DG & Hellfire:
1. I completely agree that for good rendition samples have to be tweaked to death. However, that there is no "wickedly expensive" software that adds in the endeavor, just look at Melodyne (sp?) or even more so Altiverb. For who has that kind of money if he is a student or even someone who makes decent amount of money and has a family. That's completely discretionary expenditure affordable to the like of Hans Zimmer but not the average guy. Here too, yes, we have to work at making samples usable to our liking (depending on what sound image one has in his head). But that doesn't mean that samples shouldn't come with decent sound out of the box. How would it be if one buys an electronic piano and first thing he/she would have to do every morning to tune it and then adjust every one of the 88 notes (they are of course ROM samples) spending a few hours till they sound like a piano? I wonder how many of those pianos would be sold and how much time would remain for practice.
2. Bow noise is a built in parameter into the sound of every stringed (bowed) instrument. Without it string sound doesn't exist. I am just stating the obvious. But when samples are recorded this bow noise seems to become background noise or at least this is what I hear. I call this "Schmirgelklang" that is, the background noise sounds like fine sand paper pulled on a thicker aluminum slab, or, if I were to put it in harsher terms, like a shovel pulled over gravel. I can also compare it to the background noise on the tracks of old movies when the track on the celluloid begins to deteriorate. I've never heard a group of sample violins in a sweeping melodic line without their being harsh, discontinuous, with granulated sound. And, even the noise is discontinuous because every sound has its own noise. It's like a mathematical function with lots of holes, or a road with many almost consecutive pot holes.
It's pretty interesting that the noise is so evident (again, to me) and everyone is asking me with astonishment: "What noise, John?" Oh, no... I am not confusing white noise with bow noise. I kind of know my stuff around instruments. I need also to mention that I don't intend to have an antagonistic discussion but an exchange of opinion. After all, it's my ear and the sound image in my head; both pretty good though :))
Thanks for your feedback,
Cheers, John.
PS: I forgot to answer your writing regarding vibrato for trumpets. It depends. If you take the Soviets playing Russian music, they definitely vibrate. The tone is thick, vibrated and very penetrating in forte. They also use vibrato in piano, cantabile, melodic solo passages. As an example, take the recordings done by the General Union Radio Orchestra (Balshoy Vsesayuzniy Radio Arkyestr) with Nikolay Golovanov such as Skriabin's symphonies or anything else, or Skriabine/Leningrad/Mravinskiy The Poem of Extasy. But they do not play Wagner with vibrato.
Orchestras in the West do not make this distinction because most Western trumpet players don't understand that one cannot play Tschaikovskiy like Bruckner, and few conductors would make them aware of this fact. The Russian orchestras after the Fall of the Soviets play more in tune with Western orchestras which is a bit uncharacteristic for Russian music. A good tradition has been thrown out and that's a pitty. But I need trumpet vibrato for my pop writings and not necessarily for symphonic writing. You state "Such vibrato cannot be obtained on the scoring stage" Well, just listen to Harry James or Al Hirt or the trumpeter in the "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". Some French trumpeters also use vibrato in Debussy, though not by far as rich as that of the Russians. And, all trumpeters, including me, use a bit of vibrato, which by the way technically loosens the lips off of the permanent tension they are under while in contact with the mouthpiece. Oh, I extended myself again. Sorry.