Audiobro Modern Scoring Brass: some memory tips

[NoamL]

Yes Guy, "normal" trombones are tenors. I believe Altos used to be used in operas and musicals up until the early 20th century and little used since then. I think Stravinsky used them on some pieces?? Tenor tbn lowest note is concert E below the bass staff and its highest note is D, as in "Don't Ever Ask A Brass Player Their Highest Note." But anything above about G or A above middle C is definitely "rare" high range for orchestral writing especially because that is the sweet spot for horns.

[FriFlo]

Yes Guy, "normal" trombones are tenors. I believe Altos used to be used in operas and musicals up until the early 20th century and little used since then. I think Stravinsky used them on some pieces?? Tenor tbn lowest note is concert E below the bass staff and its highest note is D, as in "Don't Ever Ask A Brass Player Their Highest Note." But anything above about G or A above middle C is definitely "rare" high range for orchestral writing especially because that is the sweet spot for horns.

Two days ago I heard two Schumann Symphonies in concert and took a look at the score before. In both cases Schumann wrote for alto, tenor and bass trombone. I cannot claim that I heard that, though. :-)
It seems to have been used rarely after the classic/romatic period:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_ ... o_trombone
I was suprised to see in the wiki that it was used quite frequently in classical works, including most Beethoven Symphonies - I never noticed that TBH. Suppose, for modern composers it is mostly of interest, if they need a trombone that plays a little higher in solos and brass choral writing.

[Guy Rowland]

Tenor tbn lowest note is concert E below the bass staff and its highest note is D, as in "Don't Ever Ask A Brass Player Their Highest Note." But anything above about G or A above middle C is definitely "rare" high range for orchestral writing especially because that is the sweet spot for horns.

Ah, that matches - according to the manual "trombones" were recorded G1 - Db5, and they extended the range artificially by stretching. To be clear, I'd wondered if the Trombones patch was somehow a hybrid of various types of bones to make one massive range but I'm 100% convinced now that its Tenors - bit odd that they didn't call them that!

For completists, the recorded range of the Altos was A2-F5, while the Basses were E1-Bb4.

[KyleJudkins]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3bsyaqab90pk ... b.mp3?dl=0

I tried to play around with leaving the "main mix" and mixing in a few plugins to make it sit with my berlin libraries.

I know it's not perfect - but does this sound like it's on the right path? The music is as random as usual(I atleast tried to make myself write something majorish)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/onkz4cfnp5b62 ... y.mp3?dl=0

that's the brass isolated - making it abundantly clear that I'm playing random stuff

[Guy Rowland]

Coming together I think Kyle For my taste some of the pedals in the mid range are a bit too dominant at times, I'd be easing those back as the trumpets for example come to the fore.

Just starting to try to get my head around the software itself. Looks incredibly versatile, but struggling a bit on figuring out how to get the individual shorts on keyswitches.... I think that's always going to be my preferred way to work. I've asked Sebastian over at the Audiobro forum for some help there, if anyone else has figured it out in the meantime I'm all ears.

[KyleJudkins]

Oddly, I just replied there. Like I said - I'd rather personally use 3 more instances of shorts on kontakt. then record the shorts using the double tongue articulation, and simply select the notes and change their channels.

However - oddly enough, I think it'll be slightly more difficult than that for me, because I'll probably set up 3 channels per(and simply only have 1 instrument active) or 4 channels so you have tutti/auto divisi for writing - and then you can swap individual parts out.

[SoNowWhat]

Thank you Guy, for taking the time to demonstrate all the library basics. Very much appreciated. There are a couple of places where I didn't like various tones but they are minor and on the whole I think it sounds great. Combine that with what looks like a very useful interface for composing with and MSB looks like a fair asking price to me. Still undecided but not because I have any doubts about the library itself.

And I enjoyed your short piece above Kyle. I thought the placement was pretty good to my ears and on my system.

[Guy Rowland]

Well, I've got all the Full Mix regular instruments into the template now. I've decided to separate into longs and short patches, with the former on CC and latter on Velocity, which feels like home to me, and I'm keyswitching most artics and velocity control of attacks. I've disabled all Kontakt reverbs and am sending to Seventh Heaven scoring stage for tail, along with the rest of the template. No need for ER. This all takes a fair bit of setting up.

For anyone else following anything like the same path, the way to do manual keyswitching of each short articulation isn't obvious, but doable. You need to set the Switcher into Preset mode (by default it is tile), then go through each articulation one by one saving it as a new preset. Name as you go 'Double Tongue'. '1/16' etc. Then once that chore is done, these new presets are available in the Articulation switcher, and you can select them like any other as a keyswitch.

There's so many instruments - 34 of them so far with 2 of everything as longs and shorts - the gigs rack up. At the moment I'm running them all unpurged on 18k buffers - stuff like the Crescendos are all in RAM, so won't work purged, and ditto the legato transitions. Including every mute, so far that's 21gb in VE Pro. There are no circumstances under which I'd ever use that amount however or close to it- having every stopped, every muted variant of every single instrument is crazy. But under the wonders of the VE Pro disabled template, its trivial to have them load / unload at the touch of a button.

But that of course is not all - next up come the wonderous Intution patches. I wont have every one of those, likely just 1 Bb Trumpet, 1 C trumpet etc.

I've found a couple of glitches so far. I'm getting CPU spikes on the looped trill patches which Audiobro can't reproduce. It happens only on higher dynamics in Cubase or VE Pro, but never happens in standalone. CPU use is circa 10% in VE Pro. It even does it at 2048 buffer in an otherwise blank instance of Cubase. Very strange, hopefully Audiobro can help me track down what's causing it. Also there's a few missing artics for me in keyswitching - Crescendos and Flutters on a couple of the low brass don't sound for me for some reason.

In all other ways, its majestic though. Unable to restrain myself, I stacked up all the main low brass artics, some crazy number. Sounded appropriately splendid and rattled the walls. However, the marvel was as I played it never sounded synthy, it always sounded like real brass. That's the beauty of auto-divisi, you don't get that crazy mathematical increase of players that sounds fake, and ultimately this is the real USP of MSB compared to the competition.

[KyleJudkins]

It's really odd honestly, I notice the build up issues when people stack ensemble/solo brass for chords - and It's almost unbearable... Some people just don't notice it - and I have no idea how it doesn't bother them.

And on the contrary - the interesting part to me isn't that MSB doesn't have the weird build up from multiple soloists - it's that it actually has an ensemble sound quite effectively because of the humanization.

[Linos]

A quick test on Vi-C suggests that Modern Scoring Brass has three dynamic layers (as does Berlin Brass). It would certainly correspond with the lack of timbral variance I perceived in the demos and walkthroughs. If you count out the cuivre top dynamic ff-layer, that leaves you with just two layers to cover the whole rest of the dynamic range. To my ears that is simply not enough. Brass has such a distinctive beautiful tone at low dynamics, and I just don't hear that in MSB. Cinematic Studio Brass has four dynamic layers, and to my ears it is doing better in that regard.

[Guy Rowland]

I'm getting CPU spikes on the looped trill patches which Audiobro can't reproduce. It happens only on higher dynamics in Cubase or VE Pro, but never happens in standalone.

All credit to Audiobro, after a couple of weeks they tracked it down. Its a Kontakt Time Machine bug in both K5 and K6, where loops glitch at 44.1k playback. My Cubase sessions are in 44.1k, standalone 48k... so there you go! Amazing it's taken this long to find a generic Kontakt bug, you really would have thought someone would have hit on it before now.

[Pixelpoet1985]

I'm a bit disappointed that there are no further videos ... I haven't bought the library yet.

@Guy: Can we expect a walkthrough in the near future? Your Symphobia videos are awesome and funny.

[Guy Rowland]

Hello Pixel - there have now been quite a lot more in depth videos of Trumpet, Horns, Muted trumpets, Cimbassos - is there anything in particular you'd like to hear?

I'll confess I was wondering if I needed to do a video as there seemed a lot more info out there now, but perhaps I should if only to show one way of having them set up in a template, and give a rough overview.

[Geoff Grace]

perhaps I should if only to show one way of having them set up in a template, and give a rough overview.

I think that would be very helpful, Guy, but only if you have the time.

Best,

Geoff

[bbunker]

I don't know if that was a general offer, Guy, but I'd absolutely, positively love to see a video from you on it.

Basically - the videos raised a lot of questions that just kind of sit there for me. Like the intuition instruments: they sound at times far, far better and more realistic. If there was a separate volume for the normal instruments and the intuition ones for half price on each one, I'd probably grab the intuitions and leave the main library from what I've heard - but there hasn't been much!! Just a review of those, maybe comparing them with the main library, what's better or worse on each - especially given that there's been zero information from AudioBro on details on them - but that's quite an ask, of course!!

The other thing that feels like it could break MSB is in doublings and playing nice between and with other sections. It feels like a Cinewinds Core again - great soloistic sound, but throw the Cinewinds Clarinets with a Horn Section, and it never adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Those low brass especially bug me. I mean - using just the bones and tuba (I have a restraining order against unnecessary Cimbassi) will it get anywhere near the body (but not volume) that the Spitfire or Berlin low brass get, or the vim and vigor of CSB's low brass, or Cinebrass on a good day? All that I've heard from the low brass has been a bit characterless at best, and I get the feeling that a good body of low strings (Say, SSS's gluten-filled low end) will eat MSB's low brass alive. Not that every library has to work well with every other, but from what I've heard I haven't been able to imagine MSB's Bones and below sitting well with any String library. Again - pairing MSB up with other things is a big ask, too!

Just thinking about it, there's tons of things that the AB videos don't really clear up. A classic Guy Rowland video of pulling up some patches and going "eh. Ah. EHHH?!!?" and chattering about whether it just works or not would be revelatory for MSB - for me, anyway!

[Guy Rowland]

Oooh, no pressure - I'll see how the weekend stacks up. Can't promise I'll cover everything.... I'll need to figure out exactly what sort of video or videos to do.

[Pixelpoet1985]

I already posted some questions on the Audiobro forum, because the official videos don't answer my questions. These are INSTRUMENT videos, not FEATURE videos. I want to see more features.

I wanted to know the following in particular...

Legatos:
How agile and flexible are they? Can you play grace notes or trills? How does repeated legato notes sound (in terms of connectivity)? What does the speed slider do or what does the speed-adaptive legato sounds like/behave?

Tuning/Humanisation:
I want to see the possible options you can choose from or in what degree they can be edited. There is a button called "custom" for the auto-divisi, so what can be tweaked here?

Sizzle:
What does it do to the sound?

Shorts:
There are different options to control the lengths of the short articulations. I think I would prefer "velocity" or "speed". I wanted to know if you can adjust the velocity and speed thresholds, or are they fixed?

And, of course, some information on the Intuition Series.

[KyleJudkins]

I think the fastest Legato is probably accented, I'm not sure how quick you can adjust Legato speed to achieve really fast stuff, I know there is no speed function for the short notes but you can definitely use velocity, and it's the same for which long variation you're using as well

Sizzle is just EQ, either reducing or accentuating that frequency range

[Guy Rowland]

Pixel:

The legato speed adjusts the speed of transitions, pretty smoothly I have to say, so at minimum there's little to no effect at all, right up to almost portamento-type effects (in this sense, it is very similar to LASS). In terms of speed its pretty good, but you can go fastest with the Intuition patches, which are extremely nimble. I'll try to cover this a bit in the video(s).

I've actually played little with the tuning tweaks, except I have started to experiment with detuning the additional intuition patches - (eg horns 2, 3, 4) just very slightly, enough to counter the too-perfect feeling that i get at default, but not so much that it sounds obviously choursey.

Sizzle is really a filter on the highs it sounds like, either tames or pronounces the bigger brassier tone in the louder dynamics.

You can indeed adjust velocity and sure speed thresholds for triggering artics. I have the velocity set to trigger the different attacks, and are changed quite drastically from the default to match my keyboard.

[Guy Rowland]

Well it hardly covers everything, but it's hopefully of use to someone somewhere, a half an hour whisk through of MSB in the template.

[Luciano Storti]

Very grateful, good Sir. Shall watch at once!

[tack]

Thanks for putting that together, Guy. Do let me know when CD 1 of Guy Noodling in Cmin is released.

Those horns sound really good, don't they. The one thing I've yet to see a sample library do well is pp, or maybe even ppp (is that technically possible?) , where horns take on an almost winds-like quality. For example, 2:14 in this video. Berlin Brass gets relatively close, and SSB isn't too bad, but CSB's a bit too cutting. I wonder how MSB does with those pianissimo repeated triads?

I noticed the CPU optimizations option in the Intuition patch. That's a counterintuitive name for such a setting -- why wouldn't you set it to high? Presumably because it's doing something expensive but acoustically relevant if you set it to low? Have you played with that setting?

And speaking of the intuition patch, the trombones legato is indeed not very good. On the main patch, at 22:10, the tenor trombones really sound dreadful in my opinion. Bouncing around the stereo field there (between center and right). I wonder if the Intuition patch for trombones does better here?

Euphoniums sound wonderful. Really a shamefully undersampled instrument. Such a satisfying tone.

Finally, I must say I'm impressed you remembered to come back to the mutes at the end.

[Guy Rowland]

Hello Jason, good stuff to pick up on...

Here's some JW-style PP horns triads. These are 1/16th notes on the downbeats, double tongues on the rest, key velocity 10 for the doubles and about 40-50 on the dowbeats, all set to auto divisi.

Here's 4 horns
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6502ewea1pi5q ... s.wav?dl=0

and here's 8 (just copying the midi to add Horns 2)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jlvnx1wslmtxu ... s.wav?dl=0 .

And if anyone fancies A/Bing, here's the midi
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6wlhgmpqmu3gh ... 0.mid?dl=0

Here's what the manual says about CPU optimizations for the Intuition series:

CPU Optimizations — Changes the amount of CPU necessary to run the engine. Higher values will somewhat reduce quality of the modeling and performance tracking but will also reduce CPU demands. Note that none of these settings will give you poor quality. By default Medium is a good balance.

Hmm, I don't hear any stereo bouncing around on that stretch of the Trombones (nor indeed anywhere in the library). Listening back however, that stretch was a bit of a casualty in wanting the video not interminably long, that this section is pretty much all bald f - fff. So here's a similar no-cheating-just-played-more-c-minor to see what it sounds like (not a very musical use of CC1, but hey its a technical test), and this time across the whole dynamic range.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pchmfmbrcza9z ... e.wav?dl=0

I then copied the data to a solo intuition patch, and just compressed CC1 very slightly to avoid the very harshest top of CC1 which is pretty unpleasant - this tops out at around 110 I think.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q32214x0lz9vw ... n.wav?dl=0

Low Optimization (ie highest CPU
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q32214x0lz9vw ... n.wav?dl=0

Medium
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7w9brali9bvgl ... n.wav?dl=0

High (ie lowest CPU)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zlfb18525d775 ... n.wav?dl=0

And for fun, here's the 4 bones combined with one solo - one thing to note here I've not heard any phasing when I've tried this, which is good news:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ue2nz91cnjia ... n.wav?dl=0

Looking at the (very fast) VE Pro CPU meters, the difference between low and high is around double. It was hitting a peak of about 14% on high, 28% on low. Honestly can tell very little audible difference - can anyone else hear anything to listen out for?

Bonus thought - I can midi transpose all my 20 CD set of C minor noodling for 11 more sets!

[riffwraith]

A little comparison, using that .mid. First your file, Guy, then the solo Hn from EWQL-HB, then three of the solo Hns from OT-BB. Nothing done; no verb, no EQ, save for putting the BB patches into TM mode.

http://jeffreyhayat.com/temp/hntest.wav

Sounds like you had some other notes in there, Guy, or are those some weird overtones I am hearing?

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks Jeff - of those, I have MSB out front, BB close 2nd, HB distant (in all senses) third. But maybe my ears need cleaning out - I don't hear any other notes here, just as I don't hear a wandering stereo image in the trombone in my little walkthrough video.

Not speaking to anyone here, but I do think somehow with MSB in particular for some reason, there has been a slight tendency to over-analyse, to find ever more elusive un-quantifiable problems. I've had one or two myself. In the end, I hope there's enough material out there now for folks to make a relatively informed decision on whether or not they like the sound and feature-set. I very much do for both. It won't be my brass for absolutely everything I ever do, but from my earliest workings with it, it'll be likely something like 75/25 MSB/Everything Else.