You NEED to know this about East West Composer Cloud

hello everybody what i'm going to be doing today is giving you a quick start guide to one of the most popular sound uh libraries there is on the planet and it is uh east-west composer cloud now for those of you who are not uh familiar with this mighty beast it allows you currently they're doing a special it's a subscription service where you get access to all their virtual instruments and there are tons of them we'll be going we're having a look exactly what it includes in a minute um but you get this for a subscription of a couple hundred dollars a year um there are a number of different plans uh you know you can pay thirty dollars a month you can play a little bit more and have the plus edition which has all kinds of exciting extra bits added on and all that kind of thing but this is why it's quite popular because you don't have to come up with hundreds and hundreds of pound slash dollar slash euros depending on where in the world you are um you can just go okay take the money take me 20 a month and i'll get into this now a couple of things to bear in mind when you choose your plan um firstly if you are a student or teacher there is a a very good deal which is ten dollars a month or twenty dollars a month if you qualify for um those ones which is really good to get you into the world of um um sampling and it's not just okay orchestral stuff it's it's a sort of guitars and drums and some sound designer stuff and ethnic stuff and vocal stuff all kinds of things now the thing to bear in mind um there is a plus edition which is the one which i'm going to be um showing you and uh here it is okay hello um if you go for the plaster tissue what you get is the multiple mic you get all the diamond edition um and platinum edition um instruments which have multiple mic positions and 24-bit samples they're also absolutely enormous and remember most of you will be downloading this stuff so you could be sitting there watching it for a very long time you can buy it on a hard drive as well if you go for the less expensive option like the the the cloud the x or the normal one you get the gold edition one um which just have one pair of microphones uh and a 16 bit rather than 24. so that actually is not it's it's not so much how much you get as but you've got to think about your hardware this is the important thing there's no point in having these enormous diamond libraries which take up you know multiple gigabytes of memory if you're still working on a 1986 uh dell laptop or something like that because your laptop will go what do you mean and it'll just get up walk out and you'll never see it again that's what laptops do and so bear this in mind because as you'll see when we start getting into the instruments themselves the actual uh you know the footprint in terms of technology they need to run is quite substantial right how about a quick once around um the thing which you will be using um to i always should just say before i get into the actual thing that if you are really into this and you want some help um with the whole composer cloud thing i've put together sort of micro course i think you could call it um but it's it's essentially a lot more videos like this showing you more of them um the libraries how you use them how to get the best out and things like that and there's a link somewhere where's that link on where is it i don't know um that will help you uh that you can link through and sign up for that so but what we're going to be doing today is we're going to be looking at some of the basic stuff how the play engine works and sort of giving you a little once over all that kind of stuff so that you can get going really so what you get here is the the bit of software you use is this one it's called play and this is version six and you have three basic planes you have the player you have the mixer and your the browser you lose the instruments from the browser you muck about with them from the player and you mix them from the mixer so far so good okay so let us uh for example if we look at what i've got loaded up here you can see there's the instrument it's stackatissimo um these from hollywood strings it's got um it's very straightforward um you have multiple mic positions here if you're in the diamond edition and so i'm listening to the main edition the main mics at the moment each of these can be routed to different outputs and things like that if you so choose um and each of these instruments comes with built-in reverb now you can have the reverb is basically um the same impulse responses you get with spaces you can have it on i would personally recommend you don't use that and you have the reverb in a separate effects channel inside your door because if you start running out of um cpu um processing power in your computer and your computer starts going all kind of i'm not feeling very well i don't want to go to school today like that um then you're going to need to nurture it a little bit and to be honest a lot of you the the irony here is that a lot of people sign up for you know students will sign up for 10 a month because they haven't got much money therefore they don't have huge amount of technology and then they get these enormous instruments and steam comes out there is so this is one way you can start saving cpu just have one bus one effects bus like that which has got um the reverb arm and then when we uh want the reverb we just use that one bus and we route the instruments to the bus using effect sends like that okay so you don't necessarily need to use the um the reverb inside if you don't want to now the play engine itself you can load multiple instruments into um each each uh instance of it so if you're going to if we go back to hollywood strings diamond there we go the uh there we go let's look up here so if we want to put some pits in uh now here's the thing you have a choice between add and replace when you're going to put a new instrument in if you want to put it on a different channel so you've got a multi-timbral instrument you click add okay and then in this right hand thing here you'll see it come up and that the way i've got this set up each of these goes to us to a new midi channel so oh it's sitting underneath my head there we go um so that's channel one that's channel two it's worth having just a little quick look here before we do anything else at the famous um preferences that's wheel at the top there takes you to the preferences um other and here's your option a midi channel assignment every time you load one do you want it to go up by one one two three four five why did i do that it's as though you don't know to count am i being so patronizing that i think you my esteemed subscribers don't know how to count to five of course you do i think um so yeah or you have it set to omni where every new instrument comes in set to only i sort of said that didn't i okay um the uh streaming this is an interesting one here's another thing top tip number two okay what was top tip number one anyway it doesn't matter top tip number two um well it's not so much it's really got to run off a solid straight drive it's got to run off an ssd i don't know if you can see there's an ssd it's one of these little thin ones here and it's because they're massively faster than old style spinny drives and you're going to need a lot of speed uh if we go back into the settings here you will see down the bottom there it rates how fast your ssd is this one four terabytes instruments b is rated one that's a good thing this one four terabyte ssd the other one is rated five that's a bad thing that's much slower so you really want a fast ssd because what happens is once it's worked out how fast it thinks your ssd is it either loads lots of samples uh if it's slow so that it doesn't have to take so long getting the stuff off the uh the drive or if it's a very fast drive it'll lose so the the faster the drive the less memory your computer is going to need that's a good thing because memory as we'll see is going to be at a premium pretty damn quickly okay so look there you have your multiple instances you can put other things in stack slur let's put one of those in in he goes and you can put up to 16 of them in and you can have them going to multiple outs so from which point of view it works very much like um um uh contact and and stuff like that um now the whole kind of paradigm here i know okay there's two types of people no it's about to be an enormous generalization there's sort of two ways people work with uh putting stuff together one is they have one instrument called violin and it has loads and loads of different articulations you know all this sort of legatos and pits cars and everything else and it's all swapped around using key switches or there's the other people who have tons and tons and tons of midi channels and each one is a different articulation um have you noticed how noisy this chair is i apologize um and in east west um they sort of are more designed for the latter approach of lots of channels because although they have some instruments which have big key switches if you look at brass actually brass diamond is a good example you can have you can have key switches which have you know most of the stuff in there so if we go and replace let's just clear out these two and we'll put uh add that one in and i'll show you and then you can see but it does take a long time to load because they are enormous okay so what you get wisely what you get with um the composer cloud is not not a snapchat you get the entire history of east west and remember you know they were doing samples way back in the day most of the stuff i originally got came on things like cds and dvds it was that long ago and so you get everything in there so if you look down this list out of instruments down the side and then you go into some of these early ones where's an early one uh adrenaline i think the adrenaline wasn't only one wasn't it but some of them would still say you know cd1 and cd2 and things like that so they really haven't been touched very much since the other than being put into play since the days when they first came out so you've got quite a lot of stuff like this which is kind of construction kit sort of things you've got guitars you've got um all kinds of more poppy stuff like pop brass and backup singers and things like this the main event for a lot of people are these the hollywood series orchestral uh libraries so you've got strings brass um woodwind on percussion and that's the order they were produced so br strings was the earliest which came out in 2010 i think that's okay what were you doing in 2010 i didn't want to know that i really didn't want to know that what else were you doing in 2010 oh good okay but it was a long time ago okay um and this was the first hollywood stream was the first of what has been come to be called the next generation libraries you know they were enormously powerful and uh some things people haven't done again uh since uh for good may be good reasons and some things they just absolutely nailed and so some of their libraries are uh by comparison with the stuff you the brand stuff new stuff you get now uh the interface is a bit clunky and things like that so brass was their second one and brass is they really kind of nailed the brass one the brass was great and the best i think of the lot then they did woodwind which isn't my favorite and then they did percussion which is great so those are the hollywood um orchestra uh ones and those are the most powerful and i will in my little free course go into quite a lot more detail as to how you get the best out of them because particularly things like hollywood strings there's an art to it trust me there is an art to it okay so but look look down the bottom here you see there's some older stuff which people often overlook which is really great okay so look east-west symphonic orchestra this was one of the earliest ones it was where they started and it was recorded i think in a big concert hall in the pacific northwest somewhere near seattle and what you get is this very uh so quite ambient sound let me get some cellos up or something how about some spiccato cellos yes please guy okay let's load our friends piccato cello here see here i mean it's it's quite quite bitey by today's standards i think probably but look [Music] and this one if you have the diamond edition you can you can get rid of that so just get a close mind frankly that is not a bad sound is it [Music] i was getting all pirates there went away all that kind of nonsense what what are you talking about guy okay look um i think people underestimate this library uh significantly and one of the huge advantages to you if you're just starting out is uh the old symphonic orchestra actually was quite low impact when it comes to your computer so if you are using that 1986 dell uh no you're still not but if you're using limited technology um then i think you should the advice with the um with the uh composer cloud is start with the simple you know the the simple light instruments and if you need more trade up don't go straight in saying well you know what i think i want a nice string sound so i'm going to go to let's have a look uh hollywood strings uh where's hollywood's drink because when you get into string here look and it says where's the powerful system one long powerful system uh some of these are unbelievably heavy cutting and i'm not even going to try loading some of these up um the reason they're so heavy hitting is that it's separated out every time you play one note you get you're using 13 separate voices because all the all the various volume um layers are in there with and without vibrato because you can with the long powerful one you have to use you control vibrato with one controller and volume with another so in other words what you need is two hands to play the keyboard two more hands one on the volume one on the vibrato and one more hand to take your c so what you need is five hands uh one brain and a cup of tea and then the long powerful one you can do in real time people don't do that do they no guy they don't do that and but so therefore if you are the proud owner of um one of these do not just leap into long powerful system because uh you think oh that's gonna be the best um because some of this stuff 13 voices do you see this ksfp key switch finger position now they were the first as far as i know the last ever to do this that that you use key switches to change so you can play the same note at different finger positions on the fretboard of your violin it's in so detailed but people just want to play sometimes people just want to play and um so it does provide you with enormous power but with that power comes a lot of patience because you just got to sit there and learn to use it and all the rest of it so right i tell you what let's just crack into some of this and get some stuff up okay i'm going to get uh let's let's live and die by my um assertion that symphonic orchestra still still cuts it in today's uh well what do we got [Music] okay so let's get into the player if we find that a bit cutty what happens if we go for stage plus surround no it's two mute two you see just the basic one's pretty good [Music] i may cue some of that okay there's this [Music] one what was that guy i have no idea quantize now there's two ways of doing this like you can either keep on loading stuff up inside your single instance but frankly if you're not going to load up hundreds and hundreds of instruments i'm just going to use a different instance for each layer i'm going to put on and so next up is going to be ladies and gentlemen let's hear it for the bases contrabass solo no i don't want one i want nine because i have absolutely no self-control uh okay what have we got here short script quick up downs six i'm going to go with those yeah replace let's get rid of this oh i've already got the garticellos loaded up in that one oh never mind i'm just going to go for it right let's so we're going to put a little are you hearing that going a bit left and right never mind i don't mind five i don't care here we go [Music] um there was a bit of a quantization problem at the end there but that doesn't matter we don't care right i'm going to have another one i tell you what instruments play i'm just going to have eight of them or something because i can it'll now open up and everything will be great and so once you've downloaded all this you can as i say you can audit it on a hard drive at extra cost but you know if you've got a decent internet connection it won't kill you i mean no the the diamond ones do take an absolute age to download um now okay let's go into a different let's look for have we got storm drum in here i seem to remember storm drum being their epic percussion i haven't played for it for quite a while but we're going to play with it now if i can find it did i download see i've got two and a half terabytes of this stuff and i still haven't downloaded everything is that true guy yes it is pro drama public enemy um i wonder if i've downloaded it i didn't download stormdrum you idiot guy complete idiot okay nevermind um we'll use something else i don't mind fab four you see there's some absolute classic stuff like fab four knocking about in here which is a sort of recreation of many of the beatles sounds which is absolutely blooming marvelous okay drums what have we got uh luffy marching drums taos drum with mallet i'm just gonna see what a taos drum is it's one of them it's a bit scratch page from ludwig bass drum 36 inch replace i'm going to have one of them okay i'll go with you mate right stand by ladies and gentlemen okay that'll be going on with now uh let's go for something completely different let's go for uh where's the ministry of rock ministering prop 2 has got some nice stuff in it guitars heavy guitars check to seven string lead key switches and mods lead let's see what this oh there's a barrett i should have gone for the baritone oh let's see hang on oh this is very loud yes i know [Music] can't you turn it down guy yes it can there i'll turn it down [Music] okay now what we're going to do with that is we're going to take that plate 3 and we're going to put a trance gate on it any programmable gate will do oh hang on i'm looking the wrong place aren't i yes guy because you're an idiot that's better so a little plug-in this one's from killer from killer hearts i absolutely love it i use it day in day out you must be bored to tears with watching me do this see now you see why i like it [Music] okay ah this is sounding a bit old-fashioned but it doesn't matter no no it's a bit better to be a traitor trash isn't it doesn't matter okay now let's get some uh okay two things okay firstly i'm gonna go i will put in a horn line using orchestral brass not pop bars brass diamond there we go and we're going to go for okay you can have two you can have six six french horns why not are we going for the legato slur accent yes we are okay now ladies and gentlemen watch this little button down here as it loads this immense patch look look how long it takes well it does take quite a long time because there is a ton of stuff to load so i can tell you stories about but now i won't i don't know what i'm going to say no so but it is do you see that when you get going with this it's quite intuitive but you do need quite a lot of horsepower how much we're using here at the moment uh performance so we're currently using 15 gigabytes of memory just with these small number of instruments up and nine percent of my immense cpu but that wouldn't necessarily be nine percent of yours because i have no less than 14 cores in this pc what well that's because i am the man who has no sense of proportion if you can get one call get 14. that's what i think where were we right okay we were about okay so before we do anything with this i'd like a little bit of reverberation please uh so we go to the send and we've already there we go spaces we're going to turn it on okay right that'll do thank you very much go away again that is a nice legato sound [Music] that was a half a good idea and then the second half went all astray didn't it did you notice that did you notice yeah this i hear with students a lot actually first half of tune great second half of tune not so much but they stick with it because they like the first half don't be satisfied with uh a wonky second half b b whatever [Music] no that's a bit okay let me see if now what i traditionally do is i work this out and then i forget how to do it and i play something completely different when i come to play [Music] okay yep i'll go with that and we'll dupe it across and this next line down we're going to put trumpet in and we're going to double the top line with the trumpet second time through because that's what people do if they want it to sound like every other piece of film music you've ever heard um two trumpets or three trumpets i'm gonna go two and i'm not always a fan of always knee-jerk ninja using um legato for particularly for trumpets and things because a lot of the time if you actually listen to how a brass player plays they're not playing every note legato but this line is legato so therefore we are going to go down the legato route you also must notice that legato uh samples choose an insane amount of memory because of for various reasons and particularly samples which were produced back in the day um used up oh my lord how much okay and the way you can see if you go down here from this little menu at the top here go down to sample purge okay this uh three trumpets is using 1.78 gigabytes okay now what's this purge thing if you okay click reset you play it through angle we haven't played it through yet the idea is you if you play it through it then marks which samples it actually uses and then if you click purge it'll get rid of all the samples you didn't use so it'll massively reduce the amount of memory using but we haven't played it through yet so what i'm going to do is do that and i'm then going to transpose it up by an octave so that it may need more than one octave but we'll give it a go see how it sounds okay that's it could be worse i've heard worse than that um except it doesn't start at the right place i know why um so we need to take the front of that actually oh this is going to be really boring um talk amongst yourselves for a second i just need to quantize the very first no or i can't chop it off properly without doing dodgy stuff dodgy stuff yes dodgy stuff right let's get rid of that let's get rid of that put it back where it should be um how long we've been going oh we've been going just coming up to the half hour so look i'm going to add one more layer um what shall i add what do you want i'm taking requests no i'm not because this isn't live it's recorded so i can't hear you right um what should we put in there uh yeah you spin spinning put up a drum and bass [Music] when i say that is that the worst idea i've ever had yes kai it is so obviously the worst idea you've ever had [Music] i think it's very unlikely to work oh he said this doesn't okay the other thing of course is this doesn't uh it doesn't sink it won't sink to the tempo so it's going to be way out of time and i'll have to but look okay look goodness sake why can't you just stick to one idea [Music] okay what we're going to do let's do this very quickly i'm going to use it first thing i'm going to do is record a bit of it in [Music] okay then i'm going to bounce it to audio then i'm going to go into the editor and set the the actual thing is originally 164 bpm so we put 164 in there like that and then we click this button and it will now adjust the tempo so that it fits it doesn't mean necessarily the front of it's going to fit so we'll just have to do some manual trimming to get it sorted turn off the snapping and just get to that front and it might sound terrible i'm sort of expecting it sound not great but but something inside me says give it a go it's no longer very drama bassy because it's slowed down a lot um the other thing you can do maybe [Music] okay look it's it's all right it's it's not the worst thing that can happen and i could make that a lot short i could speed it up like that that works [Music] okay look um this has been a very quick introduction to the wonderful world of composer cloud i do cast off the sunglasses of that because you know for those of you who are lucky enough still to be students you know ten dollars a month it if you haven't got you know lots of stuff already this is a complete no-brainer isn't it really i mean do you know what there's a spider's web over the end of the lens how strange but really uh you know 200 a year is what they're currently doing it for and that's what you get and so you get some of the sounds are absolutely uh top of the shop some of them are a bit you know so what but you're getting so many of them there's always going to be something in there and you don't have to write orchestral music you know there's uh lots of other stuff in there as well so look i hope you found this useful um and we'll be back with more of this stuff very soon and if you want the longer in-depth edition of this little video um which goes through more of these libraries and a little bit more detail than everything else then um click the link down below and we'll send you links to it and you can get stuck in anyway hope you join me again very soon that's it for today see you soon bye

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 41,876

Rating: 4.936244 out of 5

Keywords: getting started with east west composer cloud, east west, EWQL, EWQL composer cloud, composer cloud, composer cloud x, composer cloud review, composer cloud tips, sampled orchestration, orchestral programming, guy michelmore, thinkspace education, eastwest composer cloud tutorial, east west composer cloud uk, composer cloud review 2020

Id: EuyZe-VCZ8w

Length: 34min 46sec (2086 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020