Orchestral Sound

[Drew Wilson]

One of the things that is hard to produce in music is the more realistic sounds. You can synthesize and synthesize all you want, but sometimes, adding that realistic sound gives you that extra range you can play with.

One thing that has always been lacking, I find, is the vocal or orchestral sound. FL Studio comes packed with a few samples and you can pick up a few more samples here and there, but you are really limited with what you can put through your software because there's only so much samples can do (particularly with time stretching and pitch bending)

There is one monstrously large synth I'm aware of that appears to solve that gap and that's the East West Symphonic Choirs which looks really interesting. Someone has already done a nice review of it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ_BrKJwpCo

I'm currently seeing if I can get my hands on this thing to give it a test spin myself, but you can really hear the potential of this thing through that video.

[thepuzzler]

Do you ever use Reason? I haven't picked up Fruity loops in a long time, but there are tons of orchestral refill packs for Reason.

[Drew Wilson]

I've tried Reason, but I couldn't really jive with the hardware based interface anywhere near as I could jive with the interface of FL Studio. Some people love it, but it never really worked for me to be honest. :\

[thepuzzler]

fair play, there's a bit of a learning curve - and a lot of personal preference of course.

What Hardware were you using if you don;t mind me asking? Chuck RE-wire in the mix and you're all set.

Also I wish I got to grips with REAKTOR some more. A friend of mine rocks that programs - building insane custom synths. Could never get my head around it although he made it look easy.

[Drew Wilson]

No real hardware. Just use a headset and my QWERTY keyboard for note testing (not much). I do everything on my laptop as a matter of fact, so my work station is pretty minimalistic I guess you could say.

I took a look at Reaktor at one point (I believe it was Kore, but can't remember off the top of my head atm). From what I could understand, it requires a whole different look at synthesis, but you could pull out some incredible sound with it. I'd learn some of it, but it looks like a re-invention of the wheel rather than offering something I could build off of from prior knowledge, so I never really bothered with it in the end. Of course, I could be looking at the wrong product to come to that conclusion.

Anyway, a persons skillset can make anything look easy. I mean, Snooker players make snooker look easy. I tried Snooker and man is that game hard thanks to the rounded pockets! In terms of music, there's plenty of artists on YouTube that make me feel like a total n00b when they offer a tour of their music. I don't get discouraged though because there is typically a lot of pre-planning that goes in to those videos to make it look way more spectacular then what could normally be pulled off at random. There's probably a few default sounds and styles some artists show off, but what do they know beyond that? Hard to say really.

I could put together a demo that makes me look amazing, but it would take several days to put it together. I had a demo for an art class once and it took me about 3 days to put together for a simple 1 hour presentation. By the end of it, everyone was like, "OMG! What's that program called again???" and "That was amazing!" It looked easy to them, but there's a lot of forethought that goes in to it. Generally, it's not a easy as, "Put this here, put this here, tweak this knob and done!" Perfecting a tune takes a fair amount of work. Experience reflects how much that time can be reduced, but usually, it's how much higher quality you can make that sound rather than how fast you can make a certain kind of sound. We're talking tonal differences so subtle that is generally inaudible to even some of the trained ears around, but actually makes a difference to the overall mix. So, typically, that time doesn't get reduced by much.

With my current set-up, there's really not much I can't synthesize at this point. The only real gap I have left is live unsynthesized instruments which I'm looking at filling. That gap isn't as big for an electronica producer as it would be for a live band, so it isn't as big of a deal.