In
autumn 2008, I was presented with a problem which I’m sure you’ve come across
yourself: I encountered a situation in which I needed to create a “realistic”
audio mock-up of some of my existing scores, but found Sibelius Sounds to be
too unrealistic to achieve this. For me,
the solution was to purchase a third-party sample library; but I quickly found,
to my horror, that connecting my score to my samples was more difficult than a
simple plug-and-play solution.
I
spent a few months learning about how to assemble a basic manual sound set,
which I used to marry patches from PeterSiedlaczek’s Complete Classical Collection to my existing scores – ruining
the transposition settings, spacing, etc. in the process. Shortly after finishing my project, I
discovered EastWest-QuantumLeap Symphonic Orchestra (EWQLSO), which I purchased
right away, and set about toying with and learning about.
A
major problem came out of my Demo CD project though. As I listened to my carefully-prepared tracks
(I have combined the samples with recordings of live musicians playing on a
click-track), I noticed problems in the orchestral balance – melodies and
textures which had sounded fine using Sibelius Sounds were less defined, even
muddy, in live performance. The
orchestral balance was off, and part of the problem was that I had fallen for
the common mistake of young composers: “writing for the sounds” – the act of
modifying a computerized score until it sounds right with the notation
software’s pre-packaged sounds, in turn creating a score which sounds
imbalanced in real life.
While
I launched myself into books on orchestration, I also realized that I needed a
set of sounds in Sibelius which might better represent a real orchestral
performance. I knew how to build a
manual sound set, and I had been learning about EWQLSO for some time; it only
made sense to combine that knowledge and put together an EWQLSO Manual Sound
Set! After several small experiments on
a mediocre computer system, I was having difficulty accessing the full spectrum
of available articulations in the library using only a SoundID-based manual
approach. I eventually had a
breakthrough though, in the form of my “Key-Switching Staves” idea, which takes
advantage of Sibelius’ Panorama
function to treat Sibelius more like a sequencer to play the patches with more
intimately personal control. As 2010
drew to a close, the possibility of a comprehensive EWQLSO Manual Sound Set was
becoming much more realistic!
In
early 2011, I decided to invest in a better computer system which could handle all the Master KSW Patches being played
simultaneously. Once the computer had
been assembled, a few weeks’ work created my first draft of the full
system. The release of Sibelius 7 in
August of that year, with 64-bit processing, enabled me to finally load all the
patches I needed, without concern for RAM limitations. The result was the October 25th
release of the system’s first complete realization of an existing score: an
abridged version of Tchaikovsky’s Scene
from the Swan Lake Suite. The sound set would not be finished though,
until I could accommodate every
key-switch on every pitched
instrument; and combine this with all ‘common’ percussion instruments in a
single ‘Master’ template. The task took
until January 2012 to plan and implement, and required a challenging re-think
of the Key-Switching Staff model to include all available key-switches.
Several
months later, as I continued to receive positive feedback from viewers of the Swan Lake mock-up, I started to consider
the possibility of making the whole system available to other users. The ensuing effort took months of
brainstorming and experimentation to bring to market a template which is as
user-friendly as possible, while addressing both the needs of sound quality and the creation of beautiful-looking
orchestral scores.
I will be releasing my templates on 31 January 2013, in the hopes that other users will enjoy them and their unique approach to mock-up work. They will be available on my website, here.
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