Orchestral Libraries

Anyone know of any site that explains the general idea with maybe some specific examples of how to use these libraries? (GPO, EW.QL.SO, VSL, etc...)

I have EW.QL.SO Gold and GPO but I cannot get anything close to the sounds that I hear on the sites. Some are quite amazing and pretty realistic considering it's sampled(e.g., check out Beethoven's 5th at the GPO site). I understand they do a lot of changes and use keyswitching but I can't seem to get close to the sounds.

Beat Kaufmann has written some tutorials on how to use VSL libraries - Pro Edition/Horizon & VI.

EWQLSO Gold sounds pretty good straight out of the box in my experience.

What is your set up? What are you using these libraries with?

I tend to compose the music using sibelius and then dump it directly into the sample library host app. I do have nuendo and have tried to use it but with EW.QL SO gold I cannot get the articulations I need as keyswitches.

It seems there has to be a lot of manual editing of midi control codes to make the samples do their thing and some tricks must sometimes be used in some cases.

I'm going to read some more of the tutorials and play around with it and see what I get.

I wish these companies would release a full fledged demo and explain how they did it. (the mid files, the project files for different sequencers, etc...) so I can get some idea of what is needed to get the high quality they are getting. (or at least close)

Poof... You ask too much.

EWQL Gold does not have everything in keyswitches. You will need to set different midi channels and on K2 or Kompakt load different "articulations" from the instruments you want. You may have legato staccato in keyswitches, but if you want a trill or some fx on the strings, you may need to go to midi channel 2 and 3. And so on. Divide your phrase between those tracks and you should hear a better result.

Now my first sentence was a lie! Why?

Because, about 2 years ago I release a Cubase SX2 project (which should open in Nuendo actually) with EWQL Gold and EWQLSC. The project can be found here:

www.nikolas-sideris.com/stuff/atotk.zip

It contains the project files, 1 audio file (an mp3 with the finished result, to put into the project to know how it should sound like), all midi files seperately (for other sequencers, since they contain the time map information) and everything named after the articulations I used.

In all pretty much what you asked for.

Have fun ;)

It's not perfect really, and was done 2 years ago, but hey, it's better than nothing...

Let me know how it goes

not to be rude or anything, but a good sounding mock-up takes more than a few keyswitches.

Subtle tempo and dynamic changes always add to realism.

tempo track is king.

Thanks nikolas. I'll have to take a look at it some more when I get some time. Thats a lot of mid files though and I was hoping to have to avoid splitting up the instruments into multiple parts ;/ Seems like a lot of work to get something decent ;/ (to be honest I'd rather spend more time composing then trying to get it to sound good but I get thats the only way I'll be able to here it without midi)

Also my computer sucks so I tend to get fed up with it when I get an out of memory error or it locks up cause it can't handle the load. (that and I have a stupid soundblaster card that is a POS.)

tempo track is king.

Can you please explain exact use of tempo track. For example in finale or SX3?

tnx

Thanks nikolas. I'll have to take a look at it some more when I get some time. Thats a lot of mid files though and I was hoping to have to avoid splitting up the instruments into multiple parts ;/ Seems like a lot of work to get something decent ;/ (to be honest I'd rather spend more time composing then trying to get it to sound good but I get thats the only way I'll be able to here it without midi)

Also my computer sucks so I tend to get fed up with it when I get an out of memory error or it locks up cause it can't handle the load. (that and I have a stupid soundblaster card that is a POS.)

Wow! Using a soundblaster with EWQLSO Gold?!

The best thing you could do is buy a better sound card (Audiophile by MAudio for example isn't pricey but you should notice the difference)

Also a RAM upgrade would make a world of difference if you keep locking up. Going from 512mb to 2Gb helped me a lot.

Finally, keeping your samples on a seperate hard disk to everything else is essential.

Can you please explain exact use of tempo track. For example in finale or SX3?

tnx

i don't use finale, so i can't help you with that. on top of that, tempo track is a term used more in sequencers than notation.

when i cubase, press F2 to make the transport panel appear (or disappear, click it again). search for the term Tempo (somewhere in the middle), it probably says "fixed". click on "fixed" to switch it to "tempo track". this is to make cubase follow the tempo track instead of the fixed bpm you've provided it with.

next, press crtl + T (cmd + t, when on mac i assume), the tempo track window will pop up. you can now draw tempos and change time signatures per measures.

there's 2 ways in drawing in different bpm's: one is "ramp", the other is "jump" (it says above somewhere in the tempo track window). when you've selected "ramp" and have drawn a point higher or lower than your original bpm (alt + left-mouse-click, or you could use the 'pencil') it will draw a line from your original bpm to the one you drew smoothly, so the bpm graduatly in- or decreaces.

the same for the option "jump", only then it will literly jump from on bpm to another. i find both very usefull.

when you'd like to give a certain measure a different time signature, you click (again, alt + left-mouse-click or use the pencil tool) above the measure number in the white area, it will put a mark there which says 4/4. while selected, you can now change the time sig. in the top of the window.

hope this helps.