Multi's

[Zphyr]

Wouldnt it be cool if everyone could submit 1 (or several) multis of how they get their string sounds/brass etc. We could file them from silver up to platinum and build it up with time.
What you tink?

[Zphyr]

Its so Fncking annoying how this entire forum ignores all my efforts in trying to develop at least some type of cool support system for EWQLSO owners.
Why isnt anybody doing anything about this?
Why do the demo writers keep ignoring my requests to show us some cool tricks?
We as EWQL owners have it the worst when it comes to online help.
We should have cool demo movies, some online book with cool tricks. Demo cubase sessions.
Or a dedicated site like at GaritanPO.
- Really, really annoyed.

Doug, your software really rocks, but something should be done about this issue.

[satchriani]

Its so Fncking annoying how this entire forum ignores all my efforts in trying to develop at least some type of cool support system for EWQLSO owners.
Why isnt anybody doing anything about this?
Why do the demo writers keep ignoring my requests to show us some cool tricks?
We as EWQL owners have it the worst when it comes to online help.
We should have cool demo movies, some online book with cool tricks. Demo cubase sessions.
Or a dedicated site like at GaritanPO.
- Really, really annoyed.

Doug, your software really rocks, but something should be done about this issue.

I personally think that would be a great idea...but it would be a matter of having EW staff upload some, and not users of the forums. After the time spent with my library, I'm not ready to give those out. A majority of composers on here are not just hobbyists. We're working professionals.

I know a lot of composers on here strive and have pride in their pursuit for realistic sounds, and it would be giving those up to people who are looking for quick fixes, and avoiding the learning curve most of us have gone through, or are currently going through (like me).

I guess the catch is, if you're a hack in the first place, someone elses patches aren't going to help you anyways if your music stinks. So, I guess that's the lighter side :)

[LEX]

I personally think that would be a great idea...it would be a matter of convincing people to upload such patches.

I know a lot of composers on here strive and have pride in their pursuit for realistic sounds, and it would be giving those up to people who are looking for quick fixes, and avoiding the learning curve most of us have gone through, or are currently going through (like me).

I guess the catch is, if you're a hack in the first place, someone elses patches aren't going to help you anyways if your music stinks. So, I guess that's the lighter side :)

Sure that would be a great idea for you. But not for others.

Way should those who have spent hours, building their templates, creating blends, patch edits, multis and spent the hours to go through every patch in the library to find what works for them and what doesn't to just give it away?

I have been through 7 templates in the past 2 years. That is alot of work. Alot of just sitting around, changing, playing, adjusting ect.

No one is going to give away the farm to make your life easier. Give me what I made over the past 2 years, and it is yours.

The other problem you might find is that, many build custom instruments and keyswitches. So the standard instruments wouldn't work.
And getting the custom intruments might be a tough one.

I think Satch said it. It doesn't matter who's mult's and patches you have, it won't make a difference if you can't use it.

Suggestion!

Do what everyone else does. Take the time, go through every patch, find what you want and build your own.

LEX

[Zphyr]

A quick-fix is most certainly not the issue here. And i know it wont change the way my music sounds, which is something i've always been proud of in anycase, but never happy with the realism.
All the other products that i own (NI Reaktor, Toontrack and a few others) all have really extensive forums. They have user libraries available for download, they have cool updates and patches and addons....Toontrack even comes with demo sessions for each sequencer with MIDI files and all, just to show you what the program is capable of really REALLY doing.
Other progs might have books on it or like garritan, has an extensive extensive site that explains sooooo much of the complex world of orchestration to a beginner like me.

EWQL gives us outstanding quality products...but cant guide us into how to make proper use of them..This seriously stinks...it is THE ONLY product that i have ever owned that has such poor support on updates and demo's etc.
So why is it necessary to sit for 2 years, just so you should have 7 patches???? This is wrong my friend. We need more downloads available and more tuition on how to get better sounds. I payed top-dollar for this library.
Personally i have sooo much to learn about sooo many things and soooo many apps...and ive been doing this for 6 years now and feel like i will be forever learning still....i dont have 2 years to learn only one of my VST's....its ridiculous!

.....DOUG?

[tmhuud]

Honestly a part of me WANTS to agree with you but I just can't commit that fully. If you spend a lot of time at Garriton's site and VSL's site and look around for some ideas orchestrally and sampled orchestra related I see no reason why you cant apply these to EWQLSO. Even Project SAM has some really nice tips that have found there way into every major film composers arsenal.

I personaly spend a lot of time as does my boss programming strings and sounds that are very 'project specific'. I have heard sounds that I've done get 'redone' by others. That's fine if others want to try and get as close to possible to something we have programmed but I am NOT about to 'give it away.' Our sounds and the way we use them is what makes us unique.

-Allan Leung
Assistant to Composer Terry Michael Huud
www.Music4TheMovies.com
www.MySpace.com/terryhuud
www.imdb.com/name/nm0404698/

[LEX]

A quick-fix is most certainly not the issue here. And i know it wont change the way my music sounds, which is something i've always been proud of in anycase, but never happy with the realism.
All the other products that i own (NI Reaktor, Toontrack and a few others) all have really extensive forums. They have user libraries available for download, they have cool updates and patches and addons....Toontrack even comes with demo sessions for each sequencer with MIDI files and all, just to show you what the program is capable of really REALLY doing.
Other progs might have books on it or like garritan, has an extensive extensive site that explains sooooo much of the complex world of orchestration to a beginner like me.

EWQL gives us outstanding quality products...but cant guide us into how to make proper use of them..This seriously stinks...it is THE ONLY product that i have ever owned that has such poor support on updates and demo's etc.
So why is it necessary to sit for 2 years, just so you should have 7 patches???? This is wrong my friend. We need more downloads available and more tuition on how to get better sounds. I payed top-dollar for this library.
Personally i have sooo much to learn about sooo many things and soooo many apps...and ive been doing this for 6 years now and feel like i will be forever learning still....i dont have 2 years to learn only one of my VST's....its ridiculous!

.....DOUG?


There is a very big difference between synth tracks and orchestral tracks my friend.
And the difference is 1 synth sound isn't going to make the sound.
An entire orchestral template is another story.

7 Patches in 2 years. No. 7 different templates. And about two hundred custom patches created with what I bought.
Templates meaning patches loaded on the Host and slave machines that make up my template.

Now I don't know about you, but spending hours, upon days creating these things to just give them out?
I don't think so. I have close friends who I trade patches with, but that is it.

Who knows where they will end up.

Part of the composers living is in the fact of what they can create and what they can manipulate.
Giving it away is stupid and bad business.

Anyone can create drones and ambient textures.
But learning and knowing how to create orchestral sounds, that are as close to realistic you can get, takes time, patience, practice and experience.

Personally, for all the time I have spent, I only give up things to those I know, have worked with and trust.

It isn't a free kind of thing like synth sounds.

Like I said, if you can come up with what I made in the past 2 years, I'll give it all to you.
I'll even have you at the studio to show you.

LEX

[V o n h ö g e n]

Its so (.......) annoying how this entire forum ignores all my efforts in trying to develop at least some type of cool support system for EWQLSO owners.

What efforts are you talking about? Tell me, what did we learn from YOU since you joined this forum?

We as EWQL owners have it the worst when it comes to online help.

How can you say that? East West has terrific support and has released many demo's as well as tutorials (some of which are video tutorials, like the one by Nick Phoenix on EWQLSC, and Prof. Keith O'Johnson on mixing EWQLSO Platinum). They have released many updates and patches over the years, so I really don't know what you are talking about. :confused:

This is a high quality forum with many talented composers. Many forum members here spend a lot of their time giving valuable tips and tricks to others. If you don't like it here, then feel free to sign up with another forum.

I payed top-dollar for this library.

Well, that's your own fault, you should have asked us to send money to your bankaccount beforehand. There are many forum members who want to share everything they have! :rolleyes:
Seriously, judging from your list of gear, most of us have spent a lot more on EW products than you did, so give me a break!

Besides, what's the point of buying a quality car if you refuse to learn how to drive it? Buy a Playstation instead, I'm sure you will get great online support from Sony and you can drive a Formula One car without the need of a license.

O.k., I understand that you are quite busy as a media composer, and that you don't have an infinite amount of time to learn how to use EWQLSO. I can also understand that you are disappointed about the fact that it's not easy to make your music sound as good as the product demos, but you really need to have a lot more patience to make this library sound great. It can take many months (if not years) to become an experienced user, and to build up your own customised patches, etc.

There's no reason to feel ignored by the "entire forum", Zphyr. As a matter of fact, we all want to help eachother as much as possible, so please, stop complaining, your allegations and strong language are way out of line! Frankly, you sound like a spoiled child who doesn't want to read a book and gets angry when he finds out that there is no movie available based on that book. I'm sure, you are better than that! :)

Remember what Paul Hopkins (MusicHF Studios, Dubai) said to you a couple of months ago?
"The library is an instrument! It takes knowledge of the orchestra, programming skills and lot of experimentation with the software to coak it into sounding the best it can. It is possible for it to sound great, but you need to work to it's strengths."

Patience my friend, patience ...

Jerome

[rimskykorsakov]

Why do the demo writers keep ignoring my requests to show us some cool tricks?
...
We should have cool demo movies, some online book with cool tricks. Demo cubase sessions.



To use successfully such a powerful orchestral library like EWQLSO PlatinumXP simply requires the ability to write for an orchestra ! That's the only "trick" . The rest is loading the articulations that you need for your composition into the Kompakt Player or Kontakt.

That's all . No tricks . No magic button. "Just" the ability to write orchestral music .

[Zphyr]

I don't at-all expect free "secret presets" stuff from other composers, i too have my sounds that i keep to myself(we all do).
But im the kind of guy who is always doing research on the net/books about how to get certain sounds , certain styles etc. As every job requires different needs, my research is never (ever) done.
I've gotten far more, for far less on other sites (garitan being a good example..as i am not even a garitan customer)
My 'complaining' as you put it (which yes, is very true) is because i feel my hunger for information isn't being satisfied as well as it could be.

All im saying, is that it would be great if the demo writers could come out and openly share with us some cool tricks...more often than rarely.
Its not that im lazy, i spend hours and hours...and i do get great sound, but its not 100% perfect as the demos...Im inspired and theres not enough information out there for me to aquire and soak my brain into. - thats the frustrating part!

My area that i live in has very very very very few composers who work with or even dabble in orchestra sound.

But anyways.

Im really sorry for complaining. Its something that i am very aware of.

I just thought its something that needed to come out, because i have seen better..
...whether one agrees or not.

[nikolas]

Well, first of all I just saw the thread, ok? This is why I didn't reply earlier!

now on to what you say!

EW itself is not making any tutorials! Yup, that's true! but it's making good products, which YOU already bought! whoops? Don't think so!

Do a search on the forums. I have to tell you that after being here for more than a year now, I've learned SO much, and gathered SO many ideas! I don't know what you consider a professional sound or whatever, but it seems to be very straight forward. I rarely layer string pathces, I use 3-4 articulations for all instruments (except strings), and if I run out of memory I start exprorting to audio. I always export to audio, because I love mixing in audio, instead in midi.

I have no idea why would anyone exchange with you, or anybody their multis and templates...

As for your hunger, I'm afraid that even in restaurants you have to pay in order to eat. No money, no food! Bottom line is that sometime one needs to sta hungry, in order to learn. (or pay dearly. After all, fly to London, give me lots of money, and I'm sure to show you everything I know about EW. Deal? ;))

But I hardly think there are tons of secrets!

I mean spend 2-3 days listening to the articulations and make some choices...

Then in a track try them out. See what sounds better soloed.

What else is there? Have you ever heard something incredible that wasn't in the box? I have never heard anything like that! sure it took me 2 years to catch up, but I have finally, and I can say that the tracks I do are as good as it goes... :)

[Zphyr]

I fully hear your side of the story.tis very true..I have done this what you mention..
But really...never-mind...because were beginning to miss the point of my original intent of speaking out.
I was just hoping to get some nitty-gritty info.
But i think in conclusion, what we can all see, is that everyone is keeping things to themselves when it comes to advanced articulation-blending and techniques of EWQL.
I have now learnt what it takes to become a great EWQLSO user.
"Try everything and give it time"
This is what i knew from the beginning...Everything i've ever done comes from this...
But if my university professor would give me that same answer, everytime i asked him a question?...Then i would still be trying to figure out what a violin is actually supposed to sound like...Sure, with time, i will eventually get it..
But if i already knew what i wanted to know, i would have told you all ages ago.
I guest-teach sound engineering/recording 2 days in a month at a local college here, so i know (we all know) what its like to be passionate about something and looking up to our peers and being obsessed with any atom of information that they may share with us. And we all know what it feels like when all that peer has to say is "Try everything and give it time"
Over and out
-END-

[nikolas]

I don't know how helpful it is but:

Listen to this:

www.nikolas-sideris.com/stuff/atotk.mp3

IF you find it nice to listen to and wondering how I did it, get this zipped folder:

www.nikolas-sideris.com/stuff/atotk.zip

The Cubase project is there. IF you don't have Cubase there are the 53 midi tracks I used to create it named after the original articulations I used. The mp3 is also included in the ziped folder...

BTW
"Try everything and give it time", is of course true, but you seem to have failed the other part of my post, where it says that I've learned tons of stuff here in the forums. Post some of your music, and I'm sure people will offer feedback and ideas to make it better. Thus you will learn. Check to see how many music I've posted. Maybe almost too much. ;)

[Zphyr]

This is extremely (extremely) cool of you for doing this!

I have to say that the composing structure and layout is very much ahead of where i am now with regards to orchestral sequencing and the musical content is real good. This must have been written to picture?i noticed the tempos are set to some of the finest tempos i've ever seen! 113.99 etc ;)

Although i accept my position of being someone who has complained allot on this forum and has not submitted any of my tunes (yes, i have stage-fright..) I am no-one to as of yet to rightfully comment/review this track.. but judging from the audio demo link from your site..I would say that it sounds very much like "EWQLSO" Which is quite thin and some of the patches arent quite as realistic as what i've heard before from around here before. Its mainly an expression thing. The horn in the beginning changes notes very suddenly/"synthy"..its a balance between snapping notes to the quantize grid in cubase(humanize) and having too much attack and also note velocity should change from note to note as a real human would breathe and also expression automation..
The tremolo strings in the beginning - awesome.
Drums sound very unnatural aswell..its a velocity and snapping to grid thing i reckon? (Sorta has the "machinegun" effect)
Choir timings are a bit off here and there on the attacks and are quite loud in the mix..
Verbs could be more room sounding although that depends on the application of the track i suppose...
This has a real Tallarico/Game feel to it :)
I noticed you havent automated any expression in Cubase' MIDI section...this library works real well with expression automations i find, which is probably where most of the realism comes from in any application where you copy human movement/sounds etc.
To thicken up sounds (especially on Low-end) i double-up with group-busses...works the best on any drums/percussion. and cello aswell for that thick mid/low emotion..check for phasing though, if it bites, it bites hard..ouch!
With Group busses, you can double/triple/quadruple any tone without using extra CPU and can have individual settings on each buss to serve a unique purpose for each send to add to the texture of the Master Buss

Hey, thanks again, i hope that you dont mind me commenting

[nikolas]

It was made for a trailer of a game, yes.

The machinegun effect is there indeed.

I didn't use any mod patches at all! (did you notice that)? I bounce everything to audio and work the mix there. So I virtually never use CC11. since I don't use mod wheel no reason at all!

I didn't have any other reverb at the time, so I used the default reverb which came with Gold.

The begining notes, can't recall really, but it could be what you say. Horn players though would not breathe for 2 bars really ;)

In all honesty if I was to change anything to this track, I would rework the choirs (which I had just bought and didn't bother THAT much really...), and the percussion. For the rest I'm rather fine as they are...

Do keep in mind that all my mixes are done in audio ;)

All is ok and fair but: Thin???!?!?!?!? Thin? Can you explain this a bit further? Cause I would justify this as rather fat (and of course EW sound definately)

Generally, you know what you're talking about, what more do you need? :) Honestly, with your commentary (which came as a surprise I have to say), I can see that you know what you are doing. Just post some music mate! Nothing to lose really. Stage firght with no stage? Kinda hard to comprehend that ;)

[balbs]

Sir Nikolas....Great work! Thanks for sharing.

I think this is a great thread and I feel that everyone has valid points. I also feel a tutorial or Multi sharing will benefit EVERYONE! If you are one that has made a bunch of templates and is willing to share them, that's awesome. If you're the type that wants to keep it to yourself, that's great, your choice. No one is forcing you to share. If you're the type that likes to keep things to yourself and willing to browse a section of the site where you can BENEFIT from ideas others who have posted and shared, that's fine too. No one will condemn you for it. It's all a matter of personal choice if one is willing to share their work or not.

Nikolas could have just shared a midi clip or MP3 clip, but he chose to share the whole song. He pretty much shared the "source code" in software terms. He didn't have to do that. And he shared it with people that seemed against the idea of sharing their hard work.

How many of you have browsed the web and benefitted from users posting info in forums, articles, or even wikipedia? I know I'm guilty of that!! Maybe you have benefitted for fun or even profit.

I think a tutorial section will even benefit EastWest. I admit, it took me a year before deciding if I should get EWQLSO because I didn't know how to use it and didn't see any tutorials on it like the Garritan site. I finally jumped on it. But I would have jumped sooner if there were some sort of tutorials available. MORE SALES EW!

Bottom line, it's a matter of choice.

Peace,

Balbs

[nikolas]

Tutorials is one thing...

What I did (which is uploaded a long time now, btw, and thanks for the kind words) is a personal choice, and by all means shouldn't mean anything for anyone else. I try to give, because I've taken. It's rather simple for me.

People that may have spent years in front of their computer, and spend sooo much time and effort and even money, would feel better by not sharing something with the general public. This is completely understandable as well!

Keep in mind that in any craft, the idea of the apprentice, is a strong one, but the apprentice is choosen, so you could probably get a master sharing their secrets, if the learner has proven somehow his faith, and talent and everything else. With what I did, this fades to nothing. Additinally, if we are to assume that someone would make official tutorials for EW (which would cost something, if not for the end user, maybe for EW, as being official would mean EW paying), the project I'm giving away, could possible get in the way as well.

But, I'm in the academic enviroment (phd) and thus I'm all for education. with the internet I've gained huge ammounts of... everything, and yes, I'm all for free education! simply put!