I could be mistaken, but check to make sure the artiiculation is changing BEFORE the note change, on portamento. Playing an E, lets say for 4 bars, then a C for the next 4 bars. If you set the articulation to change right at the start of the 2nd measure, ie. the C, sometimes Synchron doesnt catch it. Instead, I set the articulation to change say 1/16th of a beat before the start of the second measure.

I think the reason is, Synchron doesnt have a 30 ms delay before it plays a note, VI does. This means, if you set an articulation change at exactly the same point that the note changes, VI has a 30 ms lead time to change the articulation, whereas Synchron does not.

I havent confirmed this theory, and it may not be the answer to your question, but you might try changing the articulation just a fraction of a beat before the note change happens and see if that works.

Originally Posted by: Acclarion

Thanks, Bill!  This was one of the bigger projects I've been working on, and it's funny, but the more I think about it, music might be one of the only pursuits where more work=less reward.  Case in point:  I spent a significant amount of time on the midi for this piece, which has been met with absolute silence on every online outlet I've shared it (your comment being the only exception).  However, short 2-3 minute tracks always generate some activity (and are a lot easier to put together than something like this!) 

It's sad to me that this type of music rarely finds an audience, and that many people don't feel confident talking about it and/or listening to it in the first place. It always feels like we write artistically for ourselves and our fellow artists, when it would be really nice for it to connect with non-performers (this piece, for example has already received a bunch of positive feedback from some musician friends I sent it to, but zero from the general public).

Rant over :)

Dave

My sentiments exactly. I write because I feel and want to express that, and want to share that expression. What non-musicians dont understand is, we write to share. Just as we like to speak in places where we are being heard, the same is the case with music.

I am sure no one here needs to hear this, music is a universal language, expressing emotion and story to anyone, regardless of race, religion, creed, etc.

I have reached the conclusion that, I am writing for myself. Even music I have written and shared here has received so little feedback, yet, I dedicated months of my life to its creation. What I write is a little different than what folks here tend to write, which is more classically themed (I tend to write cinematic, very dynamic volume changes, and in many cases, much more simplistic than what I commonly hear here). I shared an arrangement of Amazing Grace, which I posted on various groups including here, facebook, twitter, music composer groups I am involved with on Facebook, etc. and crickets is all I heard, with I think 1 response here. I spent a month and a half on it, in conjunction with working a full time job and a full time school schedule.

I often wonder if we have become so jaded and consumed in our own ventures to look at what else is going on?

We as people seek validation. We want, we need to know that we are headed in the right direction, and unfortunately, even musicians consistently forget this.

I only have one comment on your piece specifically, forgive my lack of further insight, but, this feels a bit like a more busy Debussy? I am curious if that was intentional?

Okies, it turns out I use this all the time, just didnt realize what it was called. Bummer that the SE editions dont have non-vibrato samples

Ill have to look and see if the special edition libraries have non-vibrato samples, Ive never used crossfade, havent really fully understood what it is doing...

I am in love with your Cornet. There is something about it, and in my opinion, it doesnt get the recognition it deserves. It blends really well, it also cuts through a mix like nothing else.

However, before I purchase, and I suspect I wont get to purchase it while the sale is on, I have a question.

One of the three demos doesnt seem to work (the one by Guy Bacos, Romantic Blues). I ended up downloading the MP3 file, but just letting you know the demo file isnt working. By the way, holy cow, listening to it while I type, Guy does something just magical with the strings in this piece.

More important than the above is my question, is there vibrato control for your full libraries? Im talking about controlling the speed (how fast a full cycle between starting at a fundamental tone, going above, back to the fundamental, then below, then finally back to the fundamental tone, occurs) and intensity (how many cents both above and below the fundamental tone will occur).

I think I have seen every video on your website and I have never seen vibrato controls mentioned. It seems to me that provided you have notes recorded flat with no vibrato, it would and should be easy enough to electronically alter the two parameters I mentioned above. Sure, it maybe wont be as "pure" as if the vibrato is baked in, but I dont think anyone would notice the difference.

This sounds like you have a note playing immediately at the start of the song. Most DAWS for whatever reason, will not consistantly play a note that starts at the beginning of a track. I dont know why. This is why the usual recommendation is to shift everything one measure in, and when you do the conversion to notation, select your range of measures starting with measure 2.

I dont use cakewalk, but another option is to set the piano roll to the highest resolution setting (in Cubase, this is I believe 1/128) and offset the note just a smidge from the starting location. It wont be noticeable to the listener, and its an easy fix for notation software to correct the notation of the first note. In fact, most modern notation software has fuzzy logic and will just round the duration up, so if you were playing a note that started at 2/128 and played to 128/128, it would just round that up to a quarter note.

For whatever reason, most DAW software wont actually get the resolution to as fine as the MIDI spec allows for, which is x/479 per beat (479/479 is equivalent to a quarter note for whatever time signature you are in).

I didnt see any attached image, but on occasion, I end up having to reset MIDI for occasional glitches like this. I dont end up with stuck notes, I end up with stuck CC data. MIDI is like an over complicated house of cards, its amazing it hasnt fallen apart. The whole thing feels so fragile. I wonder if that isnt what is happening with your CC7 data. Do you have any way of looking at what the realtime value is for a specific CC?

Originally Posted by: jasensmith

It's an interesting arrangement and I think it sounds pretty darn good.

Also those Special Edition collections are sounding better and better as time goes on.

BTW how did you get that footage? Is that some stock footage you found somewhere? They didn't let you fly a drone through Arlington National Cemetery did they?

Thanks :)

This took alot of massaging to get them to sound nearly realistic, there are a few parts that a trained ear will probably hear right away, 1 spot in the second verse, the beginning of the key change, and the grand canyonn pan / flag shot, and maybe a few other places, but I feel like I am getting a much better idea of how to do this.

As to the footage, it all came from Youtube, each scene from longer clips that I cut out to string together the video you see.

The Declaration is actually just an image, and I programmed the movie software I use to pan down the image.

There was also the dilema of watermarks, many of the clips contained watermarks, and I wanted clean video with no distracting and ugly watermarks, so I zoomed in slightly so that the watermarks were not visible in the video, for example, the slow pan of Lincoln at the beginning (which is why the top of his head is slightly cut off haha). One video, I used the same technique of zooming into the image, because the drone propeller was visible in the video (the Mount Rushmore flyby).

Finally, the video needed to line up correctly, so I time stretched some of the video clips to make it timed exactly to the music. The Lincoln video was time stretched, the Declaration was programmed, so no stretching required, and everything else was the left alone all the way until the very end, starting with the grand canyon where I had to stretch that scene and the flag scene I think I sped that up, and the jet flyby was also sped up dramatically.

As to the cemetery footage, this is not Arlington, I believe it is a cemetery in Georgia, where they built a replica of the reflecting pool and washington monument, this is what you see just after the key change / modulation. The actual real Washington Monument is significantly taller, and the real reflecting pool is significantly bigger.

Arlington does not allow photography without a permit, which is why there is very little amateur footage available of it.

The video editing itself was done with Vegas Studio, and I used a plugin for Firefox to download the video, and an online video editor to cut out the parts I wanted from the videos I downloaded. Once I had everything, it was relatively easy to just drag and drop everything in, and once I learned how to use the software, the time stretching, text, and zooming was very easy and straight forward to do, as well as programming the pan across the image. Vegas Studio was made for this exact sort of thing, it seems to have everything you could ever want for putting together a video collage, with exception to font choices and font animating (programming animated text is a pain in the butt, so I didnt do this... I originally wanted to use a handwriting font for the text at the beginning of the video).

Anyway, more info than you probably wanted to know haha...this was my first time using Vegas, and probably my 10th complete composition, Im starting to really get the hang of it.

This is an arrangement of Amazing Grace, that Ive been working on the past few weeks (in honor of the psuedo 9/11 holiday coming up here in the states). It uses mostly Vienna special edition, but I had to go outside this library for a few sounds that Vienna doesnt have, for example, wood blocks (I had to use Cinesamples percussion for this, all other percussion is from Vienna Special Edition). I also used Cinematic Studio Strings in lieu of Special Edition 3, because I can shorten the attack time, which I was never able to figure out how to do with the SE 3 collection. Probably about 70-80% of this is Vienna Special Edition, which I think makes it worthy of posting here.

Anyway, this is work I am REALLY proud of, by far, my best work. I can hear a few things that could be better, but hey, the way I figure, only I can hear those things considering I lived with this arrangement for the past month. The general public probably wont hear anything wrong...

Amazing Grace

When processor usage spikes to 100%, you realize the PC becomes unstable and unusable, right? Not sure how I can do that. For now, Ive limited the amount of CPU that Ensemble can use to 85% to give me headroom to make the machine usable enough to save my project should it happen again

I know I saw another thread that referenced this but I cant seem to find it...

I have a fairly large project I am working on, with about 45 tracks in it, mixed with a combination of Kontakt, Synchron Player, and VI Player instances loaded, All told, just over 20 gb of instruments loaded into memory.

When leaving my PC idle and coming back to it later, I frequently come back to find my PC unresponsive and my CPU usage pegged at 100%, coming from VEP7 according to the Win10 task manager. Windows 10 updates are all installed, all Vienna software is updated, Cubase is version 10.3.

This is both frustrating as I frequently have to reload the project, which is a time laden process (I can walk my dog and come back to find my project is still not loaded).

Adding to this is the frustrating five plus minutes that VEP7 takes to scan for plugins, especially considering I dont have many plugins installed (just whatever Vienna brings along in VEP7, Instruments, Synchron player and Synchron piano, whatever Steinberg brings along with Cubase 10 Pro, Kontakt 6, and Eastwest play engine), all on a core i7 processor with 32 gb of ram.

Has anyone else experienced these two issues?

Also wondering, how much RAM should I have installed? I was thinking 32 gb would be enough, but maybe I should increase it to 64 gb? I expect to be working with very large projects going forward...

Dont misunderstand, I didnt mean to imply earlier music was less refined. It was just that music had rules that were set by the Catholic church. Madrigals came long after chants, which were originally monophonic (one note per syllable) and later developed into polyphonic and imitative polyphony. It wasnt until later, when different churches wanted to be different that they began to break the rules and try to be different. This is actually what set Notre Dame apart from other churches. Since the only rule for chants from the Catholic church was that they sing the words that were written on the page, Notre Dame, in order to be different, extended each syllable into ridiculously long and changing notes per syllable, but there was no concept of dynamics. Then, early instrumentation was introduced, instruments like the organ and clavichord and later, the harpsichord were introduced that have no ability to change dynamics were introduced.

This is one example of one of these chants, written by Hildegard. The many notes per syllable was used to differentiate and distinguish churches from one another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-xhStMloyo

Even madrigals do not feature dynamics other than loud and soft (forte and piano, denoted in the score by f and p, for those that dont read music). As a side note, my favourite madrigal... it makes me laugh every time I hear it... Fair Phyllis :) The part that makes me laugh, the last line *giggle*...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE_7aqtgquo

This is a fantastic resource I am sure ya'll are aware of, imlsp. They have original scans of scores for, well, any pre-modern era song I have ever looked for, as well as midi and mp3 recordings, you can verify what Im saying about pre-romantic era music, and yes, they even have chants you can look up.

https://imslp.org/

It isnt that early music was bad, its that was much more tightly structured and as such, lacked variety. Heck, this is what composers in the modern era were trying to get away from is this tight structure. I would argue, much of these attempts were complete garbage, Schoenbergs later atonal music sounds like noise to me, but Debussy,, while his music lacked much structure, was at least tonal and pleasant.

My point is, music has developed since its origin. It doesnt mean chants are not beautiful, it means they lack complexity and dynamics. As music developed, the idea of loud and soft were introduced, and later, even more nuanced dynamics were introduced.

The intrinsic question is, who is the person that defines the originality of a piece of music? For classical music, it is the entire point of having the score. If the score only has piano and forte, then those are the only two dynamics that should be used if following the score. Anything outside of that is interpretation. Its like reading a book out loud. If I add my own words, am I still reading the book? Since books lack any way to tell the reader how loud or soft to read the words, or how quickly or slowly to read the words, or with what vocal inflections to read the words, that is left to the reader to determine. However, since scores do actually indicate piano and forte, it is reasonable to assume that if a passage is denoted as piano, it should not be played as pianissimo or mezzo piano, it should be played as piano.

The only part of this I would debate is, wasnt the entire point of written music to more accurately play the piece as the composer intended? I will grant you that taste is an important aspect to this, but this is definitely going to be in conflict when multiple players are involved and while a conducter has a large role to play in this, it still leads a very big window of interpretation and vaguery to it all.

Of course, forte is loud, but what exactly does that mean? Of course, that interpretation is up to each player, but that is why more nuanced dynamics were developed, so that the composer could be a bit more specific in that he meant just a little quieter than loud, thus, mezzo forte.

Things like crescendos and decrescendos were developed to create more emotion. I mean, after all, this is one of the defining differences between the Renaissance and Romantic era is more emotion in music. In fact, if you discount Beethoven, who was ahead of his time by a quarter of a century, the entire notion of soft and loud is all composers knew. Composers like Haydn even wrote pieces that literally toyed with the extremes, for example, Haydn composed two specific pieces that toyed with dynamics and tempo: "Surprise" and "Joke".

I dont know, I might be totally off base, I admit, my knowledge of music from this era is not as good as it could be, but it seems to me, I can generally tell the difference in the two eras simply by asking, is there varied tempo or dynamics? If there is, it likely came from the Romantic era (along with the other question of what instruments are here that didnt exist in the Renaissance era).

NP... Just be aware, they added another update as well for SE5, if you didnt see it. It wasnt there yesterday when I did the volume 6 update so if you have SE VI volume 5, you should install that too.

It looks like three total updates...

SE Synchron Volume 6

SE VI Volume 5

SE VI Volume 6

Ooo, ok... update installed, very much enjoying the heck out of the SE dim brass. How is it you guys are the first ones to figure out that recording each player individually gives...how do I describe this...

My music teacher in high school once said, woodwinds add the sparkle to an orchestra. You cant usually pick them out specifically, but much like a coat of wax on a car, its noticeable if they arent there.

Can we get an idea of what the update changes? It shows a date of August 2nd, took me a bit to figure out how to install the update for the SE Vi instruments, for those that have trouble with this, start menu, scroll to Vienna Instruments / Vienna Instruments Pro, inside that folder you'll find Directory manager, drag the unzipped downloaded file on top of the Directory manager and it should install after answering yes to the prompts. The Synchron SE6 update installs automatically if you choose "open" when you download the update file via the download manager.

I plan on purchasing a license for SE 7 in a couple weeks. VSL tapped my limited funds releasing dim strings and dim brass back to back, and since I am a student working a nearly minimum wage job with classes starting in a couple weeks, college expenses are coming up due soon. I dont make money from writing music, this is all a very, very expensive hobby for me.

VSL will be getting alot of money out of me this year, I plan on MIR Pro if they ever decide to put it on sale again (which likely wont be in September, because I have a sneaky suspicion, Synchron Woodwinds is coming and / or possibly some variant of Dimension Woodwinds, the latter of which will mean a special edition of woodwinds... so much money *cries*... It isnt all bad, if they release a special edition dimension winds, I can finally write some mixed flute and oboe parts with more realism...).

Anyway, I have a newfound appreciation for 17th and early 18th century music, even if these composers only understood soft and loud with no other variants. Im really excited to get my hands on SE 7, and if they offered a demo, Id do the 30 day demo while I wait the two weeks until money once again comes in to buy a license...

Interesting! I am thinking about buying this so the explanation of a crumhorn helps :)

Meh, people are way too impatient. Ive been using them on a 2 tb spinning disk and it works just fine. Only load times that are pretty darn lengthy is dimension strings synchron and the steinway synchron. The others are significantly smaller and load relatively quick. I use this one drive ONLY for Vienna libraries and EastWest creative cloud libraries and anytime a new library is installed, I do a tight defrag of the drive using disktrix ultimate defrag to keep performance as good as possible, and this also forces the content on the drive to be rewritten periodically, preventing the so-called "bit rot" condition that drives can develop when data sits for too long in one location.

I can load a full Synchron special edition blank template (not counting the dimension strings / dimension brass / historic winds / piano) in around 8 minutes using the plus edition varity of instruments. Synchron shows about 12 gb of data loaded when the template finishes, again, not counting the items mentioned in parenthesis. If I add those, the memory footprint and load time doubles.

Of course, I dont typically write for a full orchestra so I dont load a full blank template, I usually load instruments as I need them and its probably around 20-30 seconds per instrument to load one isntrument.

Couple of things, because this question inevitably pops up (Paul, you've had this question come up enough times, you should have this in your original post :)  ).

Crossgrade prices, 240 Euros for the VI Dimension Brass and 35 Euros for the crossgrade to get the Synchron edition, in case anyone is looking for what the pricing is on the crossgrade. You have to buy the VI version first to get the discount on the Synchron edition (special note on this in the next paragraph). There is no upgrade path if you buy the Synchron edition first and try to get the VI edition afterwards (although, Im sure the sales staff at Vienna will work something out with you if you do it in reverse).

The special note, if you add the VI and Synchronized edition to your basket and buy at the same time, it will apply the discount (you can add them in any order, just note that the Synchron edition wont show the 35 Euro price on the product description page if you add it first, but it WILL show as 35 Euros on the checkout page when you go to pay, provided you have also added the VI edition).

Historic Winds work the same, 195 Euros for the VI, 25 Euros for the crossgrade.

Also, what the hell is a "crumhorn"?

Originally Posted by: Cyril Blanc

The Orchestra is a nice piece of software.

With the new version you can export Midi generated sequences into your DAW

see : https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=zfSUWygrPR0

You can prepare your piece of music in The Orchestra and play it with VSL instruments if needed !

Yup, I have it :) Its great! Was hoping that the good folks here at Vienna would take a look at it and see if they could write something similar. It has been invaluable for me in both the creative process and learning how to make an orchestra sound

Did you make sure Enemble has the correct path for wherever you put the dll and do a rescan?

Options -> Preferences

Plugins (on the left side of the new window that opens)

Make sure the Effects tab is selected at the top, then hit the VST Settings button at the bottom.

Click Add folder if the folder you put the dll in does not exist in the window.

Hit the rescan all button once the folder you placed the dll in shows in the window.

Then, close all the preferences windows and in the Ensemble mixer screen (left side, usually the top left most thingy selected), find the channel you want to put the reverb on and click on the longer box right below the instrument name (on the far left, this box will be labeled as FX). In the new window that appears, you should be able to see your reverb plugin there.

Originally Posted by: jjmus

I've still time to purchase all my special editions as crossgrade to the new format at a good price. Could I ask Is this worth doing ? I like something that is intuitive and easy to set up and doesn't get in the way of the composing flow. The end focus is always on a live orchestra playing the works, I just use vsl for composing and mocking up the piece for the performares.

Thanks

Jill

It has been well worth the upgrade, but I do recommend turning off two of the three reverbs (I think each loads with two of the three reverbs as on by default). What makes Synchron nice is how quickly you are up and running. Since all of the instruments are pre-eqd (meaning, they dont sound flat and empty like the VI instruments do) and the panning is correctly done for you out of the box, you can have a good start right away. Of course, you loose the flexibility with Synchron for tweaking, you get to keep your VI library so if you still wanted to do this, you can. Of course, also, the eq'ing is negated if you have MirX / MIR Pro, so there is that to consider. If you have one of the variants of MIR, the real thing you have to consider is whether you like the Synchron stage sound (bigger, more film score oriented) and whether the UI suits you. Personally, Im not a fan of the UI, but Ive been learning to get around it, I think the UI looks cheesy, but that might just be me. The other major thing you loose with Synchron is the divisi feature, so if you rely on that in Instruments Pro, you wont find it in Synchron.

For me personally, it was well worth the upgrade, and depending on the work that Im doing, I use both libraries. I only wish they would upgrade Instruments Pro to be compatible with the Synchron libraries as I have all my presets and shortcuts already setup there, and I like the UI more in Instruments Pro (now if we can get Vienna to upgrade the UI to allow resizing).

There is one other note worth considering, you wont be using any variatns of MIRx with Synchron and if you plan to use MIR Pro, you will need to do some tweaking for the Synchron libraries (disabling all the builtin reverb settings in Synchron and some eq'ing, depending on the venue you choose to use).

I lied, one more thing to consider, if you plan on getting the bigger libraries, keep in mind that Synchron has no woodwinds outside of epic orchestra and the special edition libraries, so you will need to purchase MIR Pro with the Synchron stage impulse response addon in order to utilize woodwinds from Instruments Pro, to have the same impulse responses / timbre as the libraries offered in the Synchron libraries.

Well, that is a shame. I would argue you dont need fast legato to write simple arps, and I must be mistaken, because I believe SE does have fast repitions, maybe not as many as the more full libraries, but Im pretty sure I saw some double and triple tongue type repititions for brass and winds. Ill double check later today.

Not that I am looking to oversell what The Orchestra can do, but it is pretty darn good and so far, Ive only come across one articulation it used that wasnt included in the special edition, however, I was able to make it work using another articulation I did have and tweak what it generated for various reasons.

However, I am not really talking about pre-built phrases so much as an arp generator to quickly generate ostinato parts for example, where these simple patterns can be time consuming to play / write by hand, but could be quickly generated with proper velocities, dynamics, and rhythms automatically programmed.

I have been using some of these phrase based libraries to learn how to create sounds I never thought an orchestra could produce, then, attempting to recreate them on my own with my own flavour. I was thinking it would be nice if VSL users had something built-in to Instruments Pro that might do this,

One such library I didnt mention is Espressivo by Sonokinetic, which aims to help create scary / dramatic tension using atonal type phrases. I thought many of these types of film score required special digitization and computer generated sound to create these effects and it turns out, no, quite a bit is possible with just an orchestra out of the box.

I get that VSL isnt in the business of teaching music theory, but something like an arp with user saved presets would be invaluable to people trying to learn about music theory and what kinds of things are used in scoring orchestral music. I know that the two main libraries Ive been using this summer have taught me alot and Id be willing to bet that VSL would write one that beats the crapola out of everything on the market.

Originally Posted by: bbelius

Have you tried the VI Pro's sequencer? There are some presets included.

I dont see any prebuilt phrases, I have the special edition complete (including the newly released Dimension Strings SE) and Im not sure if prebuilt phrases are available for the special edition libraries. I have built several dozen prebuilt phrases in this mylself, a few simple ascending + descending runs for high & low strings for example, but I cant seem to locate any prebuilt phrases..