How To Use - ORCHESTRAL TEMPLATES

for followers of the vlog you would have noticed a slightly obsessive attitude towards the orchestral template a great amount of importance being put upon it which is why i've been searching and striving to create with my good friend jake jackson the world's well maybe not biggest template but best this is because there's this rare opportunity this project we've been doing with the bbc symphony orchestra of true total collaboration between professionals engineers composers beginners students learners a lot of you have downloaded bbc discover which is available for free if you can't afford it or 49 euros and pounds many of you have downloaded the core edition and many of you have really gone for it with the pro edition and indeed a lot of you have gone to the page to download the purpose-built templates we have created not only for my preferred daw logic but also pro tools cubase all of these templates work on exactly the same principle one that jake jackson and i have spent the last couple of years working on but a lot of you have said okay got the instructions have watched the making of how about actually using it in a real world scenario so whether you've got the cubase or the pro tools or the dp is there one yet for dp i do hope so this i hope will give you a useful insight into how i work with it as a composer and how that then translates to the engineer and we kind of uncover some pretty extraordinary opportunities here now down below in the video description is a content so you can jump straight to the bit that you want if you're using this as reference but just for those of you thinking about approaching one of our templates a bit daunted by how complicated they seem why user templates well an orchestra is an extraordinary thing it acts as a single organic mass but it can be broken down into its choirs so your strings your woodwinds your percussion your brass and then into your your sections your violin section your cello section and from there into the individual players and within the sections the choirs and the individual players these instruments can be played in many different styles or articulations as we call them one of the real problems i have with computerized music is well it's computers that the click i just can't stand it it doesn't work as quickly as our creative minds are kind of bubbling it doesn't work as quickly as someone writing stuff down jotting it down on a stave but i can't jot stuff down on a stave because i don't read music so a template is primarily a way of us accessing all of these different colors articulations sections soloists and choirs it gets us from one end of the orchestra to the other nearly as quickly as a conductor pointing at the different sections in order to get the best out of any orchestra but particularly the bbcso which is a true symphony orchestra and all of those colors and timbres all of the percussion instruments you really don't want to have to every time you want to switch from a xylophone to a glockenspiel but because jake and i have a combined experience probably of nearly 40 years within film tv and games we not only understand kind of my plight kind of getting your your orchestra and all the bits together there so you can jump on things as and when these ideas bubble but also so that we can deliver it to broadcast quality to the delivery requirements with all the stages in between namely the recording and mix sessions so these templates offer you the ability not only to create and compose and if need be professionally track and mix your music too like us composers having to construct a virtual orchestra within a virtual environment an engineer has to construct a virtual studio with all of his favorite bits and bobs all wired up together so it spits out of with the correct amount of reverb on you don't want to have to set up a recording studio every time you want to record something so as i said i've teamed up with jake again homemade and we're simply gonna do a bit of music together and there is actually a revelation at the end of this film that i think is pretty exciting okay so i'm going into the bbc page explore uh that's all nice and then we've got templates there we go so i'm gonna work in core to so we can demonstrate how you mode switch into pro yeah and why you would want to mode switch into pro and basically what we thought we'd do is just do a workflow so i'm gonna write a few bars of orchestral music then this rare thing that i've i don't have to track anymore so i'm just going to fire you the the file and see where you take it from there so this is a great uh example using core of if you're an owner of core but you have an engineer who has the pro version of of how the engineer can take advantage of all of these different mic positions etc etc core just comes with jake jackson's kind of pre-mixed setting which is very good um so i'm basically downloading all of the core uh templates we're going to mix in stereo but they want it in stems yeah perfect so we used to we're going to use the core 2 template okay so here we have all of our lovely routing we've got this great new function with template that we've got our mix monitor and master monitor so i want to monitor out of that but also i'm just going to send it out to e2 which is uh how i can root it so that you can hear the tutorial and i think what i'm going to do is probably start with a harp [Music] okay you name the next instrument this would be fun it's kind of uh whose line is it anyway so um a little a little cello string cello string pad underneath that hello string pad okay i know just the thing it's called the string stack so the thing is if you click on the whole stack it'll load all the instruments which is maybe not what you want to do but i've done that so i make that mistake all the time so chelly longs i think i'm going to do actually a little maybe a little two note thing just so you know this is my expression this is my modulation uh a lot of people only use modulation i'm a bit showbiz jazz hand so i like to go bigger and quieter and bigger [Music] okay i'm just gonna do a little loopage on the hop and then as soon as i've loaded all of the strings now i may as well do a little answering phrase in the violas [Music] and then i'm gonna do cello legato [Music] these cellos don't go down to a low a it's funny that okay so i'm just going to add a couple of bass parts i'm going to start with pizzicato [Music] i'm going to copy the cellos onto the base legato and take them down an octave um now in reality they wouldn't be able to switch from pizzicato to legato that quickly so i'm going to have it coming in halfway through that bar let's have a little look at the automation oh you could have of course you know yes yes but i'm being a bit of a purist you could have a huge orchestra here you know this could be a you know 24 basis okay i think we should do a nice little portamento down to there so let's make that nice and quiet this is fun we should do more of this [Music] okay and what i'm actually going to do is actually going to pull that before the beat so that the portamento happens before usually how would you usually when they say how do you want us to do this gliss and it's not not marked if it just says gliss into next note yes they'll often say do you want us to do it on the bar before the bar and at which point just think even a little bit four that's nice and then no too much it was it was right before okay and then let's just have a look at the violins i'm gonna do a little uh tremalandi [Music] so i think i've probably got a little bit ahead of myself but basically uh what we're looking at are are basically kind of they're pimped all in ones so you'll see that i've got first violins legato longs shorts and colenos this is uh a fairly established way that composers like to divide up their different articulation types now at brass and woodwinds it tends to be longs and shorts but with strings you just go that little bit deeper and the reason is that you do tend to approach these differently both on the scoring stage but also at mixed stage so often you'll get the players maybe not to play the pizzicato parts you'll just want them to take the lead lines that kind of stuff when we look at the shorts what it contains is spiccato staccato which i would say is like spicata is a very short staccato it's like a dramatic short and then spiccato cs which is like with the with the mutes on um so basically we have just a single instance for all of those different shorts and it's currently selected to uh spiccato now i've just done something that's created in the effects which contains tremolo tremolo cs sulpant long harmonics and the reason we call these fx is they're often like a little sheen that you'd want to add on top of the mix and not necessarily get players to to to replace so these are great things to separate off but i just want to show you how quickly say if i wanted to double up the tremolo with the long harmonics how quickly i do that i'd simply duplicate that track and then select long harmonics now what happens there is is it retains all of the routing all of that kind of stuff by far the best way of creating new tracks in within a template is to duplicate an existing track so that you know that the stemming all of the rooting is intact so i'm just going to end up at the very end here with a bit of harmonics oh nice [Music] sorry this is a product of my palette gear the that you get these drop out stuff um so just one more thing i just think that maybe a little just a little violin like a flute or something let me just do a little short if i may and then then i'm when i say next instrument you'll get your you get your moment okay these spaces have a lovely rounded sound to them so not to [Music] does our second violin's doing this is it yeah [Music] i'm making horrible noises here that really aren't working [Music] great and the way i would describe expression is i use it to basically balance the different sections so actually what i've enjoyed about this is i've enjoyed the harder the harsher more slightly dramatic layers but i've just actually physically turned it down rebalanced it within the rest of the group right next instrument mr jake please okay so this time i'm going to be careful not to activate the entire track so what you must do click on the little arrow because you must do that so a little a legato flute do we think don't mind i'd like you to work out what you'd like mr solo just a just a single just a little line yeah a little legato and then i think it just needs a bass drum or something with it and then i think we'll be done there's an end of part if i've ever heard one and it's a little bit percussion and i think we'll we'll move on julie a little bit yeah but just cut just one more thing what i love about working with the full orchestra is it's all about colors so if you ever worried about stuff getting repetitive you just just change the textures and the colors so we've got this little violin ostinato thing coming in here and i'm going to put it in some bassoon now just eye hat's a little bit i'm going to actually make it the bassoon section not a solo i'm going to take it down an octave and okay groovy and uh percussion what would you like mate uh i think about i guess it's symbols well towards the end maybe but uh just and about bass drums [Music] it's great how you can just add tension where there just is none in the composition whatsoever okay and a little cymbal swell so this is great so this is like this my job here is done i'm really enjoying this jake this is so fun to then just go right over to you and all i have to do is uh close all this monkey business up and uh save and then just wang it over to you yep no audio nothing so i've got a little hotkey there to we transfer so what we're going to do today is jake is actually going to mix it in the box direct from what i've sent him which is what makes this so exciting because all i have to send him is uh this file but what we'd usually do if we're going to use an orchestra and jake was going to mix certain live elements in is kind of commit it to tape put it into pro tools and we've set it up for that first thing to do is to take it out of height and then we've got all of these amazing print stems we've got the wind stack the brass stack the perk stack now i'm not gonna print any brass because we're not using any brass in this instance keys percussion strings and the woodwinds are already in to record and then i'm just going to record it from bar 1. i always think it's just lovely to send something off knowing that there is a click printed one way or another we will be able to put put a a file together so there we are we've got the click in record and off we go and from bar one clicks going down [Music] so you'll see then everything is beautifully color-coded now what am i using the stacks and these separate tracks here now these are the multi-tracks mix engineers don't want the full arrangement kind of bounced in place if you know what i mean the this this um protocol of longs shorts pits and collenios and string effects tends to work both in the context of uh what you're recording live and in the context of mixing now what you'll see if we just make these um waveforms a bit bigger so what you'll see is the different elements we've got our long so we started with our cellos and then we added our little string shorts much to the consternation of our engineer and uh we've got our little effects our tremalandi and harmonics here and our base pizzicatos here so what's this here if say for example fiona was doing the tracking we'd send her this stuff and the click down here and if jake's doing the mixing say for example uh we're overlapping and jake you and i have to start mixing uh or rather you have to start mixing the score when i'm doing day two of tracking yeah for example um it's great at this point is to go okay so these all of these ones here the multi-tracks go off to jake to mix and all of these are our playback stems they they go off to fiona or whoever's assisting air studio and basically what that means is that particularly with larger sessions you haven't got masses of multi-track playbacks for an engineer to have to to wrestle it's just great to have it on a few different faders and for me you tend to have your strings in one session you tend to do your wins your brass in overdub sessions so it's great to just literally be able to ping out what you're recording and obviously you can package this all together and if you want to separate you can uh later in the day but this is what's great about this system is that is all prepared if this is the point at which you're coming out of logic but if i just go back a step and go simply to the midi arrangement let's say that we're just doing it all in the box so i hope you're not using this as an orchestral programming tutorial because it's it's very light in that respect but just giving you an idea how i work within the template flitting between different tracks duplicating going between different articulations etc etc now over to jake and all i'm gonna do all i have to do with bbc is just send him the logic file and it's relatively small a few megabytes and likewise this is not meant to be an engineering or mixing tutorial or even a demonstration jake would spend a lot more time on these things so links below are two really good i think tutorials that jake and i have done one is composition one that i've done and one is a really in-depth tutorial with jake mixing some music of mine that was made several years ago so we look a little bit different right on to you jake yeah it's opened up and uh i've got your tracks lovely excellent i'm going to i've opened this up in cool but um i want to be able to play around with some of the mic positions i think just just a couple not all of them just a couple of them i think so um there is so we have this brilliant thing called mode switching right so we switch between the core discover if we wanted to and the professional version so i can go through and convert all of these at once i believe and now that key command i don't actually know so you might have to teach me this one okay so if say for example you open the first violins fx yeah where it says mode yes call there's a little arrow convert that to pro yeah and then holding down control and clicking the little round arrow to the left of pro mode switch all instances to pro so control click that of course it hasn't actually had loaded anything other because it's the sell the same mix right that's what's so great about this it hasn't had to load any new only new samples could do a very quick mix here's our flute legato this is nice but i think i want a little bit more ambience on it so i'm going to turn off the uh the mix and i'm going to he's a bit of the close mic uh bit of the ambience and a bit of the tree that's very nice this is on the lungs i can now just turn on look at the left hand side of my screen i'm not going to turn on a bit of reverb and there it is [Music] our double jugging technique there christian for those who follow us they're both reverbs double jug and uh let's just add a touch of eq to it not only much but just a very nice so let's now move down to the uh bassoons do the same thing nice let's just put a bit of reverb on that i'm going to get this a little bit crazy i quite like that but i'm going to just add a little bit of delay here let's have a look uh stereo delay there to our spare one of our spare aux we have set up in our template uh that's right it's a little subtle thing there just a little silly thing but just to demonstrate how you can add these extra use these extra effects challenge we got set up in our channel those little one percents jake it's these one percents that is where you bring the magic exactly so this one i'm definitely going to look at the um it's nice but i want it slightly drier i think so i'm going to use a bit of reverb before go back to our i'm going to use this really rather nice one here called this uh stereo [Music] along with our clothes [Music] i love how they just pop in these these as you press play they pop they pop in it's really rather nice very nice like that okay so just a bit of reverb for that i'm just gonna add a little compressor onto this as well [Music] just to help just to just add a tiny bit of just control over some of those louder notes nice just adding a just a couple of db off there nothing more exciting than that okay what's next our bass drum here we go okay so this obviously wants to be big and puffy and and um and just very soft so let's just let's add a little bit of real bottom and rumble [Music] so that base is sticking out a bit so let's just add a little compressor to [Music] that and i was gonna add turn on our compressor and see the mix here [Music] and there is a very quick mix and so now if i were to to finish this i've called it finished i would um i can actually use these uh print tracks differently to have christian she's using him to send them to me if i was to mix it so now these stacks become my different stems if i'm sending them to us to a dub so then now i've got the full mix which i could i'll stick and record i can put individually the stacks and they become my mix stems so that if they want separate um wins and brass or percussion to take if there's a percussion hit gets in the way of some dialogue they can just take down the the percussion by itself there's a very useful way of multifaceting this uh this this template great stuff so jake um should we put that into record so you we can see you sending that and and you'll be recording a stereo mix as well got my four stems and my full mix my little sink pip there as well which is great [Music] and there is our beautiful mix if i go to they can see them there there they are the stacks now become our stems we've got a full mix all the reverbs and stuff with their own stems and i can send that back to you um and you can tweak it if you needed to tweak it or um that's it done what i think has been incredible about this process so i thank you very much for asking us to do this how to use in real life what's been extraordinary scary is it blurs the process of composition and mixing in a way that i find pretty interesting he could take say for example some orchestral recordings that he made embed them into my logic file and send them back to me and i could do all sorts of stuff with them but what's also really fascinating is many of you will know that one of the hardest things to do with regards to recording live musicians and getting them professionally recorded and professionally mixed is that it often grinds up against the shifting sounds of a post-production schedule suddenly the cut is changed after you've performed the mix the great thing here is jake gets to do what he does whether that be tracking or mixing and you still have the malleability that is required of a modern media composer cuts changing at the last minute cgi shot comes in and you're not restricted to using the host plugins you simply have to pre-agree with your engineer what you are going to use i know that jake has the fab filter suite which is excellent by the way and i would say well let's stick to the host plugins the fab filter suite and then we will be literally sweet this for me is very exciting i have a feeling that there is going to be a boom of stuff happening people making just so much stuff that's going to require our work it excites me to think that we can invest into the industry the talent of tracking professionally recording professionally and playing stuff with professional musicians remotely with this slightly more fluid way of collaborating just sharing logic files back and forth the odd bit of audio maybe exciting times ahead i know that we've zipped through it today so you may have many questions please put them in the links down below and i know jake's particularly uh thorough about checking out questions that are asked on the videos he appears in thanks so much jake uh for your your input on this it's been such an amazing journey and i doubt this is the last video i make about orchestral templates so do if you haven't done already subscribe ding that bell to be notified the next time we make a video and one of those mr jake jackson top man see you later

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 51,800

Rating: 4.9573903 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: W-FngFLR-U0

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020