Mike's Template Lab - new 60's Template!

I do love making templates

I believe you mentioned in one of your videos that it's best to start with the dry stems, as everything after that just adds mess. I've been on my own grail-quest with that approach... Have you tried making a template based on trying to get as close as possible to your The Race stems? (Of course it depends if you like the sound of FOX)

So in your first example, the violins feel like they're about 16ish? feet away and about WNW on the compass, while the trumpets are about the same distance due NE. It felt weird to have them at about the same distance. Of course it's a matter of taste but I like to have the body/flurry/woosh of the string sound coming from far away, but also a really in-your-face presence. So that the music fills up the space starting from just 5 or 6 feet in front of you, almost like a conductor's perspective. Other people like a big hall sound, I noticed, from many tracks on VIC... almost like the middle seat of a symphony hall. IMO how far away the music starts coming from, is one of the most important decisions, the other is how widely things are panned at the back of the stage. I have noticed on some JW scores like the prequels, the brass are a tremendous distance away yet still very close to due NW and NE:

Mechanics Hall is one of my go to IRs (after seeing Jake Jackson use it in countless vids) but I recently discovered Troy Music Hall and that's even better! again a matter of taste no doubt... Mechanics Hall is really clear and smooth though!

I have no idea what you're doing with "Haas panning" but I thought the last example was by far the best!! The trumpets became so much more... kickass?

 

Templates make complete sense when you're a real composer and not a meddling, hobbyist hack like myself. But I do have one advantage, since I generally don't make music on a deadline: I build the thing as I go. I've had many different templates before and I discovered that each was suited for a particular sound. I took that discovery and instead of trying to build a template for all the possible styles/sounds I might want to have, I just construct everything while I compose. This takes a lot of time, but i am not in a hurry and I get what I want at the end of it.

 

Love the last version with the Mid-side widening trick. @Mike Verta , what do you mean when you say mid-side widening on the altiverb returns? Are you using a mid-side eq to alter the frequency on the altiverb returns? Or is it that widening trick you use in PT that you demonstrated in Virtuosity?

 

@Mike Verta Thank you Mike!

 

Mike, are you using the close mics on Adventure Brass? I have some panning issues with them...

 

Thanks Mike. Really interesting. I've got to the point where I have built a template and now trying to learn how to balance it. Or at least some of it and it's amazing how your examples change so dramatically. I think I prefer the last one. And regardless of you considering them all to be a failure, I guarantee most people (especially musicians who do not work with orchestras) could never tell that's a sampled mockup. Yeah the first dry example does sound shitty and that's exactly the pain of trying to work with Samples (which is why I'm currently using Wet Samples - to concentrate on writing with them more). Do you think mocking up a piece of music is the best way to balance a template because I'm struggling to set max volumes for instrument groups. I'm also struggling to find a good level to balance articulations for each instrument but I guess if I knew more about Orchestration this will probably become much easier.

 

Then, I'm guessing, once the Orchestra is balanced, if you are using it with Electronic stuff (as most of today is in Film etc) you can just pull up a main Orchestral Fader and it will raise the Volume but still in context with each orchestral instrument? Or bring the Electronic stuff down. Either way, the Orchestra stays balanced to itself.

 

Luke I can't recommend that approach enough.

That's what I was trying to do with my Harry Potter project that just finished.

It's a lot of work but it's fruitful and it does turn out that you can mostly get to a balanced set-it-and-forget-it level for VIs from different developers. Unfortunately the urge to tweak never goes away

To Mike's point, yes watch out for CC1 and it's crucial to have the printed score when doing this. Otherwise you can think you're hearing the trombones playing forte but really they're mf, etc. The problem with this approach though is that the dynamic range, at a certain point is being determined by the developer. Do NOT try to, for instance, play a staccato chord with "127 on every instrument" and assume this must be a dynamically balanced fortissimo chord and all you have to do is mix the mics until you get a good blend. Because each developer's top sample layer is a different dynamic. For example, the dial values on Orchestral Tools's Berlin Brass are just completely false. They say ff but it's absolutely untrue. The trombones in the finale of the Harry Potter piece are only playing a mezzo-forte rising to "mezzo-forte-plus" (JW sometimes indicates a dynamic level between mp/mf and another between mf/f, he's very detailed). Yet to achieve that actual timbre of the trombone sound, I'm using 110-120 on the modwheel... so you have to trust your ears and accept the limitations imposed on us by the developers.

 

To be honest, I'm a long way away from dialing this in and I hopefully start an MA in Cinematic Orchestration in January so I wanted to have a template made ready for that so I am hoping the more I learn the more I can apply to the music tech side of things. Maybe it's worth matching each libraries top layer so in volume they are the same? This way you kind of balance each library to be the same "FFF (even if it's not truly FFF"). You're never going to get absolute realism with samples but something playable and close would be great.

 

I've just recently bought Berlin Woodwinds (they seem very good by the way).

I'm just setting it all up in my template on Cubase with VE Pro.... For God's sake there must be a better way of doing this without reinventing the bloody wheel every time you get a new library.... It's soooo tedious and devours hours and hours of time with which I could be doing much more interesting things. It's 2017 for heavens sake !!!! We are all probably a little too much of a niche to be worth the effort - which is probably a good thing I suppose.

I'm using Expression Maps with this. As a recent refugee from Studio One 3, I've not really used them in anger before so this will be an interesting experiment - time will tell whether this proves to be a really cool way of working or another epic waste of time.

If this goes well, then the next step will be to get Hollywood Strings Diamond into the template as I have been using it on an ad hoc basis - though of course distilling the shedloads of patches/samples in that monster into a compact yet flexible selection for the template will probably be a masterwork in itself.

No wonder JW sticks with pen and paper.....

(As I'm typing this, Bear Grylls in on the TV in the next room - probably drinking his own piss as usual. It almost sounds like a tempting alternative....)

 

Just set it up once, save the template and use forever more. It's hardly difficult. And the tiny amount of time it takes to load some patches from a sample library saves an enormous amount of time later on for writing music. Stop being such a little bitch haha

 

Luke, be careful with this. I just added SampleModeling's trumpet to my template and there is not a library on the planet that can match this bad boy at 127. It's got so much growl full tilt that no one can match it. Great instrument but it's going to require a lot of TLC to sit right in the mix.

 

Man, I feel your pain. I've been tweaking my template for the last couple of days to prepare for a project I'm gonna be working on. I've never felt so depressed and angry!