Thanks Bruce.

Let me give all of you some background information on why I chose to mockup these tracks and give you my favourite moments in these tracks/mockups:

BACKGROUND

I've always loved "Peter and the Wolf". As a small boy, my parents put it on and I acted all animals and "conducted" the music standing on a chair in the middle of the room ("Dans Macabre" was also on my repertoire). I was frightened to death of the Wolf character. The cd and drawings in my room had to be top-down when I went to bed. Else the wolf would come out and eat me, obviously. [:)]

Still fear turned into pure fascination by wolves at an older age. And I still love the music. So mocking up these tracks with VSL, playing and recording the instruments one by one, hearing the familiar sound build and build, was really great. The idea to mockup Peter and the Wolf came from Herb and I after did my "In Our Woods" VSL demo, which has pretty much the same lighthearted and playful atmosphere and style as these tracks.

My audio reference for these mockups was a Peter and the Wolf recording narrated by Sting, performed by the London Pops (if I'm not mistaken). The concert-pitch score I used is a very old one from "Edition Peters Frankfurt, Nr. 5741".

FAVOURITE SPOTS

Grandfather:
0'20 (the string staccatos with the flute "interweaving")
0'36 (normal VSL staccatos really work well here, layered with the snare)

The Cat:
0'16 (spot with the most clarinet articulations combined: perf legato, marcatos (0'3s and 0'5s) and staccatos)
0'29 (love the way celli staccato and doublebass 0'3s) work together, warm and round)
0'53 (took some time to make these fast tutti string staccatos sound convincing - mockup nightmare here: fortissimo staccatos quieting down to pianissimo staccatos 'morphing' into pizzicatos)

The Wolf:
The hardest mockup of the 4 tracks, obviously. The 3-note harmony horn section theme contains about every element to give you a hard mockup time: repeating notes/intervals: d-c#-d-c#-d----d-----. A very slow buildup in dynamics.
0'01 (nice breathing of the VSL string tremelos here)
All tremelo dynamics are done with modwheel xfading between p-mf-f samples.

The Hunters:
0'03 (gotta love the way pizzicatos come to live, when you play them loose and use lots of them)
0'55 (great set of Prokofiev notes here)
1'03 (this trumpet solo is played with just the performance legato patch, also the staccato notes)

My favourite track overall: the cat!

Enjoy everyone!

Maarten

If you don't mind me asking, about how long in hours did it take to do it?

With a professional's technique, how many minutes of music can you get done per hour or per day, would you say?

Just curious - have to go to bed now, but will listen to it in the morning...

Hi maarten,

as said yesterday congratulaion and wow!!!!

especially the cat blew me away. very good work.
and you know, prokovief is one of my favorite composer.
now we should do "romeo and juliet".

cu
chris

Maarten,

Amazing work!! I just love the way you captured the changes in dynamics in these pieces.

/Mattias

Thanks all!

Eolcott, I think if I calculate down to fulltime-scale I spend 3-4 weeks on these. Mockups of existing music take the longest of all. So about 10-15 minutes in 3-4 weeks, not that much...

In comparison, I can write maybe 30-40 minutes original music in 3-4 weeks, when the end result is a midi production. So that's 3x more. With original music, you can compose partly for the samples and make sure you're not trying to write stuff impossible to perform with these samples, spending endless times trying to mock them up. Mocking up existing music (Peter and the Wolf) you have to do this, you can't change the notes, so it takes a lot longer.

Makes any sense? [:)]

Best,
Maarten

Well isn't VSL supposed to end that worrying about samples? I certainly hope so. I've never written FOR samples, and hopefully never will. I hear things in my head, then hope that the library will be able to duplicate it.
This library may not be up to that task completely yet, but I'm sure it'll be awfully close pretty soon.

Anthony Lombardi
www.mp3.com/alombardi

Of course VSL comes closer than anyone ever got in sampling realism. The introduction of the legato recordings, playable in realtime, makes it possible to write, play and record the legato line in your head without hardly any tweaking afterwards. You get all the little clicks and glisses of the real instruments, but still... a computer doesn't need to breath, doesn't know how to phrase, doesn't place natural accents and crescendi and decrescendi by itself.

Even with 1.000 zillion samples and controller tools, you still have to make little compromises and manual tweaks, always, though of course much less than with a basic set of just a sustain and a staccato sample. [;)]

Samples just aren't real players, and I hope they never will be! [:)]

As for the "writing for samples" - if you ever caught yourself scrolling through your midi tracks, finding the right kind of sound while fiddling on the keys... that's what I mean with "writing for samples". Or simplifying/changing a melodic line to make it more suited for the samples performing it. Things like that.

The big question is in what your end goal is: a mockup with an ultimate amount of realism, or a mockup with an acceptable amount of realism. Both goals are legitimite, of course, but both have their own limited amount of writing freedom.

Maarten

Makes total sense to me, Maarten! [:D]

The more I'm playing with this library and the more I'm getting into scoring and such, the more I'm finding where we (as far as technology goes) on the realism curve, and how far we've come and how far we have to go.

It's kind of a logarithmic curve (to use math terminology), and we've made some serious leaps in the past few years. Computers are to blame, for sure. But we also have a long way to go, or many things we can learn - and I'm learning a lot!

It's the breakdown of music into a logical form, what we're trying to do. And it's tough! But we - the people in this group anyway are some of us - are the ones in charge of leading that front. Let's keep it going!

BTW - great job, Maarten.

I would like to hear "Peter's Theme". Is this possible? Will you make any changes to the demos when the Pro Editon is realised?

Hello Esperlad,

These tracks already use a few samples from the Pro Edition. But it's probably 90-95% First Edition used.

I won't do anymore mockups of existing music for a while. These four were enough. It was fun, but writing original music gives so much more satisfaction. New original demos are already in the making.

Best,

Maarten

Great work Marten! These demos sounded very realistic.