Results for composing

Cinematic specialists ProjectSAM have announced Orchestral Essentials: The Essence of Film Scoring – a Kontakt instrument designed to give computer musicians the essential tools to launch their film composing career at an unbeatable price.

ProjectSAM has carefully selected the essentials from each of their products, including the highly praised Symphobia series, True Strike series and Orchestral Brass Classic, and bundled them into one effective, incredibly versatile package. What’s more, new instruments not found in any other ProjectSAM products are also included.

Covering full orchestra, string, brass and woodwind ensembles, classical and world percussion, Orchestral Essentials gives you the right ammo to start scoring for film, games or pop with the acclaimed “cinematic SAM sound”.

For each of the orchestral sections, an essential list of articulations is available, as well as one expressive legato instrument and an inspiring set of clusters, textures and effects.

Apart from these orchestral elements, you will also find a concert harp, church organ, ProjectSAM’s renowned Dystopia sound design, and, exclusive to Orchestral Essentials, an enchanting grand piano and harpsichord.

Orchestral Essentials follows ProjectSAM’s ensemble recording philosophy. Strings, brass and woodwinds were sampled as sections, as nothing beats the authentic blend of orchestral instruments in a concert hall. ProjectSAM captures this magic in various orchestrations; for example, imagine the noble sound of horns and trombones performing together naturally.

Back in 2002, ProjectSAM set the benchmark for ambient recording and affordability with the release of SAM HORNS. Now, ProjectSAM does it again with Orchestral Essentials.

Orchestral Essentials will be available in Q4 2011 priced £299 GBP / €349 EUR. It is now available to pre-order from Time+Space.

More information: Time+Space

Time+Space has posted an interview with Tom Salta on video game scoring and why he is a fan of Spectrasonics instruments.

“There’s something about Eric [Persing]’s sensibilities when creating libraries that really resonates with me and the kind of sounds that inspire me. I consider him the godfather of sound designers and I know he has inspired many of the people creating sound libraries today.” – Tom Salta

From working with the likes of Whitney Houston, Peter Gabriel and Mary J Blige in the early days of his career through to composing soundtracks for some of today’s most popular video games including Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X and Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Tom Salta has established a solid reputation as one of the industry’s most versatile composers.

His album ’2 Days or Die’ (produced under the alter ego of Atlas Plug) has the rare distinction of every track having been licensed for film trailers, games, TV shows and commercials including last year’s Toy Story 3 trailer, and his game scores have earned him numerous award nominations including the MTV Video Music Awards and BAFTA.

Tom is a fan of Spectrasonics plug-ins so Time+Space got in touch with him to get the lowdown on why he uses the plug-ins, how he composes for games, and the gap he recently discovered in the sample library market…

And once you’ve read the interview why not enter the competition to win one of three Atlas Plug albums signed by Tom himself!

More information: Time+Space

Avid has announced the availability of Pro Tools MP 9, the latest version of the award-winning Pro Tools software, which enables M-Audio® hardware enthusiasts to harness professional-quality recording, editing, and mixing features in their home or project studios.

Pro Tools MP 9 leverages the same core functionality found in Avid’s Pro Tools software, the top choice for music and audio professionals. New Pro Tools MP 9 features include Automatic Delay Compensation for great-sounding, phase-accurate mixes; and MP3 export capability, which enables users to easily share their creations with the world. Avid’s Pro Tools MP 9 software will be offered standalone for use with select M-Audio interfaces, as well as in all-new, value-packed bundles with the M-Audio MobilePre, Fast Track® Pro or Fast Track Ultra interfaces, providing the essential tools that customers need to create professional-quality music.

Specifically designed to work with select Avid’s M-Audio audio interfaces, Pro Tools MP 9 delivers a professional, stable platform intended for personal studio and mobile music creation.

Pro Tools MP 9 features

• Studio-standard composing, recording, MIDI sequencing, editing, and mixing features.
• Support for a wide variety of M-Audio hardware interfaces, providing robust, complete solutions that are easy to set up and use.
• 48 simultaneous 24-bit mono or stereo tracks and up to 96 kHz fidelity, enabling rich, layered productions
• Over 70 virtual instruments and effects plug-ins for creating and polishing professional-sounding mixes.
• Automatic Delay Compensation and MP3 export, delivering the most requested Pro Tools updates to Pro Tools MP 9 users.
• Session compatibility with professional Pro Tools studios around the world, facilitating collaboration.

Pro Tools MP 9 is available to purchase for $299.95, and upgrades are available to existing Pro Tools M-Powered™ users for $199.95. Pricing for Pro Tools MP 9 bundles begins at $329.95 for Pro Tools MP 9 + MobilePre, $399.95 for Pro Tools MP 9 + Fast Track Pro and $549.95 for Pro Tools + Fast Track Ultra. All prices USMSRP. All options now available worldwide.

More information: Avid / Pro Tools MP 9

Steinberg has announced Cubase 6 and Cubase Artist 6, two new versions of the highly acclaimed Cubase music production system for recording, editing, mixing and producing music to the highest standards.

Encompassing refinements and new capabilities, such as extended composing features available in VST Expression 2**, phase-accurate multitrack drum editing** plus a wealth of effects and instruments, Cubase 6 and Cubase Artist 6 are now shipping and will be available at dealers and in the Steinberg Online Shop for EUR 599*/GBP 508* and EUR 299*/GBP 253*, respectively.

“The sixth version marks a significant release for Cubase,” comments Helge Vogt, Steinberg’s product marketing manager for Cubase. “With over 25 years of experience in creating the very best in music creation software, we at Steinberg are elated to unveil the latest incarnation of Cubase at this leviathan event early in the year. By funneling our entire engineering expertise into Cubase 6 to give our customers better production solutions than ever before, we’ve been able to solidify the position of Cubase as the world’s most popular music production system today. It looks better, feels better and works easier than ever before — Cubase is simply the perfect go-to audio workstation for all styles of music,” Vogt continues.

Cubase 6 and Cubase Artist 6 offer enhanced workflow features within the Project window. The newly introduced Track Edit Groups option** refines the work with multitrack recordings, allowing related events on multiple tracks to be grouped and edited simultaneously, while the new Lane Track offers convenient multitake comping for selecting and consolidating audio parts to form the perfect take. The redesigned transient and automatic tempo detection, phase-accurate audio quantization and drum replacement functions incorporated in Cubase 6 help to smooth out any glitches in live-recorded drum tracks.** The Key Editor has further been enhanced with an Inspector panel and the groundbreaking Note Expression feature for creating and editing multiple controller values on a single-note level.** Also included is the new Dynamics Lane, which allows real-time listening of dynamic changes while automatically in sync with dynamic notations from the Score Editor.**

“With the concurrent release of VST 3.5, we’re taking VST to the next level, introducing a revolutionary new approach to controlling musical articulations note by note. It’s called Note Expression and is part of VST Expression 2 which radically simplifies work with large orchestral libraries for symphonic or film scoring. There’s also our virtual guitar amplifier and effects suite, VST Amp Rack, ready to infuse guitar tracks with the right tone in both Cubase and Cubase Artist. So many quality effects, virtual instruments and cool content right out of the box permit Cubase to scale beautifully between the needs of bedroom music producers and chart-topping studio professionals,” remarks product marketing coordinator Carlos Mendoza Rohde on the new features.

Both Cubase 6 and Cubase Artist 6 feature the VST Amp Rack plug-in, which comes with seven amp models, sixteen stomp boxes, six speaker cabinets and two microphone types. A great benefit is added by the HALion Sonic SE virtual instrument, which comes with more than 900 production-ready sounds in Cubase and 550 sounds in Cubase Artist, and the second edition of LoopMash, now boasting more than 20 MIDI-controllable live and slice-based effects. The significantly redesigned graphical user interface minimizes eye strain, which is customizable in its intensity, brightness and tone color settings. Both new Cubase versions offer 64-bit support for Windows and Mac operating systems, enabling a performance boost for using more tracks and bigger sample libraries. A few of the enhancements that round out Cubase 6 and Cubase Artist 6 are global project compatibility between Cubase 6 derivates, the new time-stretching algorithms and more than two hours of in-depth video tutorials in high-definition quality.

More information: Steinberg

^*Manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Exact time of availability may vary regionally.
^**Available only as part of Cubase 6.

Karlheinz Essl has released version 3.3 of Lexikon-Sonate, an interactive realtime composition environment for musical composition and live performances.

Lexikon-Sonate is a work-in-progress which was started in 1992. Instead of being a composition in which the structure is fixed by notation, it manifests itself as a computer program that composes the piece – or, more precisely: an excerpt of a virtually endless piano piece – in real time. Lexikon-Sonate lacks two characteristics of a traditional piano piece:

there is no pre-composed text to be interpreted, and
there is no need for a pianist or an interpreter.

Instead, the instructions for playing the piano – the indication “which key should be pressed how quickly and held down for how long” – are directly generated by a computer program and transmitted immediately to a player piano (or the built-in Quicktime synthesizer) which executes them.

Changes in Lexikon-Sonate v3.3

• Numerous improvements
• Slightly changed user interface
• Runs with MacOS X 10.4 – 10.6

Lexikon-Sonate is available to download for Mac OS X (10.4.11 – 10.6) – for Intel and PPC processors, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

More information: Lexikon-Sonate

Time+Space has released Professional Orchestration Volume 2a, a book which uncovers the scoring techniques used by top film composers.

magine learning the scoring techniques creating the “Hollywood Sound” usually known by only a few top professional film orchestrators and composers. Now for the very first time, starting with Professional Orchestration™, Volume 2A, Orchestrating the Melody Within the String Section, the hidden doors on the techniques you´ve been hearing in the scores of John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and others for years, are, at last, finally open. Thus, after months of painstaking research, the “secret formulas” are secret no more.

Professional Orchestration features

• 596 pages, Illustrated, Optional MP3 audio package available.
• Loaded with references from 35 works including Holst’s The Planets, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and Dukas’ Sorcerer´s Apprentice in a large full page/full score format (that you can MIDI mock-up at your leisure).
• 63 techniques are referenced meticulously in the low, medium, high and very high registers which are matched to the optional MP3 audio package where excerpts are heard in the musical context of the scores.

Professional Orchestration is available for £35.19 / €46.94. You can check a (low res) sample chapter here.

Visit Time+Space for more information.