During March, the compay EastWest Quantum Leap organised a contest to compose a choral piece using their new library Hollywood Choir and other libreries of the company. For this, they send Hollywood Choir licenses for 1 month of use . The most insteresting feature of the libreary is the Wordbuilder tool that allows us to create personalized phrases for the choir using sampled phonemes. You can listen the short piece that I composed below. In order to create something different from the epic choir tracks (choir singing in staccato or marcato, or a choir behind singing syllables “ah” or “oh” as many cinematic tracks) I wanted to compose a piece where the choir was more relevant so I composed a little hymn with a text written by me in Italian.
Although I couldn’t test and compose with this library enough time due my tasks in other projects, I think that this library is not fit for me. In my opinion, the wordbuilder produces not enough realistic results due to the unions of phonemes. Also some phonemes have different volume so it is hard to play with it. It requires to make hand corrections to get a result that sounds better and more realistic. For me, the use of traditional choir libraries based on syllabes produces better results fastly although we sacrifice the possibility of write the text.
I would like to show you my actual personal studio (March-2018) and also provide you some recommendations about equipment for orchestral music production
My personal studio (March 2018)
For composing and production of orchestral cinematic music it is required at least the following equipment:
A PC
A MIDI Controller
Audio interface
Headphones or Studio Monitor
Sequencer (software)
Orchestral VST libraries
In this post I will focus in the PC exclusively and I will post a new post to discuss the rest of elements.
The orchestral music production is a case very exigent (in terms of computelly stress) for a PC due to the high number of tracks that are managed by the sequencer at the same time, so, I is mandatory to take this in account to choose properly the components of the PC. In the case of the microproccesor, in contrast to other uses as gaming, it’s recommended a higher number of processor cores that a higher velocity due to the way of modern sequencers are optimized to paralell proccesing. So, the sequencers manage properly the different cores to work in a efficient way with a high number of tracks that can include different audio proccesing plugins (equalization, compressors, reverbs, etc.) . It is also interesting to have a good velocity per core but, generally, it is better to choose a procesor with more cores that a processor that works with a higher frequency or a proccesor prepared to work with overockling because for this case it is not neccesary.
An important topic is the RAM memory and the storage memory but, before of give recommendations I would like to explain briefly how manage the samplers with the modern libraries of orchestral sounds. For this reason I will mention the most extended sampler, Kontakt of Native Instruments. The orchestral libraries have a several amount of gigabytes of data even compressed. For this reason, Kontakt doesn’t load the entire amount of samples from an instrument in RAM but it only load the beginning of them. So, when Kontakt receives as input a MIDI event, it will play the beginning of the sample from RAM and at the same time it load the rest of the sample from the store memory to play it. With this method, it avoid to waste RAM memory and it allows to load templates with dozens or hundreds of virtual instruments.
I can understand that this brief explanation can be difficult, maybe I could write a more detailed post to explain this at the future. At the moment, we need to understand the fact that the memory access speed is an important factor because the most amount of audio data will be read from the storage memory.
It’s important to choose carefully the components. It is necessary to dispose a enough amount of RAM memory due to some instruments loads a high amount of data in RAM (although it is only the beginning of the samples as I mentioned previously). For example, the instruments with true legato have real recording samples of the transition between intervals of notes and for this reason need to load a lot of data in RAM. Also other instruments, for example, pianos need to load high amount of data in RAM due to round robins samples (different samples for the same to avoid the repetition of the same sound clip), true una corda samples, sympathy resonance, different microphones position. Also the instruments with a lot of samples from different microphones can load several data amount in RAM.
In conclusion, my recommendation is that, with a limited budget, we should spend in both aspects simultaneously. In the case of storage memory, the intelligent choice is the use of Solid State Disks (SSD) especially for libraries with a lot of Gb although, for minor libraries, it is possible to use Hard Drive Disks (HDD) of 7200 rpm. Always is better to distribute the libraries in different disks to avoid bottlenecks in the limitation of data rate that the disk can provide (in reading process). The best choice is the use of SSD with M.2 interface due this interface have a higher limit of data rate that SATA III interface. In the case of RAM it is not necessary to look for cards with a better work frequency. The use of RAM DDR4 of 2133 MHz or 2400 MHz is enough for the most of uses.
In my particular case, due this different particularities that I have just mentioned I chose to assembly a PC with separate components. After a study of the market I chose the following configuration:
i7-7820X 3.6Ghz processor. It is a beast, it was launched in mid-2017. It have 8 cores and 16 virtual cores. During this time it works perfectly with exigent projects that manages a lot of plugins instances. One more thing, it is necessary to use a liquid cooler system with this processor to avoid overheat problems.
Motherboard MSI X299 SLI PLUS. It’s good, modern and it have everything I need: a lot of SATA III ports, 8 slots for RAM, enough PCI ports. It is really interesting that it includes two ports M.2 that are perfect to use SSD M.2 memory (I mentioned before the benefits of this solution).
At the moment I have the following storage units and it is enough for me. Anyway, I have free ports to add a new HDD, a new SSD SATA and a new SSD M.2:
SSD M.2 500 Gb for complex libraries
SSD SATA III 256 Gb for OS, programs and plugins
HDD 7200 rpm 2Tb for minor libraries, documents and more.
4 RAM DDR4 3000 MHz units of 16 Gb each one (64 Gb in total) that are working in multichannel. I can expand this solution to 128 Gb because these are 4 free slots.
My PC for composition and production
I hope this post could be useful or interesting for you. I will write a second part with more recommendations of the rest of elements.
At the beguining of the year, I participated in the international contest organised by Spitfire for the 10th anniversary of one of his most important libraries, Albion.
The task of the contest was to create a score for the trailer of the new update of Albion One. There was no rules about the style of the music so I took as reference the style of the video that is a bit futuristic and modern, and for this reason I decided to mix some synth sounds with the symphonic orchestra. This is precisely the concept of Albion One because it includes orchestral sounds with a module of hybrid sounds and synths.
This is my entry for the contest. I had to make the entire music the last day (it took me four hours) due to I was working in a short movie soundtracks the previous days. But, even with this time constraint, I think the result looks very well.
Some months ago, I participated in the international contest “Show Us Your Musical GENIUS” leaded by Indi.com with the collaboration of the composers Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe which are the creators of the excellent soundtrack of the TV series “Genius” about the life of Albert Einstein.
The task of the contest was to make a version of the main theme. As I can saw, the quality of the tracks was very high and I could listen some really interesting.
I post here my track. I decided to vary the theme to give more power that increases the intensity with the time. The whole creation proccess took me almost five hours. It was really fun. I love this kind of challenges.
During Fall 2017, I scored the first episode of the interactive webserie La pista produced by rebeca Ruiz and Tamara Vaquero. The serie has a very interesing concept, allow the viewer to interact within a police investigation of a crime with a main suspect that afirms that she is innocent. During the different interrogatory the truth will eventually always come out.
In the musical aspect, the ost is mainly for ambientation and improve the scenes with more tension dramatic and dramatic load. Also I scored the main theme os the introduction of the serie.
Synopsis:
The night of 5th March 2000, Rafael Campos, a brilliant scientific, was found dead in his room. This is the start point of the police investigation leaded by the police officers Sánchez and Aguado. Maria Ugarte, the main suspect, is going to go to preventive prison and ask for help to the viewer in order to find the real murderer. Who is lying and who is telling the truth? What is the crime motive? These are the questions of the first season of La pista: el caso de Rafael Campos, and need to be resolve by the viewer. This is a new format for a new experience. The goal: find the murderer.
I had the opportunity to work in the short movie “Sobreático 3ª” during July. This movie is pretty original and include a lot of simbolism besides a great work of actors that bring live the different characters. Regarding the score, I must say that it was a challenge because I had a big time constraint to finish to compose and produce the music in order to deliver the movie to a film festival. Fortunately, I have learned to work well under pressure in my engineer career and it is something that I bring to my music career so, finally, we could deliver the movie and the result was pretty good.
Synopsis: A family must survive once a tsunami destroyed the entire city. It’s their objective. Survive first and foremost.
One of the last works that I produced is the OST of this short movie produced by the company Fire in the Hole Productions. It has been a very amused work with a lot of action scenes, a fast rhythm and a lot of easter eggs of many video games and films. The short movie is available in the link below. I hope you like it.
During this year I had the oportunity to produce the OST of the documentary “Sangre” of the spanish director Iván Otero. This work has been an enriching experience not only for being my first work in the documentary genre but for having worked with a director with very clear ideas and an excellent communication director-composer which has flowed perfectly despite being in different cities.
Synopsis: Agustin Climent is a fighter who along with his brother Jorge, manages the most representative Mixed Martial Arts Club in the city. Beneath all this lies a special history and a particular vision of life.
Some days ago, the second EP of my pirate rock band Mare Nostrum was published. The EP title is “hacia el amanecer” and it contains three songs that are representation of the different styles of the band. Free download and listen from Bandcamp clicking the following image.
I composed two songs for this EP (Galeón and Destino de un héroe) and I also composed the arrangements of the third song (Frío Mortal). Therefore, I play all guitars and bass lines of the EP and I produced the violin parts.
Finally, I also invite you to listen the first EP of the band that was published a year ago. The EP title is “Rompiendo el mito” and I participated on it composing the track “Faraón” and the guitar and keys arrangement for the tracks “Contra viento y marea” and “Mare Nostrum”. I recorded the lead guitar parts of the EP. Free download and listen of the EP “Rompiendo el mito” can be listened and downloaded clicking the image.
Finally I can open my personal web page. The general purpose of this web is to be my portfolio for future projects with information (like a diary) of the projects that I complete.
But, in addition to it, I intend to publish little interesting information and some tutorial that may be useful in the blog tab. Stay tuned!
