Sampled vs. live instruments
DateTime:9/27/2009 11:20:23 AM
It was clear from the beginning that recording so much music with a live orchestra would be too expensive, so we had to come up with an alternative solution. The score is mostly based on the traditional western orchestra, so the question was how to make it sound as good as possible without the real thing. There are some very good sample libraries on the market today, but no matter how skilled you are in using them, some instruments and certain playing techniques are always very difficult to get to sound right. Strings – especially slow, expressive legato passages are very difficult to emulate. The same goes for the human voice – particularly when using lyrics. My idea for the score included the use of both strings and voices to a large extent. I came up with the idea to base the score on the sampled orchestra, but include live musicians to perform critical parts. This meant that all choir parts would be sung by a live choir and all solos (both instrumental and vocal) would be performed by live musicians. In addition to this, I wanted to overdub as many string parts as possible with a live violinist.