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Late night mockup work #midi #mockup #filmscore #cinebrass #spitfireaudio

#spitfireaudio #mockup #filmscore #cinebrass #midi

Here's a short sample of the orchestral score I composed for the upcoming feature film, "How to Kill a Zombie". Composed and performed by Richard deCosta. Libraries used in the production: EWQL Play Gold, LA Scoring Strings CineBrass and CineWinds among others.

#CineWinds #CineBrass #LA Scoring Strings #EWQL Play #film score #soundtrack #zombie #movie

State of the art listen.

This is a long video, and it's kind of all about the same thing (sampled brass instruments you can play back from any midi keyboard/controller). But it's interesting to jump around in the video and just hear how incredibly organic and dynamic sampled instruments have become.

CineBrass Pro

#video #music #samples #cinebrass #fyi

Capabilities of the sampled orchestra #1

Last night as an exercise I sat down and attempted to recreate a portion of What's this? from Danny Elfman's A Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. The aim was to get as close to the original (realism-wise) as possible using only commercially available libraries and with minimal post processing. Basically I wanted to show what's possible with what's out there.

Be warned that I didn't have sheet music and so this is recreated by ear - there may be small errors or omissions. Also, it's not properly mastered - It's a little bit bassy and sonically it differs a little to the original, but as you can see even by the SoundCloud visual profiles, they're relatively close to each other. The vocals are also by myself and I'm not a trained singer in any way. I added this just so it was comparable to the original track.

So here is a snippet of the original track for reference. All of this is directly from the Soundtrack with the exception of the last stab that fades to silence:

And here's my version. This was built literally from the ground up with various sample libraries and I then sang over the top to add vocals:

Overall, I think I got quite close and hopefully created something that the average person could not distinguish as being recorded or sampled. Most of the problems I hear are either purely down to a lack of time on my part to experiment/polish the final piece, or the limitation of not having a living, breathing orchestra. A real string section is never going to go 'We don't play that articulation...'

In my opinion, some of the plus points:

Cinebrass Core & Pro make the brass sound great. I used to really dread getting to the part where I'd have to write brass. Trumpet staccatos used to sound awful and melody lines would never flow right. Now it's all really quick to do and it sounds awesome.

The Woodwinds sounds pretty close to the original and really were minimal work as they're tutti.

The ostinato articulation strings sound really good and were also really minimal to implement for the accompaniment. Albion made it super easy.

Percussion was awesome to work with. Since I bought Spitfire Percussion I am yet to find a situation where it doesn't recreate the sound of a real percussive section perfectly.

Some of the minus points:

Some of the loud tutti/brass stabs don't sound quite as crisp and defined as the original. This might be fixable by refining the dynamics and EQ shaping.

The strings also lack some of the articulations required to exactly recreate the original sound. Marcatos and notes that are longer than staccatos but shorter than sustains in particular seem lacking in modern commercial libraries.

The ambiance/room sound is a little more muddy/less clean in the recreation. The libraries I used were set to use their stage/mid mics which gives a less intimate sound than the original. If I had more time I think using the close mics and using convolution might improve this a little.

Wood trill in Symphonic Sphere sounds great but it didn't match the original in terms of tempo change/sound. EQ shaping or more experimentation with other libraries may fix this.

The string run at the end is the weakest part in my opinion (24 - 26 seconds). I have no commercial library that includes diminished scale, downward runs. In this instance I used Orchestral Tools String Runs 2 and their Runs Transitions patch, overlayed with string marc/staccatos. However, it sticks out like a sore thumb to my ears, especially when you directly compare it to the original recording.

Here's a breakdown of what was used:

FL Studio 10, Kontakt 5

Cinesamples CineBrass, CineBrass Pro, HollyWoodwinds

Spitfire Albion, Harp, Percussion & Felt Piano

Orchestral Tools Strings Runs & Symphonic Sphere

Finally for the curious, some mixes of the various libraries playing solo:

Got any thoughts/opinions/criticisms? Feel free to share them in a response. Any questions? Feel free to ask and I'll try and answer best I can.