How to get the choir more "in your face"

[DaveTubaKing]

Im running a huge orchestra and choir with Sib and VSL. As usual practice I have the choir arranged in a big curve round the back of the orchestra. I'm using the Vienna Konzerthaus GrosserSaal Stage with the main microphone in the 7th row.

Despite turning the master volume on the choir up it sounds distant (almost off stage) and overwhelmed by the orchestra. How do I bring the Choir forward in the mix so that it is more "in your face"?

[herb]

 Easiest approach is to alter the wet/dry settings of all the choir instances.

A more out of the box solution is to place the choir in front of the orchestra.

By the way the size of the organ icons will not deliver a realistic sound approach.

The organ pipes are distributed over the whole size of the concert hall from left to right. So I would place the organ icons using the full width from left to right corner of the hall, simply overlaying the icon over the choir.

best

Herb

[DaveTubaKing]

Thanks, Herb, I've moved the choir down to 0.25 which makes some difference but I've still got their VE PRO volume right up and their written dynamics in sibelius at least one degree higher. Here is a 90 second extract of a quiet passage which works reasonably well but I think I will still struggle to get the choir big enbough in the big tuttis. The keyboards and percussion are still missing from this extract.

[winknotes_282]

I'm pretty new to MIR so this suggestion may not be relevant, but can you play around with the characteristics of the choir preset?  Maybe use direct sound or natural from the dropdown rather than pure?  I may not be using the right terms here.

That is a huge orchestra too by the way.  I understand you've got mutes and such but does that all run on one computer?

[DaveTubaKing]

@winknotes_282 said:

That is a huge orchestra too by the way.  I understand you've got mutes and such but does that all run on one computer?

Not with all VIs fully loaded (with Sibelius presets). I do one section at a time, optimise, then the next section. In that way the most RAM I'm using is about 18 of 24 which when the full orchestra is going full blast (and 8 thread hyperthreading is enabled) pushes CPU to 60-65 and core temp to 60+ degrees. Latency is 512.

You can see my specs below. I could do with 48 GBs of RAM but am happy to be able to work with what I've got. VSL/Sibelius rocks big time as does Kaikhosru Sorabji. I'm having a whale of a time.

[winknotes_282]

I don't see anyone's specs or signatures on this forum.  I'm not sure why. 

At any rate that's great.  I'm a Finale user myself and am having pretty good luck with SE and MIR. I only have 8GB RAM but can play a full orchestra with my latency set to 1024.  I'm getting ready to move my samples to an SSD which I think is a cost effective way to make better use of resources and improve performance. 

Anyway good luck.  On another note I don't suppose you're keeping an eye on what notation product Steinberg is developing are you?  It seems the future of both software packages we use is shaky at best.

[DaveTubaKing]

@winknotes_282 said:

I don't see anyone's specs or signatures on this forum.  I'm not sure why. 

At any rate that's great.  I'm a Finale user myself and am having pretty good luck with SE and MIR. I only have 8GB RAM but can play a full orchestra with my latency set to 1024.  I'm getting ready to move my samples to an SSD which I think is a cost effective way to make better use of resources and improve performance. 

Anyway good luck.  On another note I don't suppose you're keeping an eye on what notation product Steinberg is developing are you?  It seems the future of both software packages we use is shaky at best.

Here's my specs

Yes I'm very intrigued to see what happens at Steinberg. Daniel spreadbury was Sibelius and I'm sure he takes a huge loyalty following with him to Steinberg and Avid/Sibelius have shot themselve's in the foot big time just to save a few Bucks.

[Dietz]

Hi Dave,

Like Herb wrote already, getting the choir more upfront in a MIR Pro setup can be achieved by several approaches:

- making it louder (doh! ;-) ...)

- increasing the volume of the dry signal by means of the Icon's Dry/Wet balance

- using one of the Character Presets that emphasize the treble and / or upper mids (Air / Silver / Bite)

- moving the respective Icon closer towards the Main Microphone

Additionally you can always use processors like a dedicated EQ (MIR Pro comes with a mastering-grade EQ-plugin of its own!) or maybe even a compressor. It goes without saying that all of this depends a lot on the context and the arrangement.

                                                          *****

A sidenote: Looking at the screenshot in your initial message, it seems as you're hesitant to use the option to rotate an instrument on the stage to a different direction than 0° ... you miss a lot of MIR's unique sonic possibilities. The Directivity Profiles (which are one of the most important aspects of MIR's Instrument Profiles)  will allow for - sometimes surprisingly different! - sounds coming from one and the same source (... you ARE using the dedicated Instrument Profiles for each Icon, aren't you?)

Just look at this screenshot  of "Herb's Teldex Setup" to get the idea:

I also see that you're using different positions for the same groups of instrument using sordinos or mutes ... while this is a perfectly valid way to do it, I would put those Icons on the same spot and "Hide" the one I don't use at the moment.

In a nutshell, I wouldn't stick to a purely visual approach when building a MIR setup. Try different positions on a stage, try different stereo-width settings, try to rotate an instrument to make its sound "interesting" and "strong".

... there are some collected hints in MIR Pro's Preliminary Manual on p. 55 ff, called "Getting That Sound".

Kind regards,

[DaveTubaKing]

Thanks Andi, some very useful tips there.

I've laboriously changed the Instrument direction to a normal set up. I think it sounds better although I wouldn't go as far as to say it's "...surprisingly different".

I'm a little confused about the "dedicated instrument profiles" Here's a screen shot The 1st Orchestral Violins. Is this right. It's the default VE PRO5 setting.

[herb]

It seems you don't have applied any instrument profiles. Your screenshot shows a "99c Cardioid" profile, I guess it's the default profile when adding a track to MIR. The instrument name on top of the pict is just your track name no profile.

When an insrument profile has been  applied you won't see the Cardioid graphic, it will be replaced with a matching pict of the instrument. In your examples multiple violin picts.

Selecting all Icons and then right mouse click on one icon (with pressing alt key to apply changes to all selected icons), will open a list. Here select "Guess" entry, and than for all tracks the correct instrument profiles will be applied. It's an automated feature which scans the loaded patches inside your VI instances and selects the corresponding profiles. You can select also manually out of the list below the "Guess " entry, but that's much more time consuming.

Now it's also clear why your organ icons are using wrong width-sizes. The instrument profiles are also applying correct width for instruments (which ofcourse can be altered afterwards)

When my descriptions are too confusing I'd recomment to read the related chapters of the MIR manual carefully.

best

Herb

[Beat Kaufmann]

@Dietz said:

Like Herb wrote already, getting the choir more upfront in a MIR Pro setup can be achieved by several approaches:

- making it louder (doh! 😉 ...)

- increasing the volume of the dry signal by means of the Icon's Dry/Wet balance

- using one of the Character Presets that emphasize the treble and / or upper mids (Air / Silver / Bite)

- moving the respective Icon closer towards the Main Microphone

- use a compressor for the choir (for the sum) before putting it into the stage of MIR

Beat