Orchestral Mockup #1 - Yoda's Theme - #ONEORCHESTRA
Spitfire Audio (of who’s products I’ve become quite a fan over the course of the last year) released a new library in partnership with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Called, simply: BBC SO. I know. Crazy, right? The money the Marketing department at SA must make…
All kidding aside, I am really enjoying this library. So much so, that I needed to put it to use as quickly as possible. Rather than compose something, I decided to dig through my scores and do a mockup of something familiar…
John William’s Star Wars: Main Title…
I know, I know. That’s not what I have here. I started with the Main theme and quickly realized that, though it was coming together and sounding great with little to no real programming, it would, in the end, need quite a bit to get everything where I wanted it.
That’s when I decided to pull another piece from under the Empire and work with Yoda’s Theme”. Of course! It’s soft and beautiful with sections threaded through that bring a very different sense of rhythmic and harmonic contrast. The harmonic structure is simple, yet has glimpses of jazz harmony. Man, JW is slick the way he slips those things in…
And so, I set out to build the mockup. This entailed using a template I wasn’t familiar with. (Download that here.) It also meant working with sample libraries in a way that I don’t typically - by separating articulations into their own tracks. I haven’t done this up until now out of fear that my system couldn’t handle it. Stacking multiple articulations into a single track, then using keyswitches (or even better…), Articulation sets, has meant that I can get a ton of mileage out of a short number or tracks. This new template, however, took a more professional approach of separating the longs and shorts too they can be treated differently when it comes to reverbs, etc. Wow, this makes total sense.
What I love about the BBCSO concept is the idea of community. The ability to create a track using a single library that has instant cohesion because 1) the way the musicians were sampled, 2) everyone was recorded in the room, in the location they would perform in on stage (referred to as in situ [pronounced si-tch-ū]), 3) performed by musicians that work alongside each other every day… it means that you can get tones of mileage without using multiple libraries and then share the file to someone else with the library knowing that there is congruence across two foreign systems. Brilliant.
So, in the end, I built this mockup to study John Williams knowing that I would green more than a few little tips and tricks… it was like being back in college! I also built it to share to a community of composers in order to receive constructive feedback and perhaps share a learn or two in hope that someone will send something my way as well
Feel free to comment or ask questions and click the download link below to get your hands on the Logic file. More to come in (hopefully) the not too distant future!
#ONEORCHESTRA
Download the Logic File Here! (20.4MB - .zip file)