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@dagmarpiano said:
(the way I always work is to add real players from the Roal Liverpool Philharmonic to samples to try get the best of both, and it really makes a difference
Let's hear an example of that on this thread.
Well since you ask... I produced this album with that method:
http://gothic-storm.co.uk/Site/Epic_Choral.html
The tracks have been remixed and remastered by someone better than me since these versions but I can't find a link that will work outside the UK.
How was this financed? Is this for an actual film or something? This could all have been done with pure samples since it sounds absolutely the same as every other current "epic" film score sampled or )pointlessly) live by Zimmer. Same treatment of choir, same chugga-chugga stuff in the strings, same parallel minor chords, same treatment of taiko-like drum accents, etc. etc. etc. I have all heard this about a MILLION TIMES NOW.
Like my analysis too?
Here is another one I did recently I would love to hear an A/B of your HS or LASS.
It is what it is. this is music created purely to be in the centre of mainstream gothic movie trailer music, for use around the world in film and TV advertising. It's a commercial product not a piece of art, although this style does have its fans.
Also, it's not exactly 'my music', in that I'm very much a minority composer amongst several great composers. I only wrote 3 tracks on that album there (my name is Dan Graham).
Tracks by me and from my library have been used in many different hollywood trailers and on many TV adverts around the world, and has therefore made good money (at least $200,000 so far!) and been successful in achieving its aims - to be a successful product in a very specific niche. I only put it up because I thought you were curious about the sound of combining samples with live playing William, I wasn't expecting an outburst of derision!
I do other stuff which is more personal to me, for more artistic reasons. For example, this 1880s/1960s time-travel concept pop album from last year, which I put a lot of time and care and love into, and it lost money:
(The whole album is free on that site in 11 different videos).
I think you William may have the impression I was being critical of your arrangement. I thought it was great and said so. I only said that it sounded unrealistic on some note attacks and fast bits. By that, I just meant it sounded nice but like samples not real strings. You seem to have taken it personally.
Btw your Komme Susser Todd sounds pretty amazing in itself. In realism terms? It's getting very close to sounding real. 90% real maybe. There's almost no giveaways, except the performance legatos sound a bit too perfect, and overall, and you have to concentrate to get this, it has a slight sense of sounding over controlled and stiff. Tbh if you just added a bit of room noise (the actual background hiss of a room, plus a tiny bit of noises like players moving around), it would probably be very hard to spot as samples, apart from maybe being just a bit too perfect. This must be the product of a huge amount of detailed selection of articulations and automation. It doesn't sound like that when you lean your elbow on the sus-vib patch!
It doesn't bother me at all that the artstic project loses money and cliches sell big. If I do artistic things AND cliches then I get artistic freedom and financial success which anyone can aspire to. It just happens that the art and money are for two different things!
@dagmarpiano said:
It doesn't bother me at all that the artstic project loses money and cliches sell big. If I do artistic things AND cliches then I get artistic freedom and financial success which anyone can aspire to. It just happens that the art and money are for two different things!
I won't offer my habitual caring and collegial review of the "epic" tracks on that other page, or your fellow "great" composers on that project, purely because I am not floating my own music here for direct comparison as William and Guy do.
However, staying on topic, I wholeheartedly agree with William - and I was indirectly spot-on in my previous entry on this thread - that at least good money didn't get wasted as it contributed to the continued livelihood of some musicians, for a recording that would have sounded 90% of what it is, done with samples. The missing 10% would never have been picked up by the ears of directors/producers that go for this stuff. You say it has sold 200,000 over?... State of affairs gentlemen...
Another thing. The meta-data on your library tracks begin with the initials DG. Coincidence? [;)]
@dagmarpiano said:
It doesn't bother me at all that the artstic project loses money and cliches sell big. If I do artistic things AND cliches then I get artistic freedom and financial success which anyone can aspire to. It just happens that the art and money are for two different things!
That may be true.
However, there are many people throughout history who may have disagreed with you.
For example - did you ever read anything that the greatest Russian filmmaker - in fact, the greatest filmmaker of all time according to Ingmar Bergman (who ought to know since he is probably the next candidate) - Andrei Tarkovski - wrote?
Here is an excerpt -
"If you try to please audiiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money; and instead of training the audience by giving them inspiring works of art, you are merely training the artist to ensure his own income. For their part, the audience will continue, their contentment unalloyed, to feel they are right - seldom a well-founded conviction. The failure to develop the audience's capacity to criticize our own judgement is tantamount to treating them with total indifference."
@William said:
"If you try to please audiiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money; and instead of training the audience by giving them inspiring works of art, you are merely training the artist to ensure his own income. For their part, the audience will continue, their contentment unalloyed, to feel they are right - seldom a well-founded conviction. The failure to develop the audience's capacity to criticize our own judgement is tantamount to treating them with total indifference."
It's a complicated issue this one, with multiple truths overlaid. Yes, great artists should have the courage of their convictions and lead the audience. But then a pretentious pseud could use this argument to make himself feel better about being unpopular when the real reason is that he's not that good. Pandering to critics isn't necessarily any more wholesome than pandering to the public, if the motivation is a kind of vanity.
A third interest party in this triangle of pandering is the artist himself. So, there are at least three people an artist might want to please. (1) The public, (2), critics/elites/experts or (3) himself.
It might be the case that the very best music appeals to all 3.
But let me make two further points here.
First, when I do my Epic Trailer music, I'm not pandering to the public. I'm marketing a product for a small market. As one of the early albums on my label, I made the decision to aim for the centre of the market first - safe bets, music which is the mainstream and therefore predictable. In future albums I will push the boundaries with more unexpected and demanding albums, but even then I'm not 'educating my audience', I'm just testing ideas and trying to find a unique position within a market. SO, I think this debate is a bit like confusing one thing with another. A good commercial product may or may not stand up to artistic scrutiny, and a good artistic product may or may not stand up to commercial scrutiny, but they are two different things, done for different reasons, and their success is measured by different standards.
Second, I would like to say that this is drifting off topic. 😊 It's interesting, but maybe the debate should move to the Music Cafe?
Finally, I'll attempt to bring this back on topic, somewhat. Perhaps the fault line being revealed here represents the division between two different markets for sample libraries. Perhaps while Hollywood Strings is selling squarely to the TV, film and game composer, VSL is divided between media composers and those from a classical background.
And so, perhaps in the same way that some commercial music will sound weak to a classical person, some aspects of VSL will sound weak to a media composer.
But the underlying problem is the 'incommensurability' of language across paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn would say. We are judging the libraries by different standards.
My only point is that it's not the kind of music to make a comparison with VSL strings.
Working composers need to decide what libraries to buy. If they are writing "epic" music and that is what's paying the bills, it's good to have that comparison. If vienna isn't good at a particular style, it's good to have examples that illustrate that.
@dagmarpiano said:
But then a pretentious pseud could use this argument to make himself feel better about being unpopular when the real reason is that he's not that good.
that is true - it is done all the time and especially nowadays at Universities, where someone can write sheer musical nonsense and, as long as it is atonal, be proclaimed a genius by people afraid of appearing stupid. Not that all atonality is nonsense - just 95% of it.
However I still don't like this idea of totally caving in to commercialism and then doing your serious work on the side. The two need to be integrated which I know is not easy. Maybe the greatest example of integrating artistry with money-making is Hitchcock. But he was a unique case in that he naturally thrived in the genre of thrillers and therefore simply had to do a good one commercially and it would have artistic quality. For example the one I am always harping on - Vertigo. He was actually indulging his own psychological obsessions with that, yet it is one of the great artistic films of all time. Another example is Picasso - he became quite wealthy and was the opposite of the "starving artist" but is considered the greatest painter of the 20th century (though not my favorite - to me the greatest 20th century painter is de Chirico who was a schizoid proto-surrealist).
For me this (off-topic) disclaimer of "yeah, I know it's cliched, it's right for what it is though for the target audience and I have my serious side too, I pay the bills with this you know etc." is utter crap, and the attitude of someone that should never have dared become a professional composer - even if they find people today that are willing to pay for his output!! (just like an assassin should really change careers even if his services are in some demand)
This current Zimmer-style SHYT that most every clone is excreting, then wrapping it up nicely in the best possible production library or real orchestra while it's still hot and steamy, straight from the Anemato/Cinescamples algorithms, is good enough reason for the skies to open and drown us all again - the Lord can only take so much lobotomy. It could happen you know... Desist while there's still time...
Let me remind you that there is a way to pay the bills without inflicting pain on everyone's ears and turning our stomachs: WIlliams, Morricone, Goldsmith, Barry, Horner, Shore, Grusin, Elfman, Silvestri, Young, Newman, Kamen, etc. - I'm specifically naming people that have had their own musical personalities to a great degree, and who still, or until recently, compose/d 'functional' music, appropriate to the action and requirements of the films they were underscoring, music very much alive, instead of the obligatory laboratory aural poison that forms the deluge of film-music today for the most part.
What? The public's going to walk out on William's or Horner's, opening titles because there's no chugga-chugga-chugga? Please.... Appropriate to the genre.... As if these composers named above never touched on all genres while managing not to make us puke all over our pop-corn.... Just admit to giftlessness and stop writing, will you people? The least you can do is desist from "rationalizing" it for us.
It's both hilarious and lamentable that people who develop and/or buy products specifically designed for musical cripples, offer opinions regarding the quest for instrumental realism, when there is nothing that is real in their music.
@Errikos said:
...straight from the Anemato/Cinescamples algorithms...
You seem to single out CS quite a bit, but you really give the impression that you have no idea what is actually in their libraries.
@Errikos said:
...straight from the Anemato/Cinescamples algorithms...
You seem to single out CS quite a bit, but you really give the impression that you have no idea what is actually in their libraries.
I don't know how I give that impression, but just in case... I actually know what there is in their libraries from their own videos. One finger plays a whole orchestra chord, right? Another finger(!) in Hollywoodwinds plays the woodwind parts of The Raiders rhythm, or the Flying Theme's rhythm, no? Properly instrumentated, voiced, and spaced for the cripple's uses, whatever those may be...
I believe that the VSL is the best, because it is the most flexible for the most uses. If you're out for only one library, I believe that should be it. It will do the most convincing Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Williams at the same time. Which library is as versatile on its own? But if you don't do music (if you do Hans for example), maybe there are other libraries specifically designed for that kind of vomit.
@Dietz: I've said all I had to say, thanks.
@Errikos said:
I don't know how I give that impression, but just in case... I actually know what there is in their libraries from their own videos. One finger plays a whole orchestra chord, right? Another finger(!) in Hollywoodwinds plays the woodwind parts of The Raiders rhythm, or the Flying Theme's rhythm, no? Properly instrumentated, voiced, and spaced for the cripple's uses, whatever those may be...
Those sorts of things are a tiny fraction of what they offer (and the one part I don't use), the vast majority of their libraries are individual samples for composing original melodies just like VSL (and I'd say they'd be just fine for all those composers you listed, in a some cases probably better than anything VSL offers). And VSL offers things like canned runs and trills, right?
I just think it's tacky to use a site like this for wholesale bashing of other companies, and I'm disappointed that VSL often seems to tolerate it.
