@Dominique said:

On a flute, for example, the higher register can go much louder than the lowest register.... Natural Volume feature in MIR... won't account for the cases where you play the lowest note on the flute, and assign a cc 1 value of 127. It will be too loud compared to the rest of the instruments (simply because the low notes of the flute in VSL have the same dynamic range as the high notes, which in reality, they haven't).

This is natural or unnatural?

[url]https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5ZYXb_HdIQhYXc2ZGVSUlRBVDA/view?usp=sharing[/url]

DG and Dominique,

You have me so confused now. You're saying the current Natural Volume in MIR is a good start but breaks down in some cases. Can you give me a specific example of a case where it's imperfect? Please tell me which instruments to play simultaneously, at which specific pitches and velocities, so that I get unnatural results?

@Dominique said:

As I'm currentlly abroad I can't give you such an example until midweek. I'll try to do it then.

Looking forward to it, at your convenience.

Ok, I came up with something here:

Balance snippet

It's a snippet from a classical piece, playing twice. One is a recording, one is a mockup I made. Can you tell which is which? Which snippet do you like better, and why? Is there something that strikes you as unnatural in one or both of the snippets?

Don't worry, these are no catch questions and there are no wrong answers. I'm just really interested how this is perceived. And I hope it can help us discussing a thing or two about natural volume and balancing.

Not sure what this is really about. Hair-splitting and arguing semantics?

Natural volume is a nice feature that gives you a general guideline. It's a time saver. It's there to get you in the right ballpark quickly. But it can't eliminate the necessary task of arranging and mixing music - just like there can never be a go-to channel strip plugin preset that says "apply great professional mix to the track"; and actually does what it promises.

The CC7 of all my VI Pro instances are set to 127 by default. Natural volume is on and I do what I feel that needs to be done with expression and vel-xfade. Everything eventually ends up being rendered to audio before mixing anyway, the good old-fashioned way.  Every single project is completely individual in terms of fader volumes, groupings, EQ, processing etc. Sometimes, the results are OK, sometimes not so much, but it's not, and cannot be, the job of a plugin or software feature to make sure that my music sounds acceptable through automation and preset values. Keeping trying, making crappy mixes, improving and continuing to learn - it's all one can do.

No amount of sophisticated software, compulsory and scientifically sound numerical values and creatively named features can relieve you of the necessity of making senseful musical decisions, riding your faders and using your ears. Using one's ears - I realize it's a scary thought, especially in the world of digital DAW music production and the phenomena of "visual" and "numerical" mixing it eintails. But it's just the way it is. Mixing music isn't color by numbers.

@Another User said:

I'm just really interested how this is perceived. And I hope it can help us discussing a thing or two about natural volume and balancing.

I'm stuck on statements made by you and DG, which I quoted in my two most recent posts. Without clarification, I don't understand why you and DG believe VSL's Natural Volume is imperfect.

@Another User said:

We're talking about things unrelated to human perception, things which would still exist even if robots or a plague killed all the humans. That, at least, is how I meant the topic when I personally created it. There are so many other threads for people to talk about art and human-perception. This is probably the least appropriate thread for that. Hijacking the thread to muse about art is disrespectful.... This thread is about objective levels and has absolutely nothing to do with how those levels are percevied by any human's ear. Pretend an asteroid killed all the humans, for this thread. We're just talking about sound waves in a hypothetical world with no humans.

 

As people continue to misunderstand this topic, I'll continue to clarify that it's unrelated to human perception. It's just about numbers in DAW's and pressure-waves moving through air, not about humans. If I could make that clear using fewer words, I would.

I see this this forum is short on people who comprehend that the natural world doesn't revolve around them (cf. the Catholic Church's attack on Galileo when he heretically suggested the Universe doesn't revolve around the earth), so I'll just try to step back and observe the artists express their grandiose, egocentric views about audio engineering.

@BachRules said:

No one's suggested it can. On the contrary, post after post after painful post, I point out that arrangement and mixing are totally irrelevant to this specialized topic.

I realize that you took the effort to point that out, but I'd argue that the sentiment is mistaken. Why would you ever be concerned about relations of volume if not in the context of musical arrangement, balance of orchestration and the mix. I mean you can do it if it brings you joy or whatever, but in the context of music making, it's idle.

@Another User said:

Why would you ever be concerned about relations of volume if not in the context of musical arrangement, balance of orchestration and the mix.... I mean you can do it if it brings you joy or whatever

I hadn't even known I needed your permission.

@BachRules said:

I hadn't even known I needed your permission.

Yeah, I was keeping that a secret too ... 😛

@Another User said:

As people continue to misunderstand this topic, I'll continue to clarify that it's unrelated to human perception. It's just about numbers in DAW's and pressure-waves moving through air, not about humans. If I could make that clear using fewer words, I would.

@Another User said:

Once you introduce art, taste, and creativity into a discussion, the discussion is bound to degenerate into nonsense.... But science -- e.g., audio engineering and computer science -- is different, and it has rules, and when I have a question about science and someone tries to change the subject to art, I will always attempt to redirect the discussion back to the topic: science. Thanks for understanding.

Thanks for understanding, everyone. If you cannot imagine Newtonian Mechanics functioning without humans to perceive it and artists to adjust it, you are incompetent for this topic. If you feel Newton was all about "hair-splitting and arguing semantics", please allow me to show you to the appropriate thread for you:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ESLC6i5.png[/img]

What will be the next self-absorbed, vapid lout's excuse for prattling about his art in this thread.

@BachRules said:

If you set your volume faders all to the the same level, turn on Natural Volume, and use only velocity (and instrument-positioning in the MIR room) to control loudness, your will get combinations of timbres limited to the combinations which are possible in the real world.

No, that is not correct, because it ignores the differing dynamic range of instruments. There is probably one dynamic at which this is true, but as I have no idea as to how the Natural Volumes were calculated, I have no idea which dynamic it would be.

I'm not understanding your point. Not disagreeing with you, but I don't understand what you mean....

... the dynamic ranges of VI are not really accurate. For example the dynamic range of a Flute is far less than say a Trumpet, but in the VI player the difference is less severe than it should be. Maybe this is something that the VSL guys could comment on and possibly give figures as to how the normalisation (for want of a better word) has been achieved....

If my assertion in the inner quote is incorrect, there should be an example of specific settings where Natural Volume results in unnatural timbral combinations. If no such example surfaces, I'm going to chalk this up as superstition or unsubstantiated rumor.

BachRules,

let me put it this way: for obvious reasons, I find your use of terms like "egomaniac", "babbling", "self-absorbed" and "vapid" quite amusing. I'm sure you'll figure it out. Look at it as a chance for personal growth. It's not science, after all, isn't it?

@JimmyHellfire said:

BachRules,

let me put it this way: for obvious reasons, I find your use of terms like "egomaniac", "babbling", "self-absorbed" and "vapid" quite amusing. I'm sure you'll figure it out. Look at it as a chance for personal growth. It's not science, after all, isn't it?

That's deep, man, because I'm the one prattling about his art in a thread where it's irrelevant. Except it was you not I who really did that.

So you bought a DAW and learned how to move the faders, and from there BAM you inferred the entire natural world depends on your operation of the faders, and anything less is "hair-splitting and semantics".

You saw the earlier talk about worlds where there are no humans to perceive air-pressure waves, and that hypothesis was too much for your ego to bear, so you pretended it never happened and you charged in slack-jawed insisting how important you are to the functioning of audio.

And when someone asks about the operation of MIR's Natural Volume feature, there you are like a drooling Pavlovian dog preaching, "Hey it's not some magic do-your-mix-for-you button," and you preach this despite no one ever having suggested it was.

You're so distracted by your own mixing practices, you can't comprehend that there's such an objective phenomenon as Natural Volume that's independent of you and your mixing. And you'll remain ignorant because you'd rather attack than take the time to figure out wtf the words "Natural Volume" really mean (not what you assumed).

No one asked you about magic do-your-mix-for-you buttons. That's just some music-forum cliche you memorized before this thread started, and you'd see it's irrelevant if you read the thread.

In summary, you move your DAW faders until you like how it sounds, and you feel compelled to announce that mundanity to the world, even when you're disrespectfully hijacking unrelated discussions.

Yeah, I bought a DAW. Smart move, I'd say. I also went to the university and had my joyful drills about SPL, sound travel, room acoustics and all the related sorcery. I might be the wrong person to push your sciolism pissing contest on to. Whatever. It's not important.

You can puff up and verbosely posture all you want - expecting software to do a job you're fearful of attacking yourself is exactly why you made this thread. Also, your questions have already been answered - by Dietz among others. My own post that hit your snooty nerve so much actually just echoed that. Take it or leave it. I'm gonna have a productive day today, perhaps you should try the same.

To come back to my snippet: it's an excerpt from Tchaikovsky's 6. symphony (first movement, just before the development section starts). You were right, the first snippet is my mock-up, the second one the recording. If you listen closely, you can hear that there's a big difference between the two when the bassoon takes over the line from the clarinet. In the mock-up, the transition is smooth and the bassoon plays it even a little more quiet than the clarinet (as it should be according to the score). In the recording however, the bassoon sticks out like a sore thumb. It's much louder than the clarinet instead of even quieter.

Now, there's the problem. You could actually say that the mockup sounds better in that aspect. But it's not 'natural'. A bassoon can not play as quietly in it's low register, whereas the clarinet can play very quietly over it's whole range. That's why this particular motiv is almost always played on a bass clarinet instead of a bassoon (eventhough Tchaikovsky asked for a bassoon).

Anyway, here comes a problem for the 'natural volume' feature. If you wanted to restrict your sample instruments to only what they can play in reality, VSL would have to delete the pp layer for the bassoon's lowest register. So for example, when playing in the bassoon's low register with a volume of, say, 22, there should either be now sound at all or one that is much louder than the requested. I can only imagine the complaints VSL would get if that was the case. And that's but one example. If VSL applied this logic rigorously through all instruments, their libraries would be very inconsistent and tedious to learn. You'd always have to ask yourself: 'oh, why can't I do that particular thing. Ah, yes, it is because this instrument can't play a trill on these two notes'.

And another thing why 'natural volume' can't account for each and every situation. In a real orchestra, the players listen to each other and balance their volume and pitch accordingly. When a horn section of 4 players has a ff marking, in one case they will play with all their force at 120 db (for instance when there are a lot of other instruments around, all playing very loudly too). In another case however, despite having the same marking of ff, they may only play at 90 db (when they are playing in a smaller setting, for example, or when another instrument has the main line and should be heard clearly over them). That's because dynamic markings in a score are no scientific instruction, but always depend on the context. And the 'natural volume' VSL provides can never respond to context. That's the users job, really. Despite your claims that 'natural volume' is a measurable, invariable quantity, it isn't. The balance between the instruments depends on the context. Like it or not, but you yourself will have to take it into account and adjust some things accordingly.

Software can only get you so far. There's no way around learning about the individual instruments you are using if you want a 'natural' sounding orchestration, and balance. So I'd advise to pick up a book about orchestration and learn the basics. That way VSL's 'natural volume' will still be a timesaver (because you don't have to set up everything from ground, but only tweak a thing or two depending on the context of your music), but you won't depend totally upon it. And you could use whatever sample library you'd want, not just the ones with 'natural volume'.

Hi everyone !

I had written a long and thorough explanation of my point of view, and then accidentally closed the window ^^.

In short : I understand Bachrules’ « quest », and I agree with him when he says there is a natural volume. It’s the world of physics, sound is like light, there are rules which are completely objective (at least in our macroscopic world ^^).

I too wanted that « ready to go » orchestra, and I was often mock or considered as a « do my mix » kind of guy.

But since, in the end, I completely nailed it and was utterly right, that’s ok ^^.

First, there’s one thing which really doesn’t exist : ABSOLUTE natural volume. You don’t know « where » is the silence on a computer. You only have a ceiling. You don’t control the listener’s volume.

However, there is a RELATIVE natural balance between instruments. But first things first, before even touching a volume fader, you have to check the dynamic range of all your instruments, so that something balanced in pp is still balanced in ff.

Since even a single instrument has different dynamic range depending on the note played, the best way to consider the dynamic range of a whole instrument is to get the difference between the softest sound and the strongest one, regardless of the played note (weakest and strongest register, respectively). So you have to search a little bit^^.

Once you have your different dynamic ranges set up, you can finally move your volume faders.

But for all this work, I needed data. That’s where internet comes in^^.

I did some digging, found some interesting sources and create my own interactive excel document to balance virtual orchestras. Since it’s still a bit buggy, I just posted pictures on this post, so you have the « theorical » setup.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4695665/Theorical%20dynamic%20range.pdf

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4695665/Theorical%20setup.pdf

First, the Theorical dynamic range of the main orchestral instruments. One cool thing about dynamic range is that it doesn’t depend on the distance with the listener. It’s the « instrument distance with itself » so it’s an objective data. Sure, in real world, the background noise can « swallow » the softer notes, diminishing the effective dynamic range, but there is no background noise on a computer ^^ (unless you use Mir’s ^^).

Then, the Theorical volume. Instruments are considered « dry », before spatial placement of any kind. Their volume is based on the ppp of the clarinet, since it’s the softest sound of all the winds. Once you set up this correctly, you have to had the « distance correction » on the volume of the instruments (as for myself, since I use mir pro, i let it decrease the volume with the distance of the microphone, but I don’t use natural volume). As a rule of thumb, multiplying the distance of an instrument by 2 is equal to -6dB. (Give or take). For convenience, I usually consider that my « dry » instruments are 1 meter away. Works well enough.

PS : I only use vienna strings (dimension, mostly), with xfader on. In this configuration, the vsl instruments are NOT normalized, and have strong and weak register, like a normal instrument would (but it may only be that the xfader plays with the volume). For the rest, i’m mostly using sample modeling and modartt ‘s instruments.

PPS : of course, this is a theorical setup. The datas I found are not always very precise, and I even filled the gaps myself. I’m sure it can be improved. But I truly believe it’s a solid base that allows for direct artistic work. The only changes I make on my setup are for artistic purposes, never technical ones. 

Here are some short audio examples. I didn't mix them at all afterwards. The mix is completely "calculated" ^^.