THomas, I'm listening to "Rise with the Angels" which just blows me out of the water. Not only because it's a beautiful piece, but because of the realism of it. Which brings me to my question.... the sound you've achieved here is exactly the sound I'm trying to achieve with my compositions using the VSL.
I saw in the previous post that you're using a simple soundcard reverb, but I'm hoping you can shed some light on the rest of your mix for me... are you just applying the reverb to your single output, or channel by channel, at different levels? The room space you've created is fantastic -- exactly what I'm trying to achieve but I can't quite get there. If you have a secret recipe for your reverbs or instrument placements, would you share that? I'm also wondering if you used the mono versions of some instruments or did everything in stereo. My goal at the end of the day is to have my mixes sound like yours!
I agree with Kerry. Please, Thomas, PLEEEEEAAAASE! (Do I sound desperate enough?) [8-)] : Can you explain how you used the SBLive reverb on your piece? Is it the built-in Concert Hall ambience? Do you apply a different setting on each instrument or section? Do you record a dry and a wet version and then mix them down? I'm asking, because I am so impressed with the sound of your new demo (appart from the demo itself, of course), that I bought a second hand SBLive! Value from eBay.
Thomas, pretty pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaase can you post some of the specs from your latest demo on here? You'll be really cool if you do. All the cool people are doing it.
congratulations for your beautiful composition.....I am a young french composer and i am extremly interested in the vsl technologie, and what big relief that we can made a so beautiful piece with only a sb live! so I wish more details please. Thank you for all.
I fear Thomas could not respond in the next weeks. He is for some weeks in USA.
I try to give you some information instead:
Thomas is very experienced and very creative in balancing different instruments in an orchestra. That means he knows exactly how loud an instrument should be in relation to other instruments. Further Thomas works extensively with expression control. Here you add volume changes during your performance to get right phrasing. He is pretty good keyboard player, so most of the performance you hear in his music is performed "live".
And most important are his composing skills: counterpoint, orchestration etc.
All this is much more important for him, than mixing issues. So he don't spend much time in postpro, and prefers the out of the box (=gigastudio) result. He always says, he is a composer and no mixing engineer.
I really hope we do hear high-end post productions of Thomas compositions in the near future. Maybe in upcoming blockbuster from Hollywood. [:D]
Yes, I think its cc 11. I personally work only with cc 7 - mainvolume. (Hope, I don't mix up them, if I'm wrong, please correct me) Regarding EXS I have to ask our Logic/EXS team, how this is managed.
We did not specially program cc11! EXS mkII responds to it, as all the synthesizers do. The sound is nearly the same if you use cc7 (volume) or cc11 (expression). But there's one main difference between it. Expression can only be used to soften a track down. This is because the standard-value of cc11 is 127. By using cc7 you also have the possibility to turn up the instrument. (standard-value of cc7 is 0.0db). But you have to be aware, that after programming cc7 you're not able to control the overall-volume of a track!!!!
Sorry Rainer, i don't understand .... But you have to be aware, that after programming cc7 you're not able to control the overall-volume of a track!!!!
Why can't you control the volume after programming cc7 - is this not just the same as ordinary volume automation?
Of course you're right, that it is just volume automation [:)] , but what i wanted to say is, that when you use cc7 while recording a track, the movement of this controller's recorded too, and you're not able anymore to turn the volume of the whole track, for examle, 3dB down?
Surely you can just select all automation and just move down by 3db!!, or go into the actual instrument and tell it's main volume output to be setup 3 db lower?
What one really wants is for cc11 to provide a few dB of *additional* output. That would make more sense than setting it to, say, 100 every time you load a patch.
But that would mean changing the world. At one point I used a pedal to automate the fader on the digital mixer I was using at the time, but I stopped doing that. Too cumbersome.