Orchestra Template Test

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Michael Willis
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Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

After updating my orchestra template to use sfizz, and experimenting with a reverb send per midi track. I wrote up a quick demo as an audition of sorts, it showcases almost all of the orchestra in under 30 seconds:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kvi971tqv5a2d ... -01-11.mp3

I previously had everything routing only through the reverb busses, with the reverb plugins set to something like 90% dry, 10% wet, but I'm finding that I like using sends way better because I can customize how much reverb I get per instrument.

How well does this sound like it fits together? What can I improve?

Edit: Based on some feedback from my friend, I did some EQ on the brass part, effectively a low-pass starting at 4kHz to cut some of the harsh high frequencies: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dj5mqv51d6eoc ... _16-20.mp3
Any opinions about whether one is better than the other?
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

This is amazing, thanks for sharing! And I agree the second one sounds better.

I was actually thinking about you and your existing template, these past few days, as I've been working a lot more on orchestration lately. My new year's resolution was to finally write that Symphony I always wanted to complete, and so I started playing with MuseScore, how it could work with Ardour and so on, and just yesterday I finished a small piece I thought I'd share here today (will do that later).

I'll write my considerations there, but I'm definitely interested about your efforts with the template. I didn't try the old one, as you mentioned it was deprecated, but one thing interested me: in another post you explain how that one had a single MIDI bus with a single LinuxSampler plugin instance, and all MIDI tracks were routed there. How did that translate to the actual rendering of the MIDI using VPO in LinuxSampler? The reason I'm asking is that adding LinuxSampler for each track in Ardour proved completely unfeasible in my setup: any attempt to preview resulted in freezes and crashes after a few seconds (even when soloing instruments), which makes me suspect that it's either way too CPU/mem intensive when too many tracks are there, or simply that the Ardour/LinuxSampler combo is too unstable. Ardour often crashed also when exporting the audio, which made the process of tuning the end result (a small 2min track) quite painful.

Again, I'll share some more considerations in the post I'll open shortly, but I'll definitely look forward to your experiments!
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

Thanks Rainmak3r! Please try using it, I would really like to know how it goes for somebody else. The sfizz folks are talking about doing a 1.0 release soon, so they should hopefully have a download available sometime in the next month or so. Before then you can try building it yourself from their "develop" branch.
Rainmak3r wrote:I didn't try the old one, as you mentioned it was deprecated, but one thing interested me: in another post you explain how that one had a single MIDI bus with a single LinuxSampler plugin instance, and all MIDI tracks were routed there. How did that translate to the actual rendering of the MIDI using VPO in LinuxSampler?
My old template had some really complicated routing because of the 16-midi-channel LinuxSampler plugin. I had a midi track per instrument (actually per articulation, since I didn't want to use key switches), each of which had a midi channel mapper on it, and then routed them all to one of four busses with LinuxSampler plugins. After that, the 32 audio channel outputs (16 stereo) from each sampler bus were routed to individual audio busses per instrument to customize the stage presence for each instrument. Finally, those busses were routed to one of three reverb busses, which were then routed to master.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but let's say that I had 50 instrument articulations. That meant that my project had 50 instrument midi tracks, 4 sampler busses, 50 instrument audio busses, 3 reverb busses, and the master bus. All together, 108 tracks and busses. Super complicated.

It turns out that there is a different LinuxSampler LV2 plugin that just takes a single midi input and has two audio outputs (for stereo sound). I don't know much about its memory usage, but it would be much more simple to use because you could do all of the stage presence stuff on the same track that has the midi data, like I'm doing with my new template. I'm not on a machine that has those plugins installed, but I think in the KXStudio repos, one is called linuxsampler-lv2-32, and the other is linuxsampler-lv2. Frustratingly, they identify themselves as the same plugin, so if you have a project that is expecting one and then you install the other, your project will crash.

Ultimately, for years I've been wanting a replacement for LinuxSampler because honestly it's kind of a pain to use. Now that sfizz is stabilizing, I don't really see a reason to use LinuxSampler anymore.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

Michael Willis wrote:Thanks Rainmak3r! Please try using it, I would really like to know how it goes for somebody else. The sfizz folks are talking about doing a 1.0 release soon, so they should hopefully have a download available sometime in the next month or so. Before then you can try building it yourself from their "develop" branch.
Tried building sfizz on my Fedora but I'm afraid it didn't go as expected. I followed the instructions and it built just fine, but there's no trace of the "sfizz_jack" executable they mention in the README anywhere, and I couldn't find any shared object either (what I expected the LV2 target to be). Which files are built for you, and where are they placed? If you have files I don't, it may be a build issue on Fedora that I should open an issue for on their Github.

Edit: nevermind that, I'm an idiot... I didn't checkout the develop branch! :oops:
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:I didn't checkout the develop branch! :oops:
Ha, that happened to me, too. I was super confused and the developers helped me get everything straightened out.

I got some more feedback here: http://scoringcentral.mattiaswestlund.n ... hp?tid=769
I'm going to make some more adjustments and I'll share the results.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

I just finished a first project using your template. I took the same MIDI from the waltz I published a few hours ago (and that as described in Ardour there made me scream in pain) and imported it using your template instead. I duplicated some tracks (e.g., I had 2 flutes, 2 oboes, etc.), fixed a few things MuseScore does differently (the note for bass drum and cymbals is different than the one VPO expects apparently), manually splitted the fast string vs. pizzicato parts (unfortunately no way around that...) and this is the result:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Eb5QE5 ... sp=sharing

Does not sound bad at all! I can hear a few differences, for instance horns and oboes sound much worse IMO, but that's probably because the template uses the PERF versions of the VPO SFZ (I always used the regular ones in my project), and I'm not sure exactly what differences there are. But most importantly, it seemed very lightweight on the CPU: not a single hiccup, crash or lag, it just let me work! Not sure if it's because of sfizz vs. LinuxSampler, or because the PERF versions may be lighter and more optimized, but I was really surprised, especially considering you have multiple reverbs and I only had one in place.

I'll definitely keep on using your template in the future, and I'll track the upcoming updates!
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r, I just made a few more tweaks to the template, could you try it out and let me know what you think? Mostly it's adjusting stage presence.

In particular, it has been hard to get that super-close mic trumpet sample to sit well with the other brass, so I'm experimenting with the free edition of Auburn Sounds Panagement to move it back a bit. You can consider Panagement to be an optional plugin, the trumpet track will still work without it, Ardour will just notify you that it can't find the plugin.

I also made the strings sound way more forward, and did several adjustments to gain levels across multiple tracks.

You can download the new Virtual Playing Orchestra.template file from my v2-tweaks branch. None of the other files have changed.

Here's an updated demo: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sigt9qd628bb3 ... 4.mp3?dl=0
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

I'll do that later tonight, thanks for the heads up! I hoped it might be just a couple of tweaks I could apply to the existing project, but looking at the diff there's a ton of changes (I guess IDs changed and so that impacted the whole document) so I'll have to start from scratch :mrgreen:
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:I'll do that later tonight, thanks for the heads up! I hoped it might be just a couple of tweaks I could apply to the existing project, but looking at the diff there's a ton of changes (I guess IDs changed and so that impacted the whole document) so I'll have to start from scratch :mrgreen:
Understood. I've been hoping to find a way to apply template changes across multiple projects, but I haven't found a very nice way to do it. You could do a stem export, saving all of the midi tracks, and then import them into a new project, but then I think you would lose tempo and meter changes.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

Michael Willis wrote:Understood. I've been hoping to find a way to apply template changes across multiple projects, but I haven't found a very nice way to do it. You could do a stem export, saving all of the midi tracks, and then import them into a new project, but then I think you would lose tempo and meter changes.
The fact that I have no idea what a "stem export" is shows how much a of a newbie I still really am, despite having played with these tools for about a year now :lol:
I guess a manual editing of the XML template file might be an option, but only for simple things, and I suspect really dangerous... I did that to integrate a DrumGizmo template in an existing project (since there was no way to start a new project from that template, and add the old tracks to that) and apparently I was lucky it worked, since it's very easy to mess up a project due to conflicting IDs.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Michael Willis »

Rainmak3r wrote:The fact that I have no idea what a "stem export" is shows how much a of a newbie I still really am
Hmm, it turns out that Ardour doesn't support midi export:
https://discourse.ardour.org/t/midi-export/86618

Still, you might be able to do it, since midi regions are stored as midi files. Depending on how your import from MuseScore went, if you have a single midi region per track it might be simple to pull the midi files into a new project.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

Michael Willis wrote:Still, you might be able to do it, since midi regions are stored as midi files. Depending on how your import from MuseScore went, if you have a single midi region per track it might be simple to pull the midi files into a new project.
The way i did it yesterday was:
  1. New project using your template
  2. Duplicate some tracks (flutes, oboes, etc.)
  3. Import the MIDI: this creates ~20 new tracks
  4. Cut/paste MIDI from each of the new tracks to the corresponding existing track in the project (plus an unlink from the origin)
  5. Delete all imported tracks
  6. Cut the pizzicato parts from the strings, and move them to the related pizzicato tracks
Not sure if there's a better or faster way to do this, but that's how I've always handled MIDI in Ardour (at least for cases where I already had a MIDI track I needed data for).
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by milo »

That sounds really good, Michael! I don't have my nice monitor speakers or headphones here in my office, but on my little pc speakers it sounds pretty good. I'll give it a listen on the nicer system when I get home.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

I didn't have time to work on it last night, so I'm trying to do something this morning before work. It doesn't seem to find the "Panagement 2" plugin, even if I did install it, and it appears when I look for plugins in the "Plugins manager": not sure what the cause is here.

As a side note, one thing I forgot to mention last time is that your template has hardcoded paths to a local folder on your machine for the "template-dir" property, and that applies to all tracks: I thought this was normal and harmless (I see the same in another template I have installed), but if I don't manually fix the template-dir to reflect the real path on my laptop, none of the SFZ are loaded. I guess it's normal for Ardour to save your path when saving the template, but maybe there should be a placeholder strng on the version you have on github, and instructions in the README on how to replace it? (e.g., with an inline sed). There may be a variable you can use in the template to refer to the local template folder no matter the installation, but I'm not familiar with the syntax unfortunately.

I'll try to get a new export for the waltz done soon for testing, but if it takes longer I'll do that later today.
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Re: Orchestra Template Test

Post by Rainmak3r »

Just exported a new version of the waltz using the v2-tweaks template: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jp42N ... 48A9Jraza-
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