To Amit,


Excellent piece, right on the money in EVERY respect;You left me wanting more!!!

Excellent work all!

William-- lovely and touching performance.

Amit-- exciting composition and spectacular production!! Please give us some insights into your mixing.

Best,
Jay

Guy and Jay - thanks! You are The Masters, and it is great hearing from you. I love this piece intensely, and tried to do it according to my feelings. I don't know if that is successful or not, but it is the only thing i can go on.

Rotondo's performance of the Mozart is excellent. And I really liked the Amit Poznanski.

I have to give a great ovation to Michael Hula's performance and Dietz's mix of the orchestra on the Puccini, and...

FERDINAND VON PLETTENBURG

BRAVO!!!!

I would be in the audience cheering like a maniac for this brilliant, great tenor. His performance is powerful, impassioned, inspiring.

Thanks to Herb and VSL for creating this universe of sound!

We got around 20 minutes of enjoying music with this 4 pieces!
This means 300 - 400 h in total for producing this music (or more?).
So we are probably listening to 2 or more month of work!

Thanks for the big effort to everybody who has worked on this "little 20 minutes".
Beside these reflections:
4 splendid results! Congratulations!


Beat Kaufmann

Excellent work !!

Well done everybody for these demos. As well as demonstrating the admirable skill and musicality of the contributors, they make it plain what can be done with the Vienna samples. I take my hat off to anyone prepared to put in the unpaid work to create pieces like these, and would like to add a word of support for Guy Bacos for the amazing fund of VSL demos he's created to date.

Love the "sound" of Amit's piece, don't suppose he could share some hints about the reverb(s) used.

Many Thanks

Dave Hage

I'd love to hear a second version of the Albinoni at a slightly slower tempo. I have often felt that this beautiful composition is played too fast - this was confirmed when I finally heard a recording at a real mournful adagio - maybe William would consider simply adjusting his tempo map?

Otherwise, great works folks!
Regards - Colin

@musos said:

I'd love to hear a second version of the Albinoni at a slightly slower tempo. I have often felt that this beautiful composition is played too fast - this was confirmed when I finally heard a recording at a real mournful adagio - maybe William would consider simply adjusting his tempo map?

Otherwise, great works folks!
Regards - Colin

Does anyone actually remember who wrote "Albinoni's Adagio"? I've forgotten. [:O]ops:

DG

@DG said:

Does anyone actually remember who wrote "Albinoni's Adagio"? I've forgotten. [:O]ops:

DG

Remo Giazotto in 1958 so it's still copyright unfortunately. Once I've got my Euphonium I can share with the assembled company my own transcription for tuba quartet - unless there are howls of protest [:(]

@DG said:

Does anyone actually remember who wrote "Albinoni's Adagio"? I've forgotten. [:O]ops:

DG

Remo Giazotto in 1958 so it's still copyright unfortunately. Once I've got my Euphonium I can share with the assembled company my own transcription for tuba quartet - unless there are howls of protest [:(]
Ah, that's right. Thanks....!

DG

... wonderful, wonderful, wonderful

this is just an amazing toolset ..... in the hands of some very, very remarkable people.

thank you

[:D]

Thank you all very much for your kind response and comments!

Some of you asked about the technical aspects of Evasion:

The string section was a combination of the Appassionata, Orchestral and Chamber Strings VI's. I also used the brass, woodwinds, harps, and percussion packages included in the Symphonic Cube.

Regarding your mixing questions-
For reverb I used several IR's of Altiverb 6 with various custom settings I've created.
I applied some fairly aggressive EQ settings on the Brass (particularly the trumpets).
Interestingly, I ended up applying different EQ settings to the different articulations of the strings, so that the legato articulations were applied one EQ setup and the spiccato articulations another.

I got this piece done on a single DAW PC, with 4 gigs of RAM ("3 Giga switch" option enabled); none of the tracks were bounced into audio, and it was all sequenced in real-time.

Once again, thank you all for the response!

Best Regards,

Amit Poznansky

All four demos are great; the Hula/Tinhof/Plettenberg performance of the Pucinni is astounding! I see a cottage industry springing up of people using VSL to create accompaniment for standard repetoir arias (can I say cottage and VSL in the same sentence?). As a matter of fact, Would it be possible to have this one with and without the great tenor Plettenbeg, so that the most amateur of us can take a crack at it in the shower?

I was also thinking, without the vocal, this could make a great Karaoke track.

(although it's a shame to remove from it this great vocal performance.)

Taking a quick break from a current project, and after a hearty Saturday morning English Breakfast (More than enough to put hairs on everything!), i sat down to listen to these latest additions to the ever growing VSL portfolio, and offer the following.......

Puccini, Michi, erm... Dietzy(?), and Ferdinand.
An elegant rendition of one of my favourites. I've heard this piece both rendered in all its glory, and destroyed by the aspirations of the untalented. And as one who prefers a fairly narrow and quicker vibrato from a tenor, i listened with some degree of caution, Ferdinand, as you began singing. I mean no offence with this, but strictly a matter of personal preference. As the piece progressed, and the orchestra and voice opened out, i enjoyed the performance more and more. Contrary to the likes of Carreras, etc. you resisted the urge to go OTT, and the ending sat in a great balance with the rest of the piece. (I once heard some chap called 'The Voice' attempt this, and wanted to castrate him with a pair of house bricks from the outset. It was horrifying.)

My admiration and respect to you and the team for a balanced, elegant, performance. A most enjoyable listen.Michi, nice touch with the Rubato. Not too much, not to little. Dietzy (?), again i'm overwhelmed by your mixing capabilities. Really great sound. I'm still experimenting with your 'Three Verbs' approach and finding out lots of useful stuff along the way that has improved my own output. (Which isn't hard to do, if i'm honest with myself, lol.)
As a side note to this, I'd REALLY like to hear Ferdinand do something from Wagner, or the tenor line (along with guest singers) from the last movement of the Maestro Beethoven's ninth symphony, as he think his voice would give a robust 'Austro-Bavarian' work an added performance attribute. A wonderful 'round and rich' tone.

Amit.
A wonderful piece, and my compliments on the orchestration. Excellent stuff, delightful, and most importantly of all, really interesting! If there's one single thing that I find troubling to listen to in sample performance, it is the lack of dynamic range married to good orchestration, and you more than satisfied in this regard. A generous supply of light and shade!
My respects to you too.

Bill my friend, another excellent performance. The adagio has been murdered countless times by the experienced and egotistical alike, and if there's one thing they all have in common, is their prediliction for performing this too slow, in some vain and misguided attempt to give this piece some 'passion'.
This piece relies (IMHO) on the relentless nature of a steady tempo to give it added power and passion, and you're obviously aware of this. Thanks for not turning this into a maudlin, funereal, tribute to 'one hundred dead kittens', like so many do.
The organ control is excellent (And i'm leaving this one alone,lol.). I've heard a somewhat similar arrangement of this destroyed with a rambunctious organ part, as if the performer were incapable of understanding that an organ can be QUIET, TENDER and MYSTERIOUS, as well as crashingly loud. Again my thanks for your musicality, and understanding.
Superbly handled dear fellow, and my respects to you.

Mr Rotondo, my respects to you for a good performance. Strictly as a personal, subjective view, i would have preferred a little more dynamic range, but in these days of ultra compression, and loud is good, my opinion may well be the last, desperate, death thrashingly mournful cries, of a musical Brontosaurus.
A sound performance, and my respects.

As for the OBVIOUSLY rampant sense of humour from colleagues (you know who you are) who would, in their mischievous best, dare suggest these glorious sounds could be suited to, and reduced to, the likes of kareoke, (with all the technicolour images of Japanese businessmen giving themselves some sort of life threatening internal hernial rearrangment, and they reach, in vain larynxial aspiration, for that last note) i thank you for giving a chance to have a glorious chortle on a rest day.

Regards to you all from a very busy slavic limey in bright, sunny, and princess laden, Moscow.

Alex.

[:D]

@hermitage59 said:

[...]
Puccini, Michi, erm... Dietzy(?), and Ferdinand.
[...]
[:D]

Hi 'Lexi,

This would have to be "Puccini, Michi, Dietzi and Ferdi", of course. ;-D

@hermitage59 said:

[...]
Puccini, Michi, erm... Dietzy(?), and Ferdinand.
[...]
[:D]

Hi 'Lexi,

This would have to be "Puccini, Michi, Dietzi and Ferdi", of course. ;-D


...and don't forget nessi dormi [[;)]]

... BTW - I just read this again:

@hermitage59 said:

[...] Really great sound. I'm still experimenting with your 'Three Verbs' approach and finding out lots of useful stuff along the way that has improved my own output. [...]

Thanks for the kind words. For the sake of completeness: The mix of "Nessun Dorma" was done on behalf of discrete multi-positional Impulse Responses from a single stage, so this is not directly comparable with the "Three Verbs"-approach you refer to.

Kind regards,

@hermitage59 said:

[...]
Puccini, Michi, erm... Dietzy(?), and Ferdinand.
[...]
[[:D]]

Hi 'Lexi,

This would have to be "Puccini, Michi, Dietzi and Ferdi", of course. ;-D

Lol.

Naturally!

Lexi.

[[:D]]