And the other reason there are yes, but I'm not in so many here.
I'm one of the organizers of the debut, but I'm also a hobbyist musician.
So I'm really excited to present something today.
And of course, since I am in musician, I pretty much had to bring a beautiful controller
to act as the clicker for my life.
So it your own dog food as they sing.
So just as a second, me, so that I know that I don't run out of time.
Just let me look for double-check when I'm supposed to finish because I want to.
OK.
So yeah, today I've been talking a bit about virtual orchestration using a free and open-source
software and a word of advice.
I mean, a couple of years ago, in open media, I did a presentation where I said,
become a rockstar using free and open-source software.
And that came out nicely, but it was also very clickbaiting because I'm not a rockstar
idol, as you can see.
That's pretty much how many people listen to me monthly.
And one of them is my mother.
So it doesn't really count.
And so you may be asking, but you may be saying that I don't even look like a composer myself.
And you're probably very right.
But I do like to write music.
I do like to play guitar.
I do like to write and record and distribute music myself.
And especially pretty much 90% of what I write as a orchestra lowly
and elements in there because I love progressive rock.
I like it.
We made it like hard rock.
And whenever an orchestra is involved, they will be happy.
And I love soundtracks and classical music.
So orchestra music is very much of my mind.
And so I wanted to come up with the workflow that worked for me in order to write
for orchestral parts as well as part of my work.
So this is just going to, I'm just going to share what's worked for me, which doesn't
mean that it will be the best approach out there.
But just I share basically some guidelines about how I like to do things.
And I love for some alternatives too.
Just so that in case you want to do something similar, you have some tips here and there.
And basically, when we talk about virtual orchestration, first of all, we are talking about
scoring parts, writing parts, and then having some virtual instruments that can turn
them into actual sounds mostly because an orchestra can have a ton of different instruments
instruments that can play, be played by a ton of people.
And of course, I don't know about you, but I don't know 100 people that would be willing
to play my orchestra music, which means that somehow we have to figure out a way to write
these things on a laptop.
And then the laptop will play everything for us.
And of course, the quality of the samples does play a role, of course, the best, if the samples
are more realistic, the more realistic, the more realistic the orchestra will be in general.
But, I mean, in general, a proper arrangement can help, a bit of misdirection can help,
especially when you use orchestras with other things like, for instance, rock or metal
and something like that, you can hide something that are not as realistic.
So, there are many things that you can do in order to make it sound more realistic than
it actually is even using something that is not super expensive as very expensive libraries.
And when we talk about our orchestras, we are talking again about a lot of instruments,
but luckily for us, most of these instruments are also grouped, which means that we don't
need 100 virtual instruments, we will need less than that.
For instance, violins are always grouped, same things for violas and so on and so forth.
Most importantly, also, the different instruments are also grouped by their own in terms
of their own characteristics, where woodwinds blasts, your percussion strings and so on and so
forth.
So, a bit of knowledge there can help.
And as I mentioned, the idea is to go from these to these, because I don't look like
it, but I am getting older and so that's basically what I wanted to do.
I think that the first way to start, I mean, even before we get to the technical part,
I think that one important point when you want to start writing orchestras music is that you
have to do a bit of homework, which does not mean that you have to go to the museum instruments
of hearing process and learn all of the instruments out there like they are your own,
but the museum is fantastic, I suggest, visiting it, but in general, I don't even suggest
reading all of these books because I certainly didn't, I scheme to them, but in general,
have some basic understanding of how the orchestral groups work, how the different instruments work,
the different textures that instruments can produce and which one sounds well with each other,
and so on and so forth.
So, the more, for instance, classical music or sound tracks that you listen to, the more you'll
get accustomed to that, because there are a lot of things that a lot of shortcuts that you can
take in order to sound more realistic. And so, I mean, again, you don't have to watch the
riddle of these books, but there are many videos, for instance, on YouTube that will give you
a crash course about why violins and flutes sound well together, for instance, or the concept of
dubbing and so on and so forth. So, again, do a bit of homework before, not necessarily to study
music in detail, just have a basic understanding of what you're doing, and then when I started
basically, oh, went too far. When I started working on an orchestral set-up, five or six years ago,
I started from this free book by Peter Schafter, who did basically a complete set-up using
new score, Jack, and so on and so forth. It is an excellent book that I suggest, as a reference,
it was a bit too complicated for me at the time, so I basically decided to take a step back and start
from the basics. And so, first of all, how do I write the different parts for the different instruments,
and the first one that I started from was called Lily Pond, that is basically like a
latte kind of programmatic language, where you write a program, you write music as a fitware,
a computer program, and then you compile it, and then you generate beautiful music shift,
for you, it can generate me, for you, and so on. And this is something that I still like a lot
too quickly, write down ideas, but if you want to write something as complex as an orchestral score,
which can take a lot of different things together, using a what you see, what is what you get,
kind of approach works much better, which means that I eventually fell on music or instead,
which is the basically the defecto standard for, especially in the open source word, for this kind of
notations, so often, especially for orchestral music. And I use this one, because even though I'm
not that good at reading music, I prefer writing music that way, I personally do, but if,
for instance, you are much more comfortable playing a keyboard and playing the part of self,
for you prefer piano roles, there are definitely plenty of solutions there. The important part is
that one way or the other, you have to write the different parts for fruits, violins,
trumpets, or whatever, and to get basically the MIDI files that then you will render later on.
And music was the best solution for me there, because it also comes with some templates for
orchestral sections, like a full symphony orchestra and stuff like that. And so once I got the
notation part done, it was a matter of how can I get some better sounds, because with music or
also the box, I can get decent sounds. I mean, it gives me a good preview of what a few,
flute sounds like or violin and so on. If I play everything together, it sounds, it gives you
an idea of what I want to do, but it's not super realistic, we need something better than that.
And there are different alternatives in the open source and free space. I'll mention some of them
in this presentation as well. I also towards the end of the presentation, I'll get back to
music sounds. There are many options there. The one that I stumbled on and that she was for a
long time was virtual playing orchestra, which is a free orchestra sample library written in
Sporzando format. I don't have much time to talk about Sporzando in general, but Sporzando
is basically a text based format that describes how you need to use and play a collection of
samples that you have. So if somebody recorded a ton of samples of a flute playing, using Sporzando,
you can use those samples so that people can play a flute programmatically, basically.
And basically, the author of virtual playing orchestra did the collage of all the best orchestra
libraries out there, all the instruments that he liked the most, he picked from different places.
And then he put them all together and then created difference for some of the files for different
things. So rather than a single big piece for some of the file for your orchestra, you have
one for strings, one for flutes, one for a single flute, one for strings with articulation changes
using key bindings. So you have really a lot of flexibility to handle each individual instrument
pretty much any way that you own. So and these sounds are pretty nice as well, I think,
for at least I like them a lot, not all of them, but I like them. Which then meant that I need
to move one more step forward because I knew how to notate parts. So I knew how to write parts.
I knew how those parts could be rendered, but then I needed to put all of these into the
framework of something that I could work on. So basically like create a project within which
I could start working on my orchestra music altogether in order to come up with the song or a piece
of music at the end. And I use our door a lot for pretty much everything, mixing, mastering and
and everything. And so I wanted something that I could do there. And luckily for me, Michael Wheelies,
which is a very smart developer and an excellent musician, all of basically shared
a template where we basically prepare the template for our door, which we different tracks for
all the different instrument groups using virtual orchestra, a guitar playing orchestra itself,
which was basically exactly what I needed. Using basically for all the instances of
a guitar playing orchestra you use in the fits, which is a plugin that plays for sound or
fives and is very light. And it has a couple of interesting things that I'll mention
more in detail in the next slide because it's easier from a visual perspective. But then the idea was
that I took this template and I tweaked it a bit from my own needs, so cutting the stuff that I
didn't need, like trying to group instruments, reduce the number of instances, tweaking a bit
how I did articulation. So I'll mention it later. And then as I mentioned, I do a lot of
cross genres. So I do for instance a metal and orchestra, which means that in my template I also
need templates for piano, guitar, drums and whatever in case I end up needing them. So I enrich
these templates for my own needs. And one thing that the template gave me out of the box, though,
and was really nice was basically an orchestra layout. And basically, Michael used the stereo space
so panning to place instruments on either side of the orchestra spectrum. And then used the
three different levels of reverb using dragonfly reverb to give them depth, so that some instruments
sounded more in the back, some instruments sounded more in the front. And so the two things together
really gave me a really nice orchestra layout out of the box, which was really helpful for me.
Also because I used the same reverbs for all the instruments that I added, so that for instance drums
would sound as if they were in the same room as the orchestra in an option. So something really
nice. And at this point, basically, I added everything that I needed, I just needed to come out with
a workflow to go from A to Z, basically. So using new score for scouring and then figure out how to
bring everything in order to start working on it. And basically, it is a multi-step approach. So
again, I start scoring the parts in new score, the older cats, all parts are written there.
Then once I'm happy with everything, I export all the individual tracks, which is usually an instrument
group into a MIDI file. I create a new order project using that modified template. And then each
of the MIDI track, each of the MIDI files goes to the right MIDI track. So I have a track for the
flutes. The MIDI that I wrote for flutes in new score is ending there, so that it will be played by
virtual orchestra. We're playing orchestra using the flutes sound, basically. Then there is one additional
step that I mentioned more in detail in a second that is tweaking articulation changes. And
by articulation changes, I mean that an instrument that is not a single thing. For instance, when you
play a violin, you have a violin sound, but my violin could be pitch-sicato, could be tremolo,
could be staccato. And those are typically all different samples because they have different sounds.
And these are typical articulations, which means that some of you need the way to switch from one
to the other, even though you are on the same instrument, basically. So I added something to handle
that. Then if I'm working on something that is not just a orchestra, I add all of the different
parts, I record drums, guitars or whatever. And then once I have everything in the same place,
in order to reckon basically work on the mixing, fine tune everything, because at this point,
I have, I don't know, 40 different tracks and you have to make sure that they will sound
pretty much nicely. You have to EQ everything nicely. And this is usually the one that takes
me the most. I mean, you are pretty much all familiar with that. And I mentioned articulations
as quite important, mostly because the way that my workflow works, musical and vitro-paying
orchestras are handled articulations differently, because if with musical, you've rewrited,
tremolo parts, the musical will rise to the same node in me the 20 times, for instance. That's
not something that I want. I want a single MIDI note that uses a sample that has a tremolo sound
instead, which is something that vitro-paying orchestras provides. So typically, this means that when
I write the parts in mu score, I strip all articulations from there. I basically remember where
they're supposed to be. And then basically I modify the vitro-paying orchestras files for articulation
changes, because by default, vitro-paying orchestras are using uses keyswitches. So basically,
if a violin is in this range, it says press this key here, which is outside of the range
of the violin to switch to tremolo. And this is not something that I wanted, because I didn't
want to pollute the score itself. I wanted something like custom MIDI commands to do the same. And so
I basically chose a random MIDI command there and I mapped it to a few things. So if a
MIDI-14 is in the range 20-39, then it means that I won't tremolo, which does mean that I have to do
some manual tweaking once I put everything in order, because those tweaks are not in mu score,
they are going to be added manually to order, but it works for me. And this is all open,
so of course, if you want to use that, there is a repo over there. And then I don't know if I'll
let time to actually make you listen to some of the words, but if you're curious later on,
for instance, this is one of the first attempts where I tried to do all of these in the same piece.
And this in particular was a classical piece, so it was a symphonic poem, like more like a soundtrack,
so a completely orchestral piece. So it sounded, in some parts it sounds better than others,
but I think it sounded decent enough. In general, here I was a bit more ambitious, because basically
I hate, all I want for Christmas is you by Mariah Carey. And so for Christmas, I decided to turn
it into a Viking metal song, and with the full orchestral thing behind it. So basically,
it's like hearing demoborgive playing Mariah Carey's song, basically. And so this is also available
as a video, if you want, and so in this case, the orchestra is sometimes it's alone, sometimes it's
with a full blasting metal out there, and it sounds nice as a combination of that in general.
As I mentioned in general, I tried to write a lot of orchestral music and rock together,
in for instance, Klopatra's and Nipi is actually a song that lasts about 30 minutes,
a symphonic progress, that emerges a lot of classical and rock elements together, so it was like
a revolution from what we saw before, everything in the same place. And as I mentioned,
virtual playing orchestra is not the only option that you have. One popular option, in general,
is BBC symphonic orchestra discover, which is not open to us because it is made by a company
that is called Spitfire Audio that releases proprietary virtual instruments, but this particular
BST they offer for free, because it's basically a subset of the much more expensive library that they
sell. So it's not super complete, meaning that all the instruments are there, but only the instrument
groups. So you cannot have a solo flute, for instance, it doesn't have legato, the dynamics are not
great, but in general, what is there does sound really good, which is why a lot of people use it
anyway. And luckily for me, I mean, even though it is a wing, those, and I think, Maconly,
virtual instruments, it does work on Linux, if you use something like Linux, BST, which is what
I personally use, or I upgrade, which is another common option, you do need to make a bit of work
because recently they updated the library and it kind of sucks, but if you basically do some
tweaks to use a previous version, it still works great. And what I did use it for was not to replace
what I've shown you before. So I still use virtual playing orchestra a lot, but now in addition to that,
I also use these other library, typically either for blending purposes or for nitpicking, which instrument
I like, because for instance, virtual playing orchestra, I hate the clarinet sound, and so for clarinet,
I just use BBC Symphony Orchestra, for strings that will use both of them together, because it
gives a more lush sound in general. So it's just a matter of having more options available basically.
And this is what I ended up using in my latest album, which is more of a progressive rock album
with orchestral elements. So in this case, I did use this VPO plus BBC Symphony Orchestra
thing together, and I do like how it sounds. I mean, there are parts that may sound better,
we are still talking about more or less synthetic sounds, but I like the output a lot.
Which makes me to my last point, because I mean, I started talking about new score, and some of you
may know that new score has an excellent set of orchestral sounds as well as parts that are
called music sounds basically. And this is something that they add in a recent version of
new score that is called musical four. The problem with that is that, I mean, in general,
if you look for the samples, especially for new two, and so on, it does sound really great.
So it does sound really appealing, and even though I mean, these new sound is basically all
of your orchestral sounds are free as well. So this sounds great. The problem that I had with it at
the time, and this has changed a bit like this, that to use those, you require an external
application that is called MuseHub, which is basically MuseCore's marketplace. So for licensing
reads, and when you install MuseCore, you don't get these new sounds as well out of the box.
You need to do external application to install these sounds separately. And when I tried
it a couple of years ago, these external application was basically a closed surduplication
that required root access, which basically was a big note from me, and for different reasons,
privacy security and so on. But luckily, they listen to the community, and this is not through
anymore. So this means that this is not an issue anymore. And others, more or less, should
that I have, is that of course, this is only available in MuseCore 4, which is the latest one,
available, and I'm still on MuseCore 3. A bit because I'm lazy, a bit because MuseCore 4 doesn't
support Jack, and so it doesn't work well with the pipe, wire version of Jack that I have.
But I mean, it is definitely on my list to start playing with this soon, because I mean,
this is something that the sounds, it sounds really great. So I want to be able to play with
this a bit as well. And so I want you to know that this exists as well. And I mean, I rushed
a bit through this, because there was a lot to say, and there is also a more than in depth blog
post, if you want to learn to read about it a bit more. It is a bit outdated, because I did
write that blog post last year, and some things changed. Like, will the BBC's discover stuff,
I know the MuseCore sound stuff changed a lot, but there is some information there. And I think
this covers everything, so I think I'm pretty much on time to handle some questions as well.
Okay. Thank you.
The microphone, so everyone can hear. So the first question seems to be at the front, that makes it easy for me.
I like easy, just thank you very much. So that's brilliant.
I'm an open source developer myself, but I'm also working my way to become a professional
organization and scoring composer. So that's exactly, almost exactly what I would have done
if it was not for the requirement of using like really high 11 libraries, which is not easy,
if not impossible to integrate with the inox and rest of the system. Have you tried any of the
other libraries like East West or the other speakers or anything compared to what you can actually
use already in terms of sample quality and so on?
No, I think they got the question because it's also in the audio. So I didn't try any of the
more professional libraries, first of all, because 99% of the times they are not available on
Linux, so they are only available in contact, which is a pain in the parts to set up on Linux and so on.
Even when they are kind of available like the BBC Discovery thing,
using a Windows VST on Linux is still a bit tricky. For instance, what I did scheme to and not go
very much into detail is that for instance, to use that discover library, I'm doing the
all the rendering outside of basically, are do it separately. Basically, I have a card line
since where I load the single instance of BBC Discover because it's heavyweight.
When I want to record floats, I have arduer send me the MIDI float to this card line since
that will be rendered there, it will go back to arduer and that will record the audio there.
So it's a bit of a manual process and it would be even more a manual process, the moment I
switch to more professional stuff and I think that new sounds is probably going to be
the closest that you can get to very professional sounds in a setup like that, but I haven't
tested it myself yet.
Still got time for another question or two? Anyone with speaking after me the other way,
because yes, who is next? I know, totally organized and I'm with brilliant.
Ah, Francesco is coming up.
Damn, no, no, no, no.
Let's see, let's see if I can share a bit of the
C feeds, if the audio is coming true, I'm not sure.
I don't think it is just let me give you a second.
Yeah, I'd rather not need to do the HDMI, so let me see if I if it works that way.
26 years of tech conference, we still can't get the tech working.
Yeah, I don't think this is the sounds, these are the sounds that we're expecting.
So I mean, I don't know, okay, is there is there?
So a bit of an ominous classical part.
Let's get to some more noise.
Yeah.
Again, I'd be too noisy about you or you're under there.
There was our case when I walked through there.
Well done.
I've done this no such thing as too noisy.
Actually, we're like the ones I thank you very much for that.
We all continue. Yes.