Originally Posted by: faebbes

I found out that my midikeyboard dont support the half pedal function.

That turned out to be my issue as well. (1st generation Komplete Kontrol S88 - apparently the 2nd generation has added continuous data to CC64.)

Since the new Macbook Pros can have up to 64GB of RAM, there is increased reason for VSL to make a Silicon-native version of VEP.

+1. There is one other option - Realsamples' Early Piano, which is a 1793 Stein. It was a state of the art sample library when it appeared a dozen or so years ago, and it still sounds very good, except that it is cumbersome to use (it's a Kontakt library, and I've never found an obviously easy way to load it), and perhaps most importantly, there is no change in timbre with the dampers off.

It's not the only enormous gap in the piano collection, though. It would be great to have a good 1830s Erard, or any of a large number of later wooden-framed or even early steel-framed instruments.

Originally Posted by: Gozzo

I also rolled back with success. The update seemed to put a much bigger load on the CPU for some reason, even when optimized.  Makes me nervous about Ensemble Pro 7.   (iMac Pro, Logic.)

I'm one of the people who had problems with the update, and fixed it by going back to the previous version. I then upgraded to 7 and have had no problems. (So far - it's been less than a day ...)

Thanks. A huge improvement in legato - can't wait for the remainder of the sections to be available!

Same here. The new update won't work consistently with VI Pro and MIR together, though it's fine with the Synchron player in MIR.

Thanks for your kind yet honest words, Anand. Yes, I definitely need to put in some more work on the production, with tracks soloed, etc. I haven't, because this piece already contains an enormous amount of labor that doesn't show up in the final result, namely:

• Because the person who inspired it was dying, I produced an earlier version, and then subsequently revised the piece inside the sequencer. (More labor-intensive than doing it in the notation program, which of course also had to be done); and

• It was originally produced on the first, incomplete version of Synchron Strings; and

• It was later revised with the complete-but-still-Vienna-Instrument version of Synchron Strings; and

• It was revised yet again with the Synchron Player. Many of the revisions consisted of pulling out old CC11 control changes that had been inserted to control the attacks and releases; but there are still quite a few CC11s that need to be added in different places ...

So I need a little more time to forget about all that, and then hopefully I will do the composition justice!

Thanks for listening.

--Mark

Hi Jos,

I'll pass your sentiments along to Aaron, who will greatly appreciate them. I agree with you about the piece's tone - and it's especially impressive considering that Aaron's foundation in music is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which is hardly known for delicacy!

Many thanks for your reply.

--Mark

At the age of 20, inspired by the suicide of a close friend's father, Aaron Gohlke composed this orchestral Requiem.

1: Abyss

2: Rain

3: Universe

There are some crudities, both in the composition and the orchestration - I'm his teacher, so he's heard this already - but Aaron's mastery of the structure, and the music's power and sincerity, are deeply impressive.

Two different spaces were used in the realization - the Pernegg Monastery for the first movement, and the Sage concert hall for the second and third movements. All instruments are VSL with the exception of the solo voices, for which Aaron wanted less vibrato than the VSL solo voice libraries provide. The library we ended up using ... well, I'm not entirely dissatisfied with the results, but I came away more thankful than ever for the relative consistency of VSL libraries.

Enjoy!

Mark Arnest

This piece for strings and harp was composed for a friend who was dying. Remixing it for the new Synchron Player greatly improved things.

https://soundcloud.com/marnest-1/sarabande-for-d-synchron-player

Thanks for listening!

--Mark Arnest

Originally Posted by: Paul McGraw

A lovely piece of music and your performance is wonderful. Thank you.

Thank you for listening!

I'm with fahl5 on this - the Synchron Player works so differently than VI or VI Pro that few of us have sufficient experience yet to express a deeply informed opinion as to the library's ultimate quality.

Nevertheless, here's my shallow opinion: There's a dramatic improvement between my first Synchon Strings project in its original VI version and the rebuilt project using Synchron Player. Legato is much smoother; releases, which were particularly squirrely in VIP, are a non-issue now. It was no fun re-doing all the keyswitches, but in the end there were far fewer of them. I love having real-time control over vibrato; I love not mucking around with repetition samples, like the other VSL string libraries require.

So, my very premature opinion, based on one soft, lyrical piece, is that Synchron Strings is a major advance over previous VSL string libraries - enough of an advance that I'd classify it as "almost meets expectations." But I may modify that view when some piece requires a nice light spiccato, or relies heavily on sforzato, which I agree with others sounds pretty unconvincing.

Any change as radical as this one is bound to be accompanied by some missteps - and VSL has made things much worse with this library's piecemeal and agonizingly slow roll-out. Besides the near-nonfunctionality of the original version, there are now the countless hours people will have to spend porting their Synchron Strings sequences from VI/VI Pro to Synchron Player. Selling the library at full price before the player was ready created a vast pool of ill-will that's going to be hard to overcome.

--Mark Arnest

It's the nature of the articulation: Because the string has to be plucked hard enough to snap against the fingerboard, it's impossible to do it quietly. 

A short Sibelius piano piece, realized on the Synchron Yamaha CFX. It doesn't show off the instrument's power, which exceeds that of any sampled piano I've encountered, but the CFX's subtlety comes through well.

An old friend of mine - the best man at my wedding - used to play this. He passed away last year, and when I finally got a moment, I learned this piece in his memory.

--Mark Arnest

No. 1 of "Four Poems for Pianoforte." It's one of the easiest pieces Godowsky ever composed, but like all Godowsky, it's trickier than it sounds. It's realized on the Vienna Imperial - and with its combination of warmth and crystalline clarity, I cannot imagine a more appropriate instrument for this piece.

Thanks for listening!

--Mark Arnest

Good points all. Plus, I have long wanted Hermode tuning, which Logic has and DP does not; and it just happens that I'm having a problem with the NI S88 and DP, the the S88 works like a charm in Logic. So all in all I'm pleased.

Obviously they were waiting for me to break down and get Logic, which I did just a couple of days ago!

After many, many minutes of facing the back door, we have the not-at-all awaited sequel to Batko Unbound.

There are no Synchron libraries here, just the old, reliable orchestral strings and percussion in the Sage big hall. The only change to my usual work-flow was the use of the VI Pro matrixes instead of the old VI, and I wish I'd started doing this sooner. It makes a huge difference in memory usage.

Thanks for listening!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQYLSAGig2s

--Mark Arnest

Is your output on Vienna Ensemble set to Master Bus? This is one of the places a signal can go awry.

Also sitting and hoping (and being irritated by the constant Apple prompts to upgrade to High Sierra!).

Because I have a crazy deadline for another project, naturally I had to put it aside for a couple of hours to do this. Based (obviously!) on "Autumn" from "The Four Seasons." I imagine it performed by an orchestra of goblins.

The realization is bt 41 Dimension Strings in the Sage studio. The strings are 2/3 regular, 1/3 muted. Except for the 1st violins, the sections are divisi.

Thanks for listening!

Mark Arnest

Just wondering if there's any progress on this issue. Apple keeps suggesting I upgrade to High Sierra, but I'm in the middle of a large DP/Vienna Ensemble Pro project ...

Thanks!

Originally Posted by: jsg

The Yamaha QX-1 and QX-3 sequencers were used for that show.   I was limited to 16 tracks.  I had a few samplers (Roland S-50 I think) and 8 DX-7s in a rack.  

Jerry

I thought I recognized the DX-7. There were far worse sounding instruments in those days - Very cute and ingenious music!

Mark Arnest

Many thanks for your kind words, Paul. "Minimo-maximalist" is just a silly term I made up - somewhere else I used the Matt-Groening-like variation, "maximo-minimalist" - to suggest that, while the musical techniques recall minimalism, there's so much going on that the effect is not minimalist. It was a lot of fun to compose.

On YouTube here.

"Shout" synthesizes several of my musical influences. In my misspent youth, I was a rock and roll guitar player, and the main theme is loosely inspired by the first phrase of Johnny Winter’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin'.” I first encountered the incessant piling on of riffs in the music of Charles Mingus. The slow, sometimes mechanical thematic evolutions are characteristic of minimalism, though "Shout" is better described as minimo-maximilist. And there are several connections – such as the proportions – to Bach’s stupendous Chaconne.

On a VSL note, I doubt I would even have conceived of "Shout" without Dimension Strings. There's also a touch of Solo Strings, most importantly the opening solo violin. The instrumentation is 6/6/5/4/2, but the piece is written at the level of the desk, with several desks joining together for the important voices - but also occasionally dividing at the very dense spots.

Thanks for listening!

Mark Arnest