Actually I keep playing with that stuff.  This time around, everything you hear is within Todd-AO.  The idea of using different rooms came about because the samples themselves are often from different rooms, requiring compensatory reverbs to try and unify them.  Some changes in my samples seemed to make using purely Todd-AO a viable option for the time being.

_Mike

Thanks Mike,

Can you perhaps Tell me in which IR Meter your using for each section?  And are you using the speaker position placement for any sections?

I'm not using speaker placement.  As for each IR, for the mix, we re-created the setup at a different studio and built it from scratch, so I'm not 100% sure what we ended up using.  I think it was the wide 15' for Horns and Tpt/Tbn, but one of them may have been the 18'.  I think we used one of the narrow mic profiles for woods, but again I'm not looking at it.  Here at home, my setup was pulled apart and all reverbs disabled so I could have the extreme track count necessary for recording the stems, and I haven't re-done it yet.

_Mike

Something I've been meaning to try; think I'll give it a run today:  In a real session, there's tons of bleed between sections.  So I'm wondering about setting up a series of reverb returns - each for a different usual mic placement, and feeding each section to every single return, just in varying amounts depending on distance from the source section, like a real room does.  Hmmm...

_Mike

There are couple pieces here, which are you referring to?

_Mike

Ah yes, that's possible I suppose, what with having to start over with raw tracks at the mix.  My setups are usually the result of weeks of tweaking, but there were logistical problems with outputing from my system.  For example, it had to be true 5.1.  Programming-wise it was never going to be great - I simply can't write and perform 84 minutes of this kind of music in 5 weeks at the level it deserves.  I'm not 100% sure I can turn out 84 minutes of this kind of music even ON PAPER in 5 weeks, come to think of it.

_Mike

Thank you, Tanuj.  In reality, this score was always to be virtual, and those are the performances heard in the soundtrack for the film.  Gratefully, they're in the mix with a billion laser blasts, explosions, yelling, fight sounds and an enormous shreiking monster, so it manages to pull it off in context.  But you're right, I tend to go for things which samples are just horrible at doing, because that's how I write and I can't stand to write around the shortcomings of samples.  If I did that, I think all I'd be left with are percussion pieces.

Great, great Music as usual Mike. Having heard all the pieces you've posted here and a couple more on your website i can honestly say that you have your own personal style and voice, so i disagree with those who label you as a "John Williams Clone" or something like that, i think there's an original voice behind those great melodies and wonderful orchestration.

Congratulations Mike

Mike, I'm late to the party but wow, what a party!  Your writing and production quality never cease to amaze me, "Battle with the Beast" is particularly impressive.  Your ability to extract such expressive life from these samples and blend them with such clarity is truly amazing.

Question: Obviously you must record expression as you play each line, but without hearing the other instruments (as players in a real orchestra do) its quite a challenge to get a cohesive balance - yet, you achieve such wonderful results.  How do you go about laying down tracks so that you get both expression and such a good instrumental balance?  In what order do you do this?

Thanks for sharing.

Greg

Thanks for the kind words, Greg (and Felipe!)-

The first thing I do with all my instruments (other than percussion) is enable velocity switching via modwheel, and reduce the velocity contribution of the keyboard pressure itself to a bare minimum.  This way, every note I have to play for woodwind, brass, or strings requires me to "bow or blow" with the modwheel.  There are thus never any truly sustained notes - they waiver and flux just a bit as my left hand can't remain 100% still - I'm not a robot.  Similarly, I had to develop a playing style where the modwheel was an absolutely constant part of the performance, and most notes begin with the modwheel all the way down - a quick attack usually means I've just got to get that modwheel to the top a.s.a.p.  It definitely helps with the overall sense of performance, because I'm burdened with getting the breath or the string bowing happening, much like the actual players.

Having done it this way for a bit, I'm sort of internally aware of where p-mp-mf-f-and-ff+ are with my left hand, and I know what my intended dynamic markings should be, so I usually lay the loudest things down first, and then I have a reference point for the support instruments.  One of the most important lessons I've learned from live sessions is that recordings seem to benefit greatly from at least a dynamic marking quieter than I'd use for live performance.  Some of that is due to the players and the idiom, but some of it is just because of the nature of recording - in a recording/mix environment, you can make ppp sound like fff if you push the faders up!  And ff, in my experience, usually records like fffff+ in a very non-musical, bleating kind of way, so I rarely mark higher than f in my scores.  Most cues live in mp-mf and stay more musical for it, with more dynamic range. 

All that is to say that I approach the samples the same way.  Most of the samples, I find, are a bit questionable at the pp and ff velocity ranges.  They tend to take on whatever the most unnatural qualities they have at those extremes.  So similarly, I try and perform the samples in those sweet-spot dynamic markings in between.  However, if I'm doing a particluarly bombastic cue, I tend to want to feel the volume and fullness in my room, so my tendency is to push the modwheel higher.  In this case, what I'll do is turn my monitor volume up, so it takes less actual volume for it to feel loud in my room, and thus not get all wall-of-sound-y with the pieces in general. 

I do my best to approximate real-world balances within my virtual orchestra, as we all do, of course, and it works well enough that I don't have to think along entirely different lines in terms of orchestration and dynamics.  So once I've set the principle instrument's part down, other things tend to fall into place.  What I spend my time doing is not adjusting balances, it's trying to get the human performances right in the first place.  At 3am, having played the same fucking oboe part 30 or 40 times trying to get it to feel tender or whatever, is usually the worst time to ask me what I think of virtual orchestras.  And there are a lot of those 3am moments in my workflow :)  And when you see the crazy modwheel data in my session, you realize right away that manual data editing would not only yield inferior results, but would take forever.  I tried to do a bit of that on this last film, and all it did was open up a can of worms.  Perfectly linear or parabolic velocity curves are not human, and don't sound like it.  And if you're going to draw a freehand modwheel curve with your mouse, why not use the modwheel itself, in performance, and get it right?  So that's what I do.

Best,

_Mike

Mike,

Thank you for sharing the tremendously valuable insights into your work process.  Surprisingly, this is very close to how I've always worked myself including playing all parts by hand and extensive use of the mod wheel (although I've certainly never attained the level of results you have achieved).  And I really "hear you" about the aberrations of samples on the extreme dynamic edges - especially on the ppp side.  I'm sure this is due to the difference during sample recording between the player playing a single dry note, or playing that note in musical context "within a passage" of an exciting performance.  The sound that the player will express with his instrument is completely different.

As for mod wheel use, this has always been my ticket to keeping the samples sounding alive - by riding the mod wheel as I play.  I previously used the Yamaha SY-77 which had two mod wheels as well as a pitch bend which was very nice as you could assign the second wheel to any MIDI CC (although I'd ususally have to add the second wheel on a separate recording pass).  Moving to the Yamaha S90ES, with its single mod wheel was a bit disappointing to me although I do prefer the weighted keys.  Although I no longer have a wheel to control other parameters - riding a little slider on the S90 or an external box just isn't the same.  And while I also use foot pedals, my feet don't provide as much sensitivity - nor do I imagine Yo-Yo Ma's feet would, were he to try bowing with them!

Two things you don't mention (although I'm sure you cover) are pitch bend and tempo changes.  Adding slight pitch inflections to a performance seems important for many instruments, yet, you can't easily control both the mod wheel and the pitch wheel at the same time. Sometimes what we do reminds me of the ompa-ompa one-man-band performances I remember seeing as a child - somehow it was entertaining (and funny), but not musical - there's only so much one guy can do at a time.  Maybe its due to our controls being clunky though, because a concert performer can handle every aspect of his instrument, with its many parameters, all in real time in, and in such a musically expressive way.   With samples, to get a more musical performance in a single pass is tremendously frustrating to me. So I often resort to just allocating another track to add additional pitch or modulation data I play in a second pass.

As for tempo variations, I've been studying real orchestral performances recently and I'm amazed at very subtle variations in timing that I can hear.  They come both from individual instruments but also from the group as a whole.  What I'm talking about is different from tempo or dynamic markings within the piece - it has more to do with little nuances added by the interpretation of the phrases.  For example, a soloist with a passage ending in 16th notes might delay the first one slightly and then rush the last few as the rest of the orchestra comes back in.  In addition, I hear a similar thing going on with the entire orchestra.  There are so many subtle variations in tempo - yet, I can imagine how this works with the conductor guiding the orchestra.  However in our studios, we are the conductors although we don't have a way of convey performance nuances to all the instruments at once - we must record them track by track - and the results are not the same (for me).  They tend to be much more mechanical.  Even if you go in and add tempo mapping details.  So I realize there's something more subtle going on within the interpretation of each player.  And to emulate this is extremely difficult.  As samplists, we must conceive of these in advance, almost as part of the composition or we won't be able to get the whole orchestra to carry these together.  Its almost like the swing in Jazz but much more subtle - yet, just as noticeable when its missing.

Certainly its a struggle and a juggle to balance all these various aspects.  And like the ompa-ompa man, it seems rather absurd sometimes.  Yet, the challenge of trying to create a cohesive orchestral performance is fun.  And especially exciting to hear when someone like you comes so close to achieving this holy grail.

Thanks so much for sharing, my head is now as full as my stomach was on Thanksgiving last night.

Warmest regards,

Greg

Mike - thanks so much for the useful information.  Although I use velxfade on all legato instruments - I have never used it on the short articulations.   I am going to horse around with this today - the logic of 'many' small changes on 'every' note makes sense to get closer to a live performance.  Thanks again for sharing what works for you.

Rob