A Symphony Orchestra is a significant body of musicians. For the String Section alone there could be as many as 60 musicians (16 first violins, 14 second violins, 12 violas, 10 cellos and 8 double basses). Then you have all the additional instruments (such Woodwind, Brass and Percussion) – a full stage.
For my project, I downloaded a full orchestral score of Rhapsodie on a Theme of Paganini. In the 18th Variation, there are (in addition to the Piano of course) the following instruments:
- Violins (first and second)
- Violas
- Cellos
- Double Bass
- French Horns (four parts)
- Tuba
- Oboes (two parts)
- Flutes (two parts)
- Clarinets (two parts)
- English Horns (two parts)
- Bassoons (two parts)
- Harp
So, all in all at least 21 different instrumental tracks to be recorded.
So, how do you recreate this with your computer? Well, this is where ‘Virtual Instruments’ and a fabulous invention called MIDI come into play.
Virtual Instruments, or Sample Libraries, are basically recordings of actual instruments playing a variety of notes, volumes, techniques (legato, staccato, vibrato etc.). These recordings are then used by the software to re-create music as you play it into the computer by combining them according to the MIDI information you create. I should imagine every instrument on the planet is available somewhere. Garageband, for example, in its base package, has lots of them from which to choose (guitars, drums, bass, brass, keyboards, violins … even Chinese Traditional instruments).
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) started life as the old ‘Piano Rolls’ – so that really old fashioned ‘self playing’ piano system from black and white filmsusing a tube of paper with holes in it that told the piano which notes to play. As time has progressed, this has become a very sophisticated language that allows you to record in a standard format not only the notes but things like the volume, expression and many other effects. In fact, when you see MIDI on your computer screen, they use a basic graphical representation of a sheet of paper with holes in it.
In a nutshell, by telling the computer which Virtual Instrument should ‘play’ the MIDI information, you are able to pretty much re-produce anything to an extremely lifelike standard (subject to having a good enough sample library and enough skills to create the MIDI information in the first place). When you have it in your DAW, it looks something like this (instrument on the left, MIDI information on the right)
Including the instruments I got when I purchased Main Stage (see my last post), I already have at my fingertips within Garageband an entire Symphony Orchestra. This includes individual instruments (for example a solo violin), whole sections (such as several violins playing together) and even a ready made whole string section (so violins, violas, cellos, double basses). Would these be good enough? Cue even more research!
I was staggered to find out (although I probably shouldn’t have been) that instrument libraries range from the hundreds to the thousands of Euros. As an example, a company called Vienna Symphonic Library offers a full string collection alone for just over 5,000 Euros. If you want to add the complete Winds collection (which I would need of course) then that’s another 5,600 Euros. An outlay of 10,600 Euros for me would almost certainly be better used elsewhere.
There are also other collections such as the Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 Sound Library – giving you over 500 instruments including things such as different bow techniques (they call ‘articulations’) etc. at a somewhat more modest 128 Euros. There are lots of options in between.
One way of looking at this (according to a YouTube expert) is that the sample library is a little like the ingredients of a meal …. the better the ingredients, the better the finished dish. True enough I suppose, however, being able to cook is extremely important as even the best ingredients can be ruined if you don’t use them properly. A good chef on the other hand can probably make fantastic food with much more modest fare. Therefore, it doesn’t follow that you always need to get the most expensive things to get a good result.
There is no doubt a top of the range library would give a ‘better’ result than a cheaper one – but probably has a range of things for which I would have absolutely no need. For an exploratory project an outlay of 128 Euros might be more realistic in the grand scheme of things and would offer some additional options over and above what I have with Garageband.
Eventually, I decided for the initial attempt to stick with what I had available to see where I could get to. I expected to find limitations with that approach, however, on the face of it I have all I need and the samples are, according to my research, of a more than reasonable quality. If it doesn’t work out, I can always ‘upgrade’ later to something else.
In my next post, I’ll cover some of the techniques required to actually record the instruments.
