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 Royalty-Free Music Achieving an Authentic Orchestra Sound With SamplesMarch 18th 2009 5:28 AM - #51 - permanent link - printable version
Hey Mark, WONDERFUL BLOG! I really enjoyed your breakdown of Indiana Jones and The Dark Knight. I also agree - God was 10,000 bad. Anyway - I was wondering if you were sharing your decibel measurement of the orchestra? I hope so as this is something I've been hoping to find for ages. I have many sample libraries but all are normalized which as you know can be awful. Balance is indeed hard. Thanks for considering! Robert Johnson RobertJohnsonMusic.com Hey Rob, thanks for your complements. The best measurements I got were the ones I talked about in the article Getting that Live Orchestra Sound. My measurements weren't all that through because I was somewhat at the whim of the orchestra's rehearsal. That paper was to get out of taking a final for Acoustics more than anything else.  After a few years of thought after writing that article, I've come to the conclusion that the real answer to your question is that it's all about the sound that you want, and there isn't really a formula. Think about it this way - you may listen to several different recordings of the same piece that have a different overall balance. There is not one, not two, but at least three different layers you need to consider if you're striving for that "real" recorded sound:
Conversely, if you rely on strict acoustic imitation of the live orchestra you'll inevitably run into the long-argued debate with two sides: Side 1 - Record the orchestra to "purely" capture its live performance. This you'll typically find in classical recordings. It might be recorded with perhaps just one stereo mic in front of the orchestra and no spot mics, and hardly any compression (if any at all) in the mastering process. The problem with this is that the softs are too soft and the louds are too loud - meaning you're always cranking the volume knob when the woodwinds are playing at pianissimo, and then dashing to turn it down when brass come in at mf. Side 2 - Record the orchestra so that it's easier to listen to when it's being played through speakers. These are usually recorded in a studio and without an audience. In extreme cases, the sections are isolated with acoustic dividers, each section and soloist gets a spot mic, and the majority of the balance work is done in the mix. Virtually *all* production music (bands, film scores) are recorded this way because it maximizes the listener's experience behind the speakers. I think the answer to the debate lies in this: The human ear listens to music differently in a live setting than it does in a recording. When listening to music recorded "side 1 style", these are typically the same decibel ranges that you get when listening to the music live, but by nature of acoustics it doesn't balance the same to the human ears when it's coming out of speakers. A well-recorded studio orchestra is mixed so that it sounds more like the real thing when it comes out of the speakers. A "pure" recording looses the clarity that the human ear gets when listening to it live, and the studio recording attempts to compensate for that discrepancy. In our line of work Side 2 is really the way to go. Normalized samples and/or samples run through a compressor are both good and bad at the same time. You might think that ideally it would be best to have all of the instruments in their natural decibel ranges, but I believe it would be even more of a problem to balance that than balance pre-compressed samples. So you can't just set flutes at 50db, trombones at mf at 60db, then trombones at ff to 80db, and bip-bam-done. What you're doing when you're balancing samples is mixing each acoustic situation to sound best when it comes out of the speakers. You're the recording engineer who's trying to find the best balance for each type of orchestration to, essentially, make it sound the way you want. Pre-compressed samples (the good kind at least) give you the full body of the instrument from the get go, at all ranges, giving you the widest flexibility to do what you want with them. Read Comments (5) Add a Comment |
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