@William said:

 I just told them that on that  thread about VSL vs HS #2 or whatever and they don't get it and never will. 

"John Williams sound"  -   "Hollywood sound" - it's all nothing but imitation. 

I haven't had a chance to read all this topic Bill. But the way I see it - and I have to come clean and say I am in fact banned from the east west forum - is those particular clientele desperately want to sound like Hans or any of the disciples - like Trevor for instance. What they don't understand is that a string library should really have nothing to do with the way anyone WRITES the music in the first place. This is SOUND we're talking about. You can sound like Hans using VSL, HS or even a cheapjack synth. But they think HS will make them WRITE like Hans. You can't sound like a fucking clone of anyone unless you WRITE like them.

Why do you think no one EVER sounds like Bernard Herrmann? Because they can't WRITE to that standard in the first place. A 2 chord ostinato section just isn't going to cut it if you're trying to emulate say, Vertigo. You need to understand particular brands of minimalism, romanticism, immense amounts of musical study, maybe a touch of blood pressure, heavy drinking, several wives and 100 cigs a day etc - and phenomenal orchestration technique, before you even attempt that. Too difficult. With HZ it's all about sound and effect. It's the equivalent of a chinese takeaway. Too easy. I admire Hans - he's good at what he does. I don't admire fucking clones and that's not his fault after all.

What I like in a way about VSL is they don't constantly jack you up with cheap sales routines. It's always the  music with them. Not just the sound. I listened to the recording of the sales routine yesterday for HS with Bergenson and it's a great sound. But the majority of these poor saps will never in million years get anywhere near that SOUND because they can't WRITE.  Bergenson WRITES better music than HZ - probably. Bacos does - probably. But when you're a clone none of that matters. Forget about studying the width and breadth of music. Just get right in there and study HZ and forget everything else, although I doubt if HZ did when he started. East West are clever and they play to that - everyone has to make living after all. Most filmscore music today is like going to the dentist.

Years ago on this forum I believe, there was a topic about the so-called Hollywood strings sound. It's a a sound that is brought about by the WRITING - if nobody believes that then you might as well start asking the players what make of violin or cello they use.

Yours

Mark Antony,

Good day.

@PaulR said:

What I like in a way about VSL is they don't constantly jack you up with cheap sales routines. It's always the  music with them.

Yeah, that is it exactly and why VSL is superior.  It has always been an intensely musical study with the creators of VSL  - determining how exactly to capture what the instruments do in playing almost any style, which is an awesome challenge that they took on straight, with no shortcuts.  That is why the VSL library has such depth that it can do any style.  So that is what I objected to about "Hollywood sound" or "John Williams sound" - those sounds are simply musical sounds. 

@Another User said:

Years ago on this forum I believe, there was a topic about the so-called Hollywood strings sound. It's a a sound that is brought about by the WRITING - if nobody believes that then you might as well start asking the players what make of violin or cello they use.

They won't write any better with VSL or the Berlin Philharmonic at their feet, that's the point. They worry about the mix instead of how rueful their compositions are. They're in the wrong profession these people, perhaps they should become mixing engineers... Why are they so obsessed with so-called realism instead of being obsessed with music? Because it's easy to demand the former from developers and engineers; they'd have to take 10 years off their middle-earthen lives to learn about the latter though.

If we're to be honest, what they're after is not the "Hollywood Sound", at least not most of them. They call it that for they don't want to call it something else - like the "Clones' Sound". For let's say that today's computer/samples technology was available 15-20 years ago, and people were trying to get their mixes to sound "Hollywoodian" then too... What would the right paradigm be? What was the "Hollywood Sound" back then? Was it Basic Instinct's? Dancing with Wolves'? Saving Private Ryan's? Edward Scissorhands'? Titanic's? Even though these scores were recorded and mixed specifically for Hollywood, they sound pretty different to me (not just compositionally - but could the perceived sonic differences themselves be epiphenomenal due to the great heterogeneity of the actual compositions?)

In short, these people today have as their specific and primary goal the emulation of other people's music (say Hans'), to the point of indistinguishability. They want to contribute nothing themselves (well, they couldn't...), but they can't even get that quite right either (that's how numbingly hopeless they are), which is why they persist in covering all bases so to speak, asking for symphonic forces that have been sampled with the right kind of frequency responses, ambience, etc. If they could, they would ask for recordings of 2-4-minute, fully orchestrated generic chugga-chugga passages. What am I thinking?... Dan, great money opportunity here!...

@Errikos said:

They worry about the mix instead of how rueful their compositions are. They're in the wrong profession these people, perhaps they should become mixing engineers... Why are they so obsessed with so-called realism instead of being obsessed with music?

CCCs (Chugga-Chugga Composers) should really be assigned a special place in Musical Purgatory. Nothing eternal mind you - I am not unfeeling - but a Period of Punishment of around 6 months, in which they would be forced to play cello in a section of one thousand, doubling at the octave the basses (250 players) for 24 hours a day an ostinato consisting of sforzandi staccati a-c-b-g-a-f-e-g repeated without cessation.  The Punishment would be monitored by Dr. T.  Here's a recent photo of him with his guards behind him supervising some punishment of boys who never practice their piano lessons:

@William said:

CCCs (Chugga-Chugga Composers) should really be assigned a special place in Musical Purgatory.

[:D] CCCs! Fantastic! All that remains now is a CCC controller to be added in Logic, Pro Tools etc., for automating the automata...

@devastat What you say has been my predicament exactly and you didn't realize that by reading my post? That's what I meant; that in the hypothetical15-20 years ago, you would still be mixing/mastering your composition to give as a finished product, but directors/producers would be far more interested in the actual music, IF your mix was professional. However, they wouldn't have been after one specific "sound", as the uneducated, uncultivated of today. These days the mix - as you say - is as important (if not more important) than the music, precisely because the music has become so streamlined, so uninspired, so generic, so automatic, that the roles have been reversed. Now, they will be more interested in your "sound", IF the composition is professional, meaning that it is exactly what they have heard before.

I am not a good engineer (I never cared to be), and even if I were, my musical setup is too modest for the "expected standards" of the industry, i.e, I would have to hire a master engineer or even a mixing one if I were to score a mainstream feature with samples. But that has nothing to do with the quality of my compositions. I shudder to think that some hackwit would secure a contract over a young Herrmann today, because the turdirector would mistake the hackwit's better engineered track for better music! God help us!!

@Another User said:

Years ago on this forum I believe, there was a topic about the so-called Hollywood strings sound. It's a a sound that is brought about by the WRITING - if nobody believes that then you might as well start asking the players what make of violin or cello they use.

Hang on a second - did VSL ever name any of their string libraries using the prefix "Hollywood"?????

That's right Erik and a good point. Most of these tossers should be studying to be tea boys and then recording engineers. SOUND. That's what it's become all about if wasn't already that for the last 30 years. Don't get me wrong - I love the idea of sound and and am lazy enough to simply rely on sound or sounds to fool any potential purchaser of what I loosely describe as a 'musical composition' in my case. If I use more that 15 tracks on a recording - I've done something wrong.

But I'm a snobby bastard. If I, for one nanno  second thinks a guy calls himself a musician - BUT CAN'T ACTUALLY PLAY A FUCKING NOTE ON ANY GIVEN INSTRUMENT - then that person needs to be electronically tagged and thoroughly persecuted. 

@devastat said:

My russian teacher in the music institute hated me for being exceptionally talented....

Exceptionally talented?

And you now want to write trailer and game music using Hollywood Strings?

I see.

About this thread. It's interesting to me that a discussion about Hollywood Strings and VSL has blended into a discussion about degenerative modern film scores vs more artistic older scores.

The implication seems to be that HS represents the degenerate present, while VSL represents the classical past, the lost glory of finer days.

On some level this is therefore an implication that VSL is behind the times, a library for the older, cast-off generation of overlooked detail-focused geniuses, while HS is stepping forth into the mainstream with the boldness and stupidity of youth.

My own opinion is more simple. I like HS for its lush sound, and its extra velocity layers. I dislike HS for its limitation of ONLY having that big, distant, lush sound. Sometimes you want more edge, smallness and closeness in the sound.

I think the best, but most expensive thing to do, is own both libraries and then use what you want when you feel like it, without getting too hung up on the collapse of beauty, the fall of society, the rise of the idiots and so on.

@Another User said:

Exceptionally talented?

And you now want to write trailer and game music using Hollywood Strings?

Why don't we leave it alone Paul? After all, there is an inherent contradiction in the sentences: "my piano teacher thought I was exceptionally talented" and "I cannot read or write notes much"...

I have to agree with Dan on his point regarding the lushness of HS, which I covet sometimes when I write appropriate tracks for it. However, wouldn't that be a matter of plug-ins rather than of the original sampling? Couldn't one create settings - say on Vienna Suite, to get or approximate that kind of sound?

I wouldn't call the flagship of orchestral libraries a "cast off, falling behind the times", simply because on this aspect alone it faces some competition which seems to be faring better for some people. The standard of comparison should not be the successful symphonic emulation of the puerile orchestral collages that are currently in vogue in one particular place on the planet (no matter how lucrative financially) and in vogue with non-musicians for the most part, but the emulation of Brahms, Mahler, and Xenakis (C. Kardeis - or was it Andi? - has managed to create some very convincing modern demos, considering that there aren't too many such articulations available in the VSL as yet).

If everybody followed the ooberman paradigm, we would have no library, no means through which we could compose our concert music, test that music for ourselves, be able to send a recording along with a score to potential conductors, or score a film in any other way than the one favoured by ex-DJs and techno-producers. The linear chronological approach is not very apt in my opinion, as there are a lot of young people around who use orchestral libraries in various ways for various purposes. If pre-plainchant monotony is the spiral downward way that Hollywood has chosen to pave, so be it. Just because this is happening now, that doesn't necessarily make it progressive, right, or universal.

@Errikos said:

Why don't we leave it alone Paul? After all, there is an inherent contradiction in the sentences: "my piano teacher thought I was exceptionally talented" and "I cannot read or write notes much"...

@devastat said:

it's been 13 years since I stopped training classical piano, and been mostly reading midi sequences since - which I have no problem reading of..

Well it's no problem what you studied if your music is good - that is the only thing that matters.   There was a big discussion about musical education elsewhere.   

@William said:

However I disagree about Zimmer - he is so far from being an "innovative" composer that your statement is making me start to quiver here in a slowly building rage.

@devastat said:

 and sorry to disappoint you if my ambition is not to become a conductor of a boy choir in St. Paul's Cathedral or something similar that musically "educated" people like you will have high respects on.

My God! Are you gay?

Did she wear a headscarf?

@devastat said:

Well, at least his music is truly original, even he isn't classically trained or "educated". He has created his own musical style. You know a Zimmer score from the first beat that you hear.

Although it certainly shows that he isn't classically trained or "educated", I'll agree with you that he has created his own musical style, as "one knows a Zimmer score from the first beat that one hears". And for argument's sake I'll also agree that "his music is truly original".

The million $ question that begs itself is: Since this guy's style is so original and personal, how does it benefit 100,000,000 orks that wish to claim composer's credit and get paid for their services, to deliberately and completely facsimile that style and try to pass it off as their own, when - as you say - it is so painfully obvious it is somebody else's?

[The answer in the next post]

@Paul: She wore powerful earmuffs; it can get very cold in Russia...

@Errikos said:

The million $ question that begs itself is: Since this guy's style is so original and personal, how does it benefit 100,000,000 orks that wish to claim composer's credit and get paid for their services, to deliberately and completely facsimile that style and try to pass it off as their own, when - as you say - it is so painfully obvious it is somebody else's?