestral library that’ll bring people a few steps closer to being able to make musically convincing, historically informed and timbrally defensible renditions of Mozart and Beethoven” …
In order to do classical music — from, say, Monteverdi right up to the present day — a minimum amount of justice, it would require very specialized libraries (and very different ones for each century) that no developer is interested (and/or would be allowed by his/her accountant) to produce. And it isn’t just a matter of sound — although that already disqualifies most existing libraries right from the start — it’s every bit as much a matter of idiomatic articulations, phrasing and overal musical perspective and insight.
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The reason I didn’t have any suggestions for improvement to offer with regard to the production of the above mock-up is that, to my ears, there is no consistency in the problems it is struggling with. In some bars, the strings may actually sound quite decent, in other bars they sound totally wrong and out of their depth. At times the woodwinds may seem to fit, at other times they appear to belong to a different recording entirely … From one bar to the next, different problems rear their distracting little heads and all of them together simply can’t be reduced down to a clear, convenient list that includes a suggestion for improvement next to each identified issue.
Some issues have to do with wrong articulations (sampled or programmed), other issues are the result of the libraries’ limitations, still others are the inevitable side-effect of ‘mocking up and orchestra’, others still are space-related, and then there’s also a few issues that are much more difficult to analyze because due to the sonic clutter it is near impossible to determine where the problem begins and where it ends …
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Re SPAT: I use it many different ways. In a piece I’m working on at the moment, for example, I have 4 different clarinet libraries — incl. the one you were involved with, José — which take care of the clarinet parts. They’re all sent to a bus where SPAT is inserted, and they come out sounding as a single instrument consistently located in one specific place in the mix. At other times I might send a prominent solo instrument through SPAT, or suggest extra depth in a string section by placing a selection of desks a little further back … The options are limitless and my answer to any imagineable question that is spatialization-related and inquires about something being possible with SPAT or not, is: yes.
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I have a question too. For the opening poster and people with similar inclinations. What’s the fascination? I mean, why would one want to mock-up a classical piece? I never understood that. I have never understood what creative satisfaction can be derived from producing musically wrong, artistically inferior and sonically crippled versions of a classical piece of music. Surely, the music itself can’t be the reason. (I would think that the music itself provides all the reasons NOT to do it.)
People usually answer that it’s very eductional, as in: you learn a lot about your libraries when you mock-up classical pieces. That may be true up to a point (although I fail to see what there is to be learned from forcing your samples onto music for which they weren’t created to begin with) and also, if self-eduction is the main drive behind these efforts, then why do entire movements or even entire works? I don’t get that. Why not just do a minute or two, and give those two minutes all your focus, attention and commitment? If, for example, you had just done, say, the exposition of this movement, and truly made the effort to take things as far as your tools allow you to go, doing your utmost to sculpt everything as musically correct as possible, wouldn’t that have been a much more satisfying and educational excercise than doing the entire thing in a sort of slapdash, inconsistent and “there’s just too many problems here to address them all”-kind of way?
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Jon W, I hope the first section of the above text answers your question too. In addition, I must say that I’m very reluctant to recommend libraries (strings or others), because any choice is, in my opinion, always determined by the music that needs to be rendered. That said, Sable (the ancestor of Spitfire Chamber Strings) is as close to a constant presence in my mock-orchestral music as any library ever got, as are the Spitfire Bespoke Chamber Strings. Next to those, it’s a merry and chaotic coming and going of libraries like Afflatus, the Berlins (the 2 Expansions and the strings from Ark 4), other Spitfire stuff, a small selection of Century Strings patches, LASS, the old Sonic implants, Light & Sound, CSS, and several others, …
As for Tundra: I don’t have that library but judging from what I heard in the walkthrough and various demos, and even just going by its name, I don’t think it is something I would reach for should I ever decline to a mental state that has me thinking that doing a classical mock-up might be a sensible way to spend the day. (Tundra sounds nothing short of amazing for a particular type of musical stylings though. If I had any musical affinity with those stylings, I’m sure I would have bought the library on the day it got released.)
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