Ode to a whistle

Whew, this piece (my homework from last week) took awhile to sequence and mix due to my schedule at work heating up. Only managed to do bits and pieces over the week and finally got a big chunk of evening free today so decided to finish it.

Learnts lots from this little sequencing piece, for example:

VSL Flute, Solo Violin and Solo Cello
Learnt how to use the performance intervals. Like man, they are soooo awesome. For the flute, I was beginning notes with the portato patch for a stronger attack, then switching over to the performance legato patch for smooth transitions.

On the violin and cello, I attempted to apply the same idea but it felt really static. Experimenting with using the performance portamento patch helped somewhat, but it tended to jump out at me. What I think made it work was to use the portamento patch only for note changes up to a tone in distance; it gave an improved sense of life and yet still be smooth and not too earcatching.

Kontakt
Used my Zoom H1 to record various sounds; breath noises, chair creakings and coughs.
Audacity was then used to clean up any noise (very little, the Zoom H1 is amazing!) and chop up the bits and pieces into usable .wave chunks. Thank you audacity team!
Finally, all these were brought into Kontakt and laid out. If you got a good set of headphones, you may hear these artificial artifacts.

Custom IR
I captured a custom IR for use with this piece. It's not a 4 channel impulse like what's in the vienna suite, but I made it and I like it :P

Mixing
Mixing was as usual. I had major trouble setting up my spatial acoustics. Today, I decided to check my "final mix" with my Shure SE215 IEMs (and Grado SR80s). Not expecting much, but holy dang, everything jumped out at me. Levels, spatial placement; everything was WRONG.

I then re-mixed with the Shures, and was delighted to be able to find out how much I needed to put the levels for my ER and tails so that the instruments sat in a space I wanted, and I could eq off the highs off the strings and their 'verbs waaay easier.

After the remix I felt that everything didn't sound as boomy and cluttered as before. Maybe because I pushed the two stringed instruments waaay back in the mix, but there are still there to provide a textural bed for the flute to float on.

One other thing I've noticed is that the music is originally composed on piano staves (though the melody was composed first on an irish whistle) with no thought for instrumentation. I think I would actually prefer the flute to be playing higher up in its range where it becomes more sweet, and not so warm and mid-rangey. Something to think about, since the violin and cellos are pretty close as well. On the master bus's EQ, it was all mid range frequencies, no super highs and the lows were remarkably clear.

It's time for bed, I'm so tired.

Smaller sample producers

Found a few new (to me) smaller sample library producers today, these are

Sound Dust and AudioThing.

With SoundDust, what can I say. I had to have that piano :P Ship's piano sounds really unique.

AudioThing OTOH has some soundscapes in Temple of Mercury that I can't wait to try.

Another one from japan!
http://www.rhodes-premier.com/

Distant Shores

I was working on my new 3 part counterpoint exercises when I noticed VSL released a new instrument collection, Recorders! I've been lusting for recorders from various companies, and have managed to keep that lust controlled but not yesterday :P

One thing I didn't keep in mind when "composing" is instrument ranges. With the piano it's not an issue as it simply covers the whole spectrum. Not so with recorders, and I'd had my bass recorder play notes too low. Thankfully, it was only a few notes that had to be corrected for it.

Another thing I had at the back of my head was vibrato. I remember reading discussions when vibrato is used, or not. Given I'm not writing for period music, I just used what sounded good to me :3

Addictive Keys! OMG!

Oh, my good lord. I just read xln audio's latest newsletter and in there was.... Addictive Keys! Jeez, piano libs are all over the place! There is a free download of the instrument that's limited to 49 keys. Downloaded it and....

I daresay this is a very, very playable instrument. I'd added it to the cart and almost pushed the buy button, but stopped, slowed down and loaded up the pianoteq demo. Again (lol!).

Comparatively, I think Addictive keys sounds really, really nice, and is definitely the most playable sampled piano I've ever put my paws on. What I miss from it compared to Pianoteq is the dynamic range, I feel that I can play more intimately with Pteq or slam down the keys and get a response I'd expect. No so much with Addictive; on its own it actually feels very responsive, but when laid side by side to Pteq? Not as much as I hoped.

There is gamma control that remaps the input midi notes' velocity in Addictive Keys, but it doesn't feature the curve type control features in Pianoteq. Hope something like that will be added in future updates of Addictive keys. Gaaaah, really want it.....

Pianos: Playable, versus Sequencing.

Guess what? I bought yet another piano! This time it is "MyPiano" from FluffyAudio. And.... like Alicia's keys, I'm definitely not a fan of playing it live. There's something about the response that just feels wrong under the fingers, and I dislike the tone when I'm actually playing it - somehow, the high notes sound very close, whilst the low register sounds very distant >.> There is also an odd lag - as if I'd set my buffer size to 256-ish - that only shows up in certain passages. I'm already got my buffer down to 64, and tried it on Kontakt standalone as well as Konkakt inside Logic. Same thing.

Being not too happy, I booted up the Pianoteq stage demo for a comparison, and (*&£$ yeah, I loved how Pianoteq responds to my playing. However, I decided to record the midi this time, and applied it to MyPiano (as well as The Old Lady). And it sounds... pretty good! Especially after reverb has been applied and some mild limiting on the output stage. Old lady sounds good as well on this midi, just different.

Pianoteq on the other hand was more difficult to tame in the mix due to the immense dynamic range - perhaps that is why I don't really enjoy the rest of my virtual pianos - their dynamic range seemingly pales in comparison to pianoteq.

Hence, I think I've come to this conclusion that the many piano VIs I've licensed just don't play that well as a live instrument. Heck, I prefer the piano's onboard sound chip's response versus all the virtual pianos I've got, apart from Pianoteq.

Guess I'll have to get me a pianoteq stage license some time down the line for playing, and the rest of the piano VIs for sequecing, because I do love their tone :3 I played a bit of my jazz grade 2 stuff on MyPiano, again, it sucks under the fingers, but the tone is good, so I think this is a good purchase, with the caveat that I don't like it being played live :3

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Edit: Tried some bach midi's off the web with all 3 vis mentioned above, sounds damned good, though arguably, I prefer the tone of both the sampled pianos. Best tool for the job I think; pianoteq for playing as a live instrument; sampled pianos for sequencing and tone/character :)

Edit 2: After tweaking the "Velocity Control" page, MyPiano becomes much more playable, though even with low buffers, it still feels laggy. Ah well.

A few piano VIs

Being the black friday weekend, I picked up NI's Alicia's Keys for at half off. It sounds pretty good - after increasing the stereo width control - but there was just something about the playability of the VI. On a whim, I decided to download the trial versions of two other pianos I've been meaning to try, Truepianos and Pianoteq.

I must say I'm quite surprised. Pianoteq initially sounded quite boring, until I tweaked some parameters - I'm only on headphones, so changing the output type from "Sound Recording" to Stereophonic or binaural made a *huge* difference. Also, I love the ability to draw a custom velocity mapping curve, again, that helped greatly. Finally, the ability to adjust the difference in volume between the ppp and FFF - wow. What's best, is that after I fell in love with the playability, I checked out the website in more detail, and found out that the latest D4 piano in Pianoteq was actually modelled after a Steinway D! Even more win!

I then switched over to testing Truepianos. I must say, that the sounds of Truepianos has much more bite and character compared to the Pianoteq. Just A-Bing them made it painfully obvious. On the flip side though, I felt like I couldn't get as much dynamic range out of Truepianos versus pianoteq.

Other pianos I compared them to were my good old sampled Old Lady piano, which I now found quite thin compared to pianoteq. Maybe I need to increase the stereo width like Alicia's Keys to get the bite I want on headphones. But it still played very nice.

I think I definitely want to get the "stage" version of Piantoteq soon, I just love how it plays under my fingers. The others are great sounds, and will definitely be useful depending on different genres of music. However, in terms of playability, I think I like Pianoteq the best.

"Contemplation" - Jazz Piano

I'm still working on several ABRSM Jazz Piano Grade 2 pieces, and this beautiful piece, "Contemplation", by McCoy Tyner, really spoke to my heart. What's more, the improvization section is very straightforward (improvise over Am7 and F) - very easy for us newbies, and I can just keep on experimenting. Hence, I thought what better piece to try out my new piano samples on :3

Sadly, my new piano samples don't react the way I expect from my midi data, so until I find out how to correct that, I switched over to my favourite, the SampleTekk PMI Old Lady. Steinways FTW!!!

While the piano sounds as awesome as usual, I came into some very nasty distortion issues when attempting to apply some compression. After much time spent, I finally figured out that there were certain frequencies that I had to cut out, if not there will be distortion after going through any dynamics processor.

It was actually a visual guess - I saw some frequencies poking way above 0db on the EQ's analyzer, and decided to deeply cut those frequencies away and hey, that worked! With that fixed, I applied some mild compression and got my limiter close to about 0.2dBfs.

Using the VSL Hybrid reverb nowadays, and picked the "Brown Hall" for my ER. I'd really wanted to pick an IR from one of the famous halls (so I can brag, hey, this is what it sounds like in the Mozart Saal Konzerthaus :P) but the brown hall just sounded the best to my ears.

Forward!

Pizzicato - not the same IRL

Attended a live orchestral performance today, and one thing that stood out a lot to me was the pizzacato strings. They sound totally different from the samples I have. Very smooth, not like the very percussive samples I have. I'm probably playing them at high velocities, lower velocities hopefully will yield what I heard this fine evening.

Looks like I will want to allocate some budget over to attending live performances. I'm not only interested in a full symphony orchestras, small performances like string quartets are also very interesting to me.

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I've been giving some thought about my music pursuits lately. I really have no idea where I want to take it. I don't believe I have a deep seated passion in it. Yet I pursue am wading yet deeper into it like.... er... a spatula mixing a... a chocolate cake mix. Yeah..... oh wait, I think I prefer pancakes. Damn.

Looking back, this all started with the Winter Jazz course I attended. That really sparked a flame in me, I really wanted to improvise and stuff. During that course, it was evident that every single instructor there could compose and play the piano at a high level. I pretty much went down that route.

But what do I really want? It seems like I have not only gone off course, but went off the motorway, crossed some borders, and jumped onto a highway in another country.

---

Since beginning harmony and counterpoint, my music tastes appear to have changed as well. I'm beginning to feel unsatisfied with nearly everything I listen to. Especially after I started score study, I am really appreciating what kind of amazing art goes into classical music. And at the same time, alot of the pieces are just too damned long for me to "get" in their entirety.

And then older stuff I used to like, I'm slowly picking out bits that are now feeling very... uncomplicated. No, not sure what kind of word would describe it.  Perhaps repetitive? Ah, don't know.

What I do know, is what I am learning is both fun and challenging. So, I'll keep at it.

64bit :3

Have shifted to running Logic in 64bit mode for a few weeks now, and I'd like to report that.... nothing has changed.... :P Only one AU plugin is still in 32bit, AAS's Strum Electric Guitar, won't be updated soon, and I don't use it much, and appears to work through the bridge. Finale's playback plugin appears in the 32bit bridge but who uses that in Logic? :P

The last package I had to shift to 64bit was XLN's Addictive Drums. Erm, nothing to say there. They've got a nifty new installer that downloads patches and all from "the cloud". Everything else worked out of the box, and my lastest saxophone track ran AD without any hickups.

Can't see any advantages either, I don't use that much ram. I had 7 instances of VI Pro running, AD as well as one instance of Kontakt (for the triangle) no ram issues. Yet.

The only other virtual instruments I use - that are already 64bit out of the box - are VIs running with the Aria sampler. So, all of my Garritan (sorely underused nowadays now that I have Kontakt) and Plogue VIs ran with nary a hitch.

Woo!

Castanets!

Like whoa. What a performance. I really want a castanet patch now (did I mention I'm a sample junkie?).

Plus watching the string performers is giving me some ideas on what kinda string patch to use. Double win!

Sequencing: Flute Quartet in A major

Sequenced a very abridged version of Flute Quartet in A major, K298 by Mozart. I think the mixing isn't too bad, but the flute is quite lifeless when compared against a live flute. Need to work harder!

I think this is mainly because I am following the score too rigidly, and used the performance legato patches all the way as it was mainly slurs and single notes. Listening to a live version on youtube I can probably replace certain portions with portato patches, maybe even trills in places. ALWAYS REMEMBER REFERENCE!

Chaconne - Two in One upon a Ground

Home sick today, some stomach issues. Spent what time I was awake sequencing this. Found the score off imslp.

Trumpet Concerto

A short sequencing test for the solo trumpet part of Hadyn's Trumpet Concerto, 3rd movement. I really should have checked it against youtube vids, I think I overdid the attacks in this test, and whilst it sounded quite appealing, it is far from musical compared to the mellower performances on youtube. Live and learn.

And here is an updated piece featuring less aggressive samples:
 

Sweetness, combining articulations

Sweetness! Read some tips about improving weak attacks in vsl and figured out how to setup a patch so that only certain notes have a stronger attack, but still keeping the legato performance.

If I were to combine just the legato patch with sfz or staccato, the additional layer will always play with new triggered notes, but, if I used a Y axis keyswitch to switch the patch from legato + additional layer to just legato, it works!!!! Woo! I also tried it along the horizontal axis, evidently it does not work that way. Dun dun dun! I love my vsl :3

Some other patches I've tried combining that worked very well (this is on the Oboe) e.g. sfz + pfp swell, adds a nice bit to the attack, then swells. GAAAAAAH I WANT THE FULL LIBRARY OF ARTICULATIONS! Imagine the combinations and possibilities!

Library thoughts: Kontakt Factory vs VSL SE

Let's face it. VSL's instruments aren't cheap. And for us hobbyists, it begs the question, will I actually make full use of the full blown VI?

At the moment, the answer for me is easy: No.


But yet I lust for more VIs (lol gimme more harps).

And looking back over the short piece I finished today - I realized something about the articulations.

A quick browse shows that the Brass and Wind instruments in the Kontakt 5 Factory Library come with:
- 3 types of sustain
- Fp
- Sfz
- Staccato

Comparatively, VSL SE instruments come with
- legato
- sustained
- sfz
- staccato

So, the base SE instruments basically miss out 2 types of sustains and fp.
The SE also has the Plus package which gives us these articulations:

- Portato
- Fp
- Half and whole note trills
- Repetition performance for legato and staccato
- Fast repetiions at 3 speeds (?)

Hmmm..... 

Orchestral Template Musings

One more time! Lol.

My latest sample acquisition is VSL's Chamber Strings I, the full thing, standard and extended. I put out an ad on Vi-Control and as luck would have it, a composer was selling his copy off, so I managed to snag it way below retail. Woo! That's one thing to love about vsl - you can legally purchase used libraries, unlike say East West, where that's not allowed. And I really wish I could get rid of my EWQL Symphonic Orchestra as I just don't use it at all - much prefer the workflow with vsl and kontakt.

Alright, so let's do the rundown again. I need to keep reminding myself that *I have kontakt and the built-in library* - I keep going off about "I have no winds, I have no brass", yadayada, but as one of my friends pointed out, I have kontakt and there's a friggin' orchestra in there, as well as choirs, band instruments, ethnic instruments, sampled synths and more.

Strings:
VSL Chamber Strings + Solo Strings - DONE. For now.

Winds, Brass, Percussion: Konkakt 5's native library.

Truthfully, down the road I want to go down the vsl route for winds brass and percussion as well, though there are oher considerations e.g. Wallander Instruments for Brass.

Preciously, that was a no brainer as I loved the sound, and being a modelled instrument it is light on the disk, ram and cpu. However, now that I've been using a bit more vsl, I really enjoy the workflow, and apart from loading times, vsl's stuff seems very memory and cpu efficient.

But when it comes to VSL, the issue is PRICE, as well as what to buy. For brass there's 3 options, Dimension Brass, as well as Brass I and II. I don't know my brass needs at the moment, so it is difficult to say I'll need which lib. Now that I think about it, I actually should not be buying libraries because I want to "Fill the gap with VSL" - I do have the Kontakt library and it does have alot of the stuff I can use to experiment with, and if doesn't work I can get vsl.

Well no, actually I know I will get vsl, BUT, using the kontakt libraries first will give me more insight on what my needs are. E.g. I really like the legato performances in the string libs from vsl so far; I'm sure the brass and winds will have that kind of performance as well. AFAIK the kontakt libs don't have legato, at least not on the articulation page, so I hope I'm wrong and it is there just something I need to tweak.


Ok, so that's it for me then, I'll give the kontakt built-in libraries a go, but if I ever come across a good offer for vsl... heheheheh

Subnote: After much fuddling about with the Kontakt library, I can safely say I am not all all a fan of the woodwinds in there (I think they are the horizon series vsl instruments, not the current day instruments? I could be wrong) - no legato is a big killer for winds as I dabble in several types of flutes (I forsee a tenor recorder in the near future) and having an attack at every note for solo flute just blows it. Faking the legato seems to work though. Brass, I don't know, no legato but sounds ok, percussion sounds great! Strings seem to be pretty good even without legato, but this was with just a very simple midi phrase for testing.

Kontakt 5 in the house

Another sampler to learn, yay >.> But on the bright side, I now have access to alot more libraries. The existing libraries I do actually own also seem to work better on Kontakt. For examples, two of my SampleTekk pianos, PMI Old Lady and Rain Piano. The former, with the EXS24's patch had the occasionally release samples play incorrectly, and rain piano just didn't feel right on when being played.

With Kontakt now, both play great!

The downside I see is CPU cost. Kontakt appears to be *really* Cpu heavy - perhaps I need to tweak some settings. Old Lady was getting crackles when I was putting down my usual test tune, and I'd checked to ensure there were enough voices to support playing with the pedal down. Logic's CPU meter was deep in the read, even with higher buffers.

Also checked out a few of the kontakt factory libs - went straight for the flute, sadly, there does not seem to be an option for legato transitions. The world instrument flutes though, appear to have legato. I wonder if they are sampled legato or similar to what GPO uses for legato transitions. Checking the samples revealed little apart from the world flutes having 4 velocity layers per key.

Guess I'll be on a free Kontakt lib hunt this weekend, lots of free stuff from Embertone, Spitfire Audio etc. to check out.

Why not linux?

I think this thread on vicontrol sums it up why musicians that use samples can't and don't use linux for their music. There are not enough tools, and developers mainly develop for osx and windows.

And even for developers that do develop a sample format that can be used on linuxSampler e.g. Ziron's Shreddage - to use this format means you give up some functionality.

From OcRemix:

Differences between SFZ and Kontakt:
If you don't own Shreddage yet and are deciding which version to buy, the comparison is fairly simple. Shreddage SFZ has most content from the Kontakt versions but does not have a scripted UI or true recorded legato (due to limitations of the SFZ format). Also, since there is not wide support for the modwheel in SFZ, we use keyswitches instead, which some may find less convenient. So, if you DO have Kontakt, you may consider that version to be the better option. However, the SFZ version has all other articulations, double-tracking, and the full range of round robins, so if you DON'T have Kontakt you are still getting the vast majority of both libraries! Shreddage Bass is the same deal, though it DOES actually have all content and legato scripting... just not the fancy UI of the Kontakt version.

Choose the best tool for the job at hand, I say.

Re-thinking the newbie orchestral template

even though I have no idea how to score for orchestra lol. And its fun to window shop! Previously.

Here's my updated plan. Strikeouts indicate acquired stuff.


Strings: VSL Solo Strings, Cinematic Strings 2.0, EWQL Symphonic Orchestra
Winds: No idea.
Brass: Short term: WIVI Band, long term: WIVI Brass and WIVI Pro Player.
Percussion: Drums of War, EWQL Symphonic Orchestra
Drums: Addictive Drums

Commentary:

Strings:
Even though I only have VSL Solo Strings 1 i.e. no extended articulations - it has soo much I doubt I will exhaust them anytime soon. EWQL SO, I quite like the strings, but I do want a library with proper legato, so most likely CS2.0 (LASS Lite, as originally mentioned, is still up for consideration)

Woodwinds:
Waiting to see how Berlin Woodwinds shapes up. CinematicWinds is a no-no for me at the moment as I do not have Kontak. VSL? Expensive. Don't like the WIVI winds in the demo, may change my mind when I get wivi band properly. Don't really like the winds in ewqlso, sadly.

Brass:
WIVI, easily. I like it :)

VSL Solo Strings Install

My my, this is going to be a fan boy post. Or maybe not, but I'd like to share my experiences installing VSL Solo Strings I last night.

Installation went *very* smoothly. VSL uses the eLicenser for copy protection, and installation of their control center software was a snap.

VSL wise, things were extremely straight forward; put in the license key on the vsl website, and I get an email with the authorization key. Enter the auth key into the control center, and we're ready to install the samples.

Installation was very long, more than an hour for the 4 dvds (damn you crappy mac dvd drive), but it went without a hitch, and the solo strings update also completed with nary a hitch.

VSL's sampler is simply fantastic. Load times were not too bad - considering I was streaming off an external FW drive, and the way the patches are grouped together in matrices make a whole lot of sense. Keyswitching, Velocity, Modwheel, even speed of playback can be used to determine which patches are played back. (videos here)

Going to take awhile to get used to this baby. Maybe it's time to spam the internet with horribly written string quartet pieces lol.

I've always read that the vsl samples are too dry - but after my experience with another library with baked in environment is that I'd much prefer to have my samples dry. It makes it so much easier to blend in a mix.

From my quick tests last night, EOS on the strings was very nice, and that was just using a plate preset.

Oh well, this sample junkie is signing off for today, I'll write more about my ocremix compo piece tonight when I'm back :)