On Sampling – Part 2
If you missed the other 2 parts of this series,  you can read them here: On Sampling – Part 1 and On Sampling – Part 3.

As little as 5 years ago, orchestral sampling was still in its infancy. I call it an infancy because whenever I heard a virtual orchestra, I could pretty much tell immediately that it was virtual, meaning it was not actual players sitting there playing the piece, but instead was ‘built’ by a programmer using samples.

For four years my wife and I had great season tickets at Carnegie Hall – wonderful seats about 2/3 of the way back and center on the main floor – for our favorite orchestra – The Philadelphia. They would come to Carnegie Hall 4-5 times a year and it really gave me a chance to study a great orchestra and see how it was done. I absolutely loved the experience.

Five years ago, you couldn’t get a virtual (sampled) orchestra to sound like that. You could come close, but no cigar. Now you can. I’ve heard classical pieces recreated with two different software programs that can now do it where I can’t tell the difference. Put ‘em up side by side and musicians can’t agree which is which. The technology has now come of age. I’m thrilled to be able to use it in my lifetime.

But it ain’t easy and it ain’t cheap. The two best software programs out there today are the Vienna Symphonic Library using actual players from the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra and the East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra. I use the latter because it was recorded in a great European concert hall by one of the geniuses of the sampling technology today, audio legend – Prof. Keith O. Johnson – recipient of two GRAMMYS, plus eight additional GRAMMY nominations for his 90 plus Classical Recordings.

This is the first 24-bit orchestral sample library to include three simultaneous stereo mic setups (close, stage and hall), so users can mix together any combination of mic positions to control tone and ambience. A major benefit of this recording philosophy is the tonal control the three simultaneous stereo tracks provide.

Users can literally alter the tone and ambience of any instrument or section by incrementally moving out from the close mics, to the stage mics, to the hall mics in real-time! This “virtual repositioning of the listener” in a concert hall environment offers a surprising amount of tonal control.

With other orchestral libraries, you get what they give you, and apart from adding reverb and EQ, you have virtually no control over the sound of the instruments. The control of tonality and ambience in the EASTWEST / QUANTUM LEAP SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA enables each user to “design” the sound of the orchestra to suit the work that is being created.

I can use the stage mics for a typical big Hollywood sound; boost certain instruments by adding a hint of the close mics; add in the hall surround mics to create a surround sound mix, or to add natural hall reverb.

All of the players were recorded in position. All of the instruments and sections were chromatically sampled, with multiple dynamics, with extremely dynamic and expressive articulations, and although the library is huge, it has been programmed to be, for the professional, relatively easy to use.

I bought it in 4 sections because in the beginning it was so expensive – about $3500 per section.  The sections are Strings, Brass, Woodwinds and Orchestral Percussion. The stuff is just heart-thumpingly cool and the minute I got it out of the box and installed into my computer – no easy feat (about 6 hours per section installation) – I would just sit and smile at the possibilities.

Here’s how they do it. Let’s start simple. Rent the concert hall in a city with a great orchestra for 3-4 years. Concert halls have lots of down time if you want to record late at night and early in the morning. Get a hall with world-class acoustics.  Bring in their first chair trumpet player. Have him stand on the stage alone with a conductor/technician/designer.

Have him play middle C for say 4 bars – a perfectly played, perfectly in tune, straight tone (with no vibrato) mezzo forte.  Record it with world-class close mics, stage mics and hall mics. Have him play it over and over if necessary until he gets it perfect.

Then have him play middle C for 2 bars and do the same. Then have him play the note for 1 bar and do the same. Then have him play the note staccato long. Then have him play the note staccato short. Work on each of these until they are each perfect samples of middle C.

Now have him do the above two paragraphs forte instead of mezzo forte. Remember, you can’t just turn up the volume of the trumpet to make it louder because when the trumpeter plays louder, the timbre changes, the tone of the note changes. Now do it all again fortissimo. Then do it all mezzo piano and piano – softer and softer.

Then have him go through all of the above playing the middle C with a soft vibrato, then a wide vibrato, then sforzando, then with straight tone into vibrato on and on into the night. You get the picture.

Have him come back tomorrow and we’ll do C#. Or perhaps have him rest a day while his lip heals.

Work with him hour after hour, day after day until you have captured all the nuances of how he plays the trumpet. Then have your engineers spend months editing all these sampled notes into perfectly matched files programmed so that one can trigger them on a keyboard. If I press middle C, it triggers the trumpeter playing the mezzo forte middle C. If I strike the note harder it knows by my velocity to play the forte sample. If I play the note softly, the softer recording is played back, etc.

What I have just explained to you is an extremely simplistic description of the process. Oh, by the way, the process will cost you millions of dollars.

With strings, bring in a great violinist and do the same. Then bring in a small section, say 5 violinists and record them together for more of a chamber orchestra sound. Then bring in 18 violinists and do it all over again for the 1st violin section.  With strings, of course, it’s all infinitely more complex because of all the various bowings, pizzicato, marcato, etc.

This gives you a small insight into why these software programs are so expensive and take years to develop.

Do this now for every instrument in the world and you have at your fingertips the art of sampling. This is all now available (if you have the money to buy and the computer power to run the programs). I use 3 maxed out dual quad processor / 16 GB ram computers to manage my orchestra.

“Wow”, you say, that’s expensive, but not as expensive as one 3 hour session with an orchestra. Buy it once and you got it for all your work – or until the next better iteration comes out.  :o)

Let’s tie this all up tomorrow with Part 3.

If you missed the other 2 parts of this series,  you can read them here:
On Sampling – Part 1 and On Sampling – Part 3.

And for more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link, please visit Watchfire Music.