Matching loudness in string patches

[Peter Roos]

I am curious about the loudness differences between long and show bows, for instance ff legato versus ff marcato Are the short bows louder?

The question is maybe a bit weird, but I cannot find the answer in my orchestration books and I have no access to string players or sessions where I could ask.

To compare these loudnesses I would like to be able to use peak levels on my meters (or some visual impression of the wave forms), not the subjective loudness, which I need to learn afterward. So, my question is also about the physics of the bows and the strings.

My goal is to find acceptable default volume settings for the tracks that use pre-defined string patches.

I am replacing GOS patches with Opus 1 string patches, and find the VSL ones a lot better with respect to dynamics. Which seems to demand some more educated decisions than before [;)]

Thanks in advance [:)]

Peter
www.PeterRoos.com

[mathis]

Hi Peter,

I actually never bothered with these things since I found the default (relative) VSL volumes quite believable.

It´s also a quite difficult question to answer in technical terms. I mean, spiccato has much more noise and probably a higher peak while long bows have much higher average energy. What "sounds" louder is also highly dependent on the room acoustics. The short bows will be softer in a large room since they don´t trigger that much reverb like the long boes where the reverb can quite build up.

Hope that makes some sense,
- M