Thanks for the compliments guys. It was a great piece to work on - I actually had it done before the holidays, but unfortunately it didn't make it on to the VSL website until after the new year.
Jay, as for the mix, I used the appassionata violins in the beginning and also about 2/3 of the way through, when the melody is restated. I added no EQ at all to the mix - everything is "out of the box." As for verb, I used a bunch of Altiverb instances - I pretty much followed the tutorial setup on Audio Ease's web site (
http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Altiverb/AltiverbStagepositions.html). I think it wound up being about 10 early reflection instances plus a final tail instance to ease the burden on the CPU. The wet/dry ratio on the tail was approximately 40/60 (it got way too muddy if I went past this ratio).
What I think really added to the realism of this mockup is that I imported the original song from the "Home Alone" CD into Digital Performer and tempo-mapped the whole piece. I then fine-tuned the tempos to make it not sound so "tap-tempoey."
For every instrument, I made use of the velocity crossfade feature in the VI, which is absolutely fantastic because with the previous pro edition, I would have had to load in multiple instances of an instrument (p, mf, and f) and crossfade between them with multiple MIDI tracks to achieve something as simple as a believable crescendo.
I sequenced the whole piece on one G5 2.5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM. I chose to sequence each instrument from beginning to end, as this allowed me to make use of the "learn and optimize" feature of the VI, which freed up memory for the next instrument in the family. After one whole instrument family was finished, I froze it as audio and then moved on to the next family.
And finally, I think I spent more time on the choir programming than the actual instruments, which just goes to show you that the Symphonic Cube is absolutely amazing right out of the box.
