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Old 01-28-2020, 08:42 AM   #3
Jason Lyon
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: May 2016
Posts: 720
Default Necro poisting - wow, you mean I'm dead?

Nobody told me, but it's good to know...

Good luck with it. I actually found compiling the banks fairly easy. The tricky bit was designing the tracks and routing for reasonably clear workflow. The template is the key and I'm sure you can bespoke to your needs. It's hardly an industry standard solution, the emphasis was on practicality rather than hundreds of busses, sidechains, stems, etc. Play in the MIDI parts, duplicate or replay them for the layer MIDI tracks, then edit them and use the conductor track to control overall tempo and dynamics. Finally just tweak the balance of sections and groups.

Having said that it's reasonably simple to use, there is a lot of routing and a lot of it's hidden. It may be instructive and useful to follow the chaining but it's probably best at first to just swap the VSTis you want into the container tracks and add Reabank info to control them properly. So eg retask CSS, Cinewinds and Kirk Hunter as UVI Strings, UVI Woods and UVI Brass. And rename the non-purple tracks accordingly.

Choose centred bone dry close miced samples - you lose the libraries' spatial positioning and ambience but panning and gentle progressive reverb and EQ cuts for depth are baked into the template. This makes it much simpler to blend different libraries together. The result is supposed to be the sound as the conductor would hear it in a simple moderate sized hall. Add your own hall ambience to taste.

Something you learn very early on with orchestral mockups - layering is the secret. Two cheapies combined often sound better than one library that cost you a kidney. Some people still even add dashes of simple square and sawtooth waves to enhance strings and brass - whatever sounds right is right. Very few pros religiously use only eg Spitfire or VSL, even if they're under endorsement contract. It's not like being a Steinway artist who can't take a concert on a Yamaha.

And pros also employ techs who spend their entire lives designing and maintaining templates, incorporating requested additions, etc. They are effectively the devs to the composer's user. Of course, we mere mortals have to do it ourselves and it's interesting work, but you can get into the trap of spending all your time on it and not actually writing music...

Hans Zimmer for instance, is very tech savvy, could do it himself and knows how to use most of the tracks, but he didn't design the whole setup himself. He chooses a sample, hits record and plays. Then passes on the sketch to an army of orchestrators, mockup artists and copyists, but that's another story...
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