Hey guys. New to all this. I'm an electronic musician, and have always wanted to write/compose orchestral music. My only hesitation from buying the whole Vienna package is, do I have to know how to actually WRITE orchestral music? Meaning do i have to know how to compose a full blown symphony? [[:|]]
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Do I have to know how...
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Of course you need to know how to WRITE! If you had a real orchestra next door to use, would you expect to be able to make great music without some knowledge about orchestration, chords, and other basics?
VSL doesn't have pre-recorded phrases other than some scales and chord arpeggios. There are no melodies, themes, chord progressions, or drum loops in the library.
Anthony Lombardi
www.mp3.com/alombardi
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I dont agree.
While the better you are, and more knowledgable you are about orchestras and orchestral music, the more realistic and playable results you can achieve with VSL
However it is still simply a pallette(sp?) of sounds. A very detailed and incredibly large one, but still just that.
If you do want to write "real" orchestral music tho. I think you're better off buying a cheap library like AO first. You'll be way too overwhelmed by VSL.
However, if they do start using it in schools to teach orchestration (how cool would taht be?!?!) it would be my first choice.
A companian book should be written for this lib. Like Samual Adler's book/CDs, but now with a sample Lib and MIDI. Man talk about self education!!!
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Hey! I come from an electronic background as well, and I don't write orchestral music per se. Personally, I stick to the simple saying "if it sounds right, it is right" 8-] ... allthough some knowledge won't hurt. You could start with a little reading of our "Instruments Online"-encyclopaedia (... the small "Instruments"-button at the right end on the navigation bar of this page) will take you there.
That said, I think it's an _extremely_ exciting possibility to integrate the hyper-realism of our Library into an popular or experimentral electronic context apart from conventional orchestration. Just think about highly-fluent, authentic legato-lines, changing to something filtered/morphed/distorted and back .... the possibilities are truely endless, and you will always find a new way to swim against the current ;-]
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
/Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library -
Ok thanks guys for the feedback. One thing however, I have many of the Spectrasonics sample collections, like 'Symphony of Voices', etc. and have gotten around fine with programming.
And Anthony, I realize there will be abit of a learning curve, but when it comes down to it, we are working off of computers here, not in front of an orchestra.
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@willmusser said:
And Anthony, I realize there will be abit of a learning curve, but when it comes down to it, we are working off of computers here, not in front of an orchestra.
Well I didn't quite know what type of music you were doing, so maybe my response was a little off. If you're trying to blend it with another genre, then of course it's less important to know all the details of orchestration. It doesn't hurt though.
I thought you were thinking VSL was something like Symphonic Adventures, which has a bunch of loops and pre-recorded themes, so I was trying to make sure you knew that is not the case. Anyway good luck with your music!
By the way I've done some genre blending myself. About a year ago I made a rock/symphonic/techno blend. I recorded myself on electric guitar too. Lately I'm focusing on pure orchestral stuff.
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Tony, yea actually I am going to try and have 2 branches of my music. One side being electronic, the other total orchestral. I'm quite excited actually about learning all about the programming capabilites etc of Vienna.
So I'm not really looking at mixing the 2 together, as I have a love for both genres. But yeah, I've done alot of material with the 'Symphony of Voices' so I kinda know the atmosphere. Granted I'm expecting these samples to be ALOT more complex, yet alot more advanced.
Another question for you guys - Does Giga Studio read Akai? If not how am I going to integrate the 2, Giga and Akai?
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I haven't used Gigastudio for reading AKAI CDs, but I'm almost positive it can read them. I just prefer to use CDXtract.
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If you want to be able to make realistically sounding orchestral music, it is IMHO crucial that you have quite some knowledge about the genre you want to compose in - as well as some knowledge about the instruments in the symphony orchestra. Composing with samples is basically the same as working with a real orchestra, except certain advantages/disadvantages with both. The advantage of using samples is that you don't need to write a piece which is perfectly balanced according to a real orchestra, and you dont have to worry about only having two clarinet players, three horn players etc. With samples you can compensate with MIDI volume and such to get your balancing right. However, the disadvantage is that you may end up doing something that would not be possible for an orchestra to perform so it sounds the way you made it sound - and thus it might give itself away to people who have at least some knowledge of symphonic music.
