How to Get Realistic Orchestra Sounds at Home

For the most part, contemporary
composers use computers to create their works. (One notable exception is the
esteemed John Williams, who still writes every score by hand!) If they are
scoring a big-budget motion picture, then the virtual orchestral instruments
will ultimately be replaced with real ones on a scoring stage. But, in many instances,
it will be the actual sound of those plug-ins that you hear in modest-budget
indie films and TV shows. Sampling technology has advanced by leaps and bounds
in the past decade; and today’s virtual instruments (VIs) are, for the most
part, stunningly convincing (when deployed optimally). Sweetwater carries the
world’s premier software brands; and, browsing our website, you can choose from
a huge selection of high-quality orchestral samples and physically modeled VIs.
In this article, we’ll highlight some techniques to help you get the most
realistic results from them in your home-studio (or any studio) setup.

Study Up on Basic Orchestration

If you are not familiar with
orchestral instruments (sounds, ranges, voicing, etc.), then having an arsenal
of the latest, greatest virtual instruments is not going to help you very much.
So, for newcomers to orchestral composition, we’d recommend boning up on
creative orchestration techniques. This starts with a basic knowledge of each
instrument within the four sections that make up an orchestra: strings, brass,
woodwinds, and percussion. Learning about each instrument’s register, playing
techniques, limitations, and peculiarities will come in handy when it comes to
choosing the range for a part and assigning articulations for specific notes
and/or phrases in your software. This will go a long way toward helping you
achieve the genuine orchestral sound you want for your in-the-box compositions.

Know Your Instruments

Once you’re familiar with the
instruments of the orchestra, you’ll mostly want to ensure that instruments are
playing in the “comfort zone” of their registers. For example, if you have
brass voiced too high, it can become strident-sounding and overpower other
instruments in the arrangement. With that said, don’t be shy about breaking the
“rules” to achieve a specific effect. For instance, a tuba or bassoon played at
the top or bottom of its register can deliver immediate comic relief. Certain
conventions exist because they are reliable. Celesta and violins together can
connote mystery. Soften trumpets by doubling them with oboes. Doubling cello
arpeggios with harp can provide a sense of wonderment, as will doubling flutes
with piccolo. Letting clarinets take the melody with flute ornamentation is a
delicate and beautiful way to state a theme. To evoke a lighthearted sense of
fun, many composers reach for oboe, piccolo, and pizzicato strings. These are
but a few examples of effective orchestration techniques that are regularly
used by professional composers. There are countless others, but you get the
idea: know your instruments. You are painting with sound, and they comprise
your artist’s palette.

Keep It Interesting

A good composition will be engaging to
the listener whether it’s recorded on a Hollywood scoring stage or created in
your DAW. To that end, keep your arrangements interesting and move them forward
by constantly shifting the mood with devices such as variable/interlocking
instrument textures, key/mode changes or modal interchange, dynamic tempo and
cadence, wide/close voicings, tension chords, parallel/contrary melodic motion,
and other techniques that can take a piece from playful to mysterious to
suspenseful to resolved, all in the span of a short, dramatic scene.

Find Your Own Voice

A recognizable, recurring basic theme
(commonly imprinted to a character) interwoven throughout a movie score is a
time-tested strategy for bringing the listeners’ ears back to an auditory
signpost that can serve as a springboard to other themes. What do you have to
say as a composer? Being conversant with basic conventions will give you the
freedom to experiment and find your own signature style. Putting in the work,
you’ll know what works and what doesn’t — and most importantly: what you like.

Sketch Now, Orchestrate Later

You may want to consider sketching out
an entire piece on the piano before transcribing it to orchestra. Of course, as
you do this, you’ll have ideas about the eventual orchestration, but not having
to think about it as you are writing can be quite liberating, if you can work
this way. Before computers became an intrinsic part of the music-creation
process, this is the way it was done. And, indeed, many composers still work
this way, sketching out a complete composition on a piano patch in their
orchestral DAW template and then orchestrating it. If you are ultimately
composing for orchestra, then it’s important that your MIDI controller have 88
keys, as its keyboard will cover the entire range of the orchestra. Trust us:
you don’t want to be constantly fiddling with octave-shift buttons when you’re
trying to capture and perfect an orchestral arrangement.

Perform Instrument Parts Expressively

One of the disadvantages of the piano
sketch/subsequent orchestration method is that expressive performances on a piano
and, let’s say, French horns, will invariably require a different touch from
the performer (you) in spite of the fact that they are both played on the same
keyboard. An orchestral arrangement directly ported from MIDI data generated by
a piano performance will need quite a bit of massaging to sound natural, and
you will probably find it necessary to play in certain instrument parts again
with sampler playback settings optimized for various parameters.

The Longs and Shorts of It

As you’re playing in a part,
manipulating dynamics in real time helps you nail a more expressive performance
that sits well in the mix. Sample-library companies generally record their
samples with multiple dynamic layers that capture the sound of the instrument
in various zones throughout its dynamic range. With sustaining instruments such
as strings, brass, and woodwinds, dynamic layers of short notes (“shorts”) are
triggered in turn by keyboard velocity as you strike the keys progressively
harder (like a piano). To achieve realism with “longs,” you can crossfade
between these dynamic layers (which are all constantly playing in the
background) as you hold notes. Assigning dynamics to a fader, mod wheel, or
expression pedal and riding dynamics in real time allows the instrument to change
in timbre throughout a note’s duration as it swells, sustains, and dies out.
This sounds eminently more realistic than if you simply ride the volume. The
effect is especially dramatic on sustained brass notes with crescendos.

The desirability of real-time
expressive control might cause you to question the wisdom of the sketch now/orchestrate
later approach. The answer might lie in your prowess as a keyboardist. It would
make sense if the piano is your native instrument, allowing you to formulate
and bang out a reasonably complex idea expeditiously. If, however, you’re a
guitarist whose relationship with the keyboard is tenuous at best, then you may
want to stick with performing each part on its intended orchestral instrument.

Don’t Ignore Tutti Libraries

The uninitiated might assume that
professional composers always write for separate sections (e.g.,
first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, basses), however it’s often not
only expedient to use meticulously curated tutti
(all the instruments together) patches with all the string players, for
instance, carefully mapped out across your controller keyboard; it can actually
produce superior results. Well-crafted tutti libraries let you create quick arrangements that
sound amazing without the need for detailed orchestration. More often than not,
tutti patches are used together with separate sections when you want to,
for example, lay down a pad while explicitly highlighting the instruments that
are carrying the melody or to delineate intricate counterpoint between
instruments or sections.

Be a Recording Engineer

To achieve the most authentic-sounding
orchestral virtual instruments, you’ll need to shift gears — from composer to
recording engineer. Knowing instinctively how to balance a full symphony
orchestra is not necessarily something that comes naturally to composers;
however, in today’s DAW-centric production environment, it is nevertheless a
skill they have had to master. With a solid library of plug-ins and a full-featured
DAW, you have many tools at your disposal.

Natural Room Ambience

Many of today’s virtual-instrument
libraries give you a choice of mixable mic positions, and these can be
invaluable for setting your orchestra in a credible physical space — particularly
if the scoring stage where they were recorded is graced with favorable
acoustics. In these cases, you may not need to apply any added hall reverb.
Oftentimes, the Decca tree mics (a triple-omni mic arrangement on a tall stand
that has been used for orchestral recordings ever since the ’50s), with perhaps
a prudent application of close mics for focus, will suffice, providing a
believable sense of spatial dimension.

Use Reverb Judiciously

Not all sample-library patches sound
great straight out of the box; some will require a bit of work to make them
sound authentic. And this is where you roll up your sleeves and dig into your
recording engineer’s toolbox. As for reverb, find a hall setting you like and
optimize it for duration, pre-delay, and other parameters. You may experiment
with using an instance as an insert for the early reflections and a
similar-sounding master reverb optimized for the tail, set up as a send. Use
this configuration as your main (and, preferably, only) source of added ambience.
Applying different-sounding reverbs to various sources might work well for a
rock, pop, or jazz combo, but you’ll generally find that it sounds unnatural
when you’re dealing with an orchestra that’s ostensibly all playing in one
room. Of course, if you’re writing a sufficiently hybridized score or merely
adding strings to your latest EDM track, then go for it!

Fix It in Post

If you hired a horn section and they
all played fortissimo all the time, it would sound terrible, and you’d
fire them. So, ensure that your productions have realistic dynamics. As
previously discussed, it can be a challenge to nail the dynamics of a part
perfectly when you play it on your controller. And, in any case, you’ll likely
have a better overall perspective once all the parts have been laid down. So,
we’d advise you to insert an interim step in preparation for your final mix. In
your DAW’s editor, you can apply velocity automation, which will be more
effective (and infinitely neater) than tying yourself in knots by performing
countless fader-ride automation passes. Unlike simple volume changes, applying
velocity naturally affects the sound of an instrument patch, and it allows you to
go in, graphically, on a macro level to “perfect” a performance.

Sometimes, however, you may simply
want to change a level. Here, instead of reaching for a fader, you can tweak
MIDI volume (CC 7), again, graphically at a macro level. And, while you are
revisiting the velocity and MIDI volume of various parts, keep an ear out for
articulations that might benefit from being changed. Last, if parts you have
recorded with quantization are sounding a bit mechanized, your DAW has
provisions for “humanizing” them with controlled randomization for a more
natural feel. The practical advantage of this pre-mix production phase is that
you’ll be starting your final mix with a good balance, fewer issues to be
ironed out, and all console faders at unity gain. This makes mixdown a lot more
manageable as you’ll only be perfecting the few items that still need tweaking.

A World-Class Orchestra Under Your
Baton

That about wraps it up. Obviously, this is a huge subject, and we’ve only scratched the surface. There are many aspects to producing realistic orchestral recordings in a DAW. Fortunately, there are many resources on the Web — including Sweetwater.com, where you’ll find lots of helpful content as well as a massive selection of the finest music-creation software available. And, if you need personalized expert advice, our Sales Engineers are always ready to help you select the best plug-ins for your needs and budget. Give them a call at (800) 222-4700, and you’ll be on your way to putting a world-class orchestra under your baton!

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