As those who make film, TV or game score type of music, track counts can get pretty high pretty quickly, often utilising the same instruments, be it the go-to Kontakt libraries or the go-to synths.

Just wondering how many people utilise a template, and curious whether people are able to share the contents of their templates to feed into my consideration when creating my own templates.

How to organise your instruments? What instruments do you use? What parameter tracks do you use (tempo, time signature, markers etc)? What effects do you use? What bus groups do you use?

 

For the orchestral part it's one kontakt instance per orchestral section (loaded with sustain patches unless i need something else) which also doubles as a folder for all the midi tracks involved. Then there's a "orchestra" folder which sole purpose is to collapse the entire thing.

The rest of tracks are a series of buses and routings i unapologetically stole from Andrew Scheps and made a few personal tweaks, imo it works great to "compatibilize" sources that are pretty different, like orchestral and more rocky or electronic stuff.

Tempo and signature "tracks" are hidden until needed. Markers are made on the go.

That's about it for the "big" template, the rest changes depending on the nature of the project.

Oh, and e erything is coloured accordingly, orchestral part uses a lot of sober and classy colours, the rest looks like skittles.

 

Btw, i'll "uno reverse card" you and ask you the same. What does your template(s) look like? I'm particularly curious about how you (or anyone) deal with pre-made atmospheric or sfx libraries/samples when it comes to templates, since that an "on the go" thing for me.

 

I am using EWHO only .. so yeah, basically is enough already, I do not like to have and confuse myself on too many libraries especially on KONTAKT, sometimes I even just make a mock up in Sibelius and using noteperformer and that's it ..

 

Sounds like a good approach. Unfortunately, I cannot read music fluently (yet) though, but am trying a similar approach using Dorico, both to simplify the writing as well as to learn to read musical notation.

 

I currently do not have one, hence the question. I've dabbled in the past with creating templates but none of them really stuck or felt like it was where I wanted to be. I shall be setting something up over the next few days and will let you know

 

One question I've been contemplating recently is related to this, in terms of setting up Kontakt efficiently. I recently posted about it in the Kontakt forum. It's basically whether to go with one instrument patch per instance, or have multiple instrument patches per instance. You state above that you go for entire sections per instance, suggesting it's multiple instrument patches per Kontakt instance. Does this work well in terms of system resource efficiency and so on for you?

 

Works for me, specially if i need to load patches with multiple articulations, it's easier to see what keyswitches are doing if it's all in the same place, same for microphone positions and stuff. No idea how it compares with the "one instance per instrument" approach in terms of resources, haven't really compared them in detail but i've never had any trouble with one or the other (none that i can blame on the approach, that is), and my computer is fairly old.

 

I also use one instance of Kontakt per instrument "section" (up to 16, I won't bother with multiple pages in Kontakt) or group, whatever makes logical sense in terms of organization. I feel it is more beneficial in terms of resource management for an older machine. There is an argument, which I may adopt for myself, for further separating your short articulations from your longs for mixing/engineering purposes. Suffice to say, having a Kontakt instance per articulation to me is overkill, so I'll continue using multis/keyswitches in the meantime.

I don't know what DAW you're using (Cubase here) but you want to ultimately, and if you're interested in this sort of production you have likely seen this already, funnel all your individual tracks into groups that that fold out or fold down in complexity/simplicity as necessary. This makes rough mixing and stem printing easier. Additionally, you want to place basic eq and light compression on all the tracks of your template so that is already done for you. The EQ is most important, you want low/high cuts where appropriate. I follow Marc Jovani's advice on EQ and general mixing concepts, you can't go wrong doing the same.

I am also newish to the orchestral side of things, so I am happy to exchange info/answer questions on this where I can.

 

I'm basically my templates; on my crazy times i had ELEVEN different ones, each one with different amps and signal paths. Now i have 6, that are basically the same routings, same auxes but with different amps (or no amps). I got a neve based, 4000 and 9000 SSL's, the Amek 9099, tube based and full digital (no amps). It's basically a channel strip on all my channels; the 4000 is waves, 9000 and Amek by bx and neves and tubes are preamps that i like the most going into a metric halo channelstrip. on the digital is only a metric halo CS. Those channels go for the classic Brauerized ABCD: drums, melodic instruments, one shots/loops/fx and vocals. Each one of these busses have a summing amp (or any kind of saturator) -> compressor - tonal eq. I can add other things after or between those, but i try to get the most with those 3. No heavy lifting on my busses, prefer treating indiviual channels with more attention. All of those busses go to the 2buss: 9 of 10 it's a compressor doing 2 db of gr and a limiter doing 3db of gr. I can use other tools, but its circunstancial. Also have a parallel 2buss where i can add grit and dirt to the whole record and a parallel drum bus where anything may happen. the other parallel auxes are inside the ABCD. Got some effect busses, only delay and reverb, turned off but already with my favorite presets for each situation.

 

For me, mixing is a closed system. if you're in a studio, you are limited to the tools of the studio. each one of thoses things is a building block to feed the 2buss with max power and less work possible. at least, i got my best results this way.

 

I have all the instruments grouped by family, mainly in color-coded folders in reaper and run those to usually one of two reverbs.

Each of the main sections: Brass, Winds and Strings contains both ensemble patches and divisi.

On my MIDI controller I also have faders set to turn negative track delays for certain instruments (like those by Audio Imperia) on or off as well.

 

I have 1500 tracks disabled in cubase, classified by instrument category in folders and sub folders. I don't use it as a premixed template but more as a giant browser where most of my libraries are accessible.
I use only keyswitch patches with cubase expression maps because I tried the split articulation way, it was way too many tracks for my comfort