Hi! I'm a composition student looking to elaborate a project that consists in a 0 budget virtual orchestra working with reaper, already mixed, so fellow students in my faculty can start to learn how to compose orchestral music in DAWs. We are instructed in all the ways of composition but we don't learn anything about composing in this environments. It needs to be with 0 cost because it's for an official faculty project (and we really can't afford any of the products in my country, mindblowingly expensive for us), so my to-go library came to be the Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover.

So, I know this VST is pretty basic, but nevertheless I was looking for ways to improve the sound of it, to make it more realistic. I was wondering if the use of convolution filters and convultion reverbs that emulate the acoustic response of the environment and the instruments could help.

Any advice is of great help for me! Thanks in advance to everyone.

 

I just had a listen to it at their homepage. Built-in reverb sounds ok (I assume it's built-in). The key to authentic performance are arrangement and playing styles, not the reverb (althouh it contributes).

 

Orchestral recording is all about a great performers in a great space with good microphones. Spitifre already took care of that, post-processing is not going to save you. The problem with virtual instruments is their lack of expression and realism. So my advice is :

- Don't forget that you're writing for a library that is quite limited. Simple musical ideas with limited articulations will work fine on it. Don't expect that you can create a violin solo with the same level of expression as Itzhak Perlman, those will simply sound bad on VIs. Try to highlight the instruments that sound best on your library.

- If the virtual instrument behaves badly with reverb tails, select the closest mic position, tame the high frequencies with an EQ to simulate distance, and slap on a good IR reverb. You can't do that with Spitfire's BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover however, as there's only one (mixed) mic position. Maybe you can experiment with it anyway, but be careful to not drown the instruments in reverb.

- Good arrangement. It's the key for good sounding orchestral music. Every instrument section has its distinct timbre and range, so the arrangement has to take advantage of this. If you abuse EQ to make space for every instrument in a bloated arrangement, their timbre will be wrong.

 

I assume you already got skills for sheet music writing, expressions, signatures etc...

vast majority (if all) virtual instruments are based on MIDI input, so you gotta learn howto provide proper MIDI including CC and automation in quite a different way you'd provide orchestra with sheet music - not just following rules/limitations of particular real instrument, but also your target virtual instrument which may or may not "translate" MIDI you create,

Reaper functionality can be significantly enhanced with tons of custom actions and scripts,

definitely check Reaticulate:

 

for reverbs, for orchestral music you want something natural, so impulse reponses are your better bet,
Reaper already contains plugin called ReaVerb which you can load IRs into,

my recommendations are (legally) free impulse reponses of:

Bricasti M7 by Samplicity: https://samplicity.com/bricasti-m7-impulse-response-files/
Lexicon 480L by GrantNelson: https://www.grantnelson.co/article/1/lexicon-480l-free-impulse-responses

 

I don't know anything about BBC SO Discover, so here's some general ideas:

- If the library has multiple velocity layers, ping pong your notes between two layers for "fake" round robins.

- Consider duplicating your track. Transpose the MIDI on your second track up by two semitones and then pull it back down again by 2 ST with a pitch shifter (or the other way around if that sounds better).

- You might want to pull back all your MIDI by a couple milliseconds to account for crossfading/legato transitions, some DAWs have a per-track setting for this.

- You might want to extend your notes/chords quite a bit beyond the start of the next note/chord to get less abrupt crossfades/legato.

- If the library supports modwheel, consider manually adding MW CC to your MIDI, particularly around chord/note transitions.

- If the transitions sound awful, turn off the plugin's reverb, heavily compress the dry track and afterwards add your own reverb (or better yet, IR of a real space).

 

Steve Winwood made a crappy old MultiMoog sound damn nearly like a sax in the 80s just because he understood how to phrase his playing like a sax. Good sounds are great but imho correct phrasing and technique will add more to a sense of realism...

 

That is an incredibly difficult task you're facing. The budget of 0 is really tough.
I honestly cannot imagine working with orchestral composition, or just sampled instruments in general, without Kontakt anymore. Native Instruments have such a monopoly on the entire sampling industry because of it. Almost everything is just made for Kontakt because it has been the go to VST for virtual instruments for way over a decade now, basically to the point of it becoming an industry standard and almost a requirement if you seriously want to get into composing with virtual instruments.

My best advice would be the same thing as multiple people here have said already. It's not about the sound of your samples, it's how you use them. If you intent on working BBCSO then you must learn it inside and out, every tiny thing about how it works and how to use it to its fullest potential. Learning how to use articulations, how manipulate MIDI data such as note velocities, modwheel, expression, etc., that is the key to making realistic sounding sketches. Orchestral programming is the biggest factor deciding on how realistic/good it will sound.

I've heard properly programmed midi files played with built in Windows soundfont that sounded way better than some of the "realistic" orchestral music I've heard online, that was made with very expensive libraries by people who just have no clue how to properly use what they have. So, just focus on composition and programming, mastering these two things will be the key to getting good sounding results.

 

Exactly, video game music is a great example of that. The older Zelda games, before Skyward Sword, used laughably bad samples, and they are still regarded as some of the greatest video game soundtracks of all time. I'd listen to those any day over the soundtracks of some modern triple A games whose composers don't know what a melody is, and use every section just to play chords.

 

Last edited: Sep 12, 2023