The saxophones are emerging. That whets the appetite for bongos and congas - Manicini and Bernstein territory. Any plans in that direction?
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Music To Wash Plates By, not.
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The small string ensembles within the new Symphonic 1 will enable you to create the 8-part vertical harmony Mancini used. Also, you'll be able to get the FH plus trombone low spread voicings as well. You can do that now with the Viennese horn, BTW.
For Bernstein, I'm not sure I follow your thought here. West Side Story was done with Violins, Cellos and basses, no violas. You can certainly do that now with VSL. Perhaps you could clarify a bit.
Peter Alexander
peter@truespec.com
www.truespec.com
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Peter,
Being what I would believe one of the few that to this date have done a complete rendering of West Side Story with VSL I can testify that there are some instruments missing even though it's possible to find workarounds sometimes. Below is a list of the instruments I missed the most. For completeness (is that even a word?) I decided to include not only why the small string sections are missing...
Note: I did the musical for a stage setup here and the goal is not absolute perfection in that case (like you would strive for when doing library demos or something like that) but more good enough to make it believable and enjoyable for the audience. Another point is also time (for me [:)] ) vs money (for the clients [8-)] ). I'm saying this since some of the workarounds can seem a bit strange.
1. The small string sections would have been very welcome. The violin parts are written for 7 violins often divided into several sections. The workaround was of course to use violin patches, but also viola on the lower parts to get some mix in the sound. Also the solo violin is great for some parts. Needless to say, the string section sounded too large in some places, but I really don't mind that. I'm not a purist by any means though.
2. Muted brass! They will finally arrive in the Symphonic Cube. I used live players for trumpet and skimped a bit on the bone parts here and there...playing some of them open and even left some out. [:O]ops: It's not like the arrangement is what you'd call sparse anyway... There are also lots of muted french horn parts that I just couldn't do. In many places I used open horn but in some places where the sound required it I used open horn with some nasty eqing. Works good for parts that are not exposed. I have said this before, but I'm eagerly waiting for someone to nail muted brass!
3. Latin percussion such as bongos, congas and timbales together with pitched drums are used all over the place in some parts. I used other libraries or live percussion for this.
4. Saxophones. Is partly on its way, but there are lots of alto, baritone and bass sax (now that's a cool instrument) parts. I didn't have access to any bass sax player at this time that would fit in the budget so unfortunately I had to leave those out. The other sax parts were made with live players.
5. Jazz style articulations for the brass like really hard attacks, stabs, falls, shakes etc.
6. There are drums in VSL, but I always use live drums anyway. Why program stuff that takes a 10th of the time to play for a good drummer when it adds so much to the realism of the piece (if you have the choice).
/Mattias
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Peter - I was asking about stylistic direction in VSL's future releases. I'm not sure where you get the strings from - I didn't mention strings in my post. What I'd be interested in is bongos, congas, muted brass, brass falls and shakes. The kind of samples that add life to a jazz piece.
Mattias - I agree with all that you suggest would be a great addition to VSL's 'core' sounds. Other libraries have various brass effects, but without doubt VSL would do a far superior job.
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Herb stated before on some thread about future plans here that they are working on muted brass and at least plans to add more "modern" articulations on the other brass instruments. It was around the time for the release of the Pro Edition if my memory serves me. You might want to search for it and check the details.
/Mattias
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@jrm1 said:
Peter - I was asking about stylistic direction in VSL's future releases. I'm not sure where you get the strings from - I didn't mention strings in my post. What I'd be interested in is bongos, congas, muted brass, brass falls and shakes. The kind of samples that add life to a jazz piece.
Mattias - I agree with all that you suggest would be a great addition to VSL's 'core' sounds. Other libraries have various brass effects, but without doubt VSL would do a far superior job.
My apologies. I thought you were talking about stylistic considerations of Hank's writing technique.