DESCRIPTION:
In this tutorial, Los Angeles film composer Dan Brown demonstrates how to work with virtual instruments to make your MIDI mockups sound more realistic.

Learn basic routing tasks for virtual instruments, how reverb is used, and how to apply MIDI continuous controllers such as expression and modulation data to make MIDI mockups sound realistic. And don’t forget to check out "Make MIDI Sound Real: Creating Orchestral Mockups, Part 2"!

You can check out Dan's website here:
http://www.dbrownmusic.com/

Visit Midi Film Scoring and subscribe to our email newsletter for exclusive deals on sample libraries and everything film and game composing related: http://www.midifilmscoring.com

This demo is done with Vienna Symphonic Library instruments in Digital Performer, but the tips are applicable to all kinds of virtual instruments and studio setups.

Partial Transcript: Much of the music that comes out of Hollywood today, particularly from the television industry, is created digitally, in the box, using pre-recorded or sampled instruments, replacing sweaty and error-prone human musicians with coldly efficient — and, more importantly, cost-effective — robots. For better or worse, more and more final products coming from professional, high-budget productions are being supplemented or even completely replaced with sampled or canned music.

If MIDI sequencing is being done right, it can be very difficult for even professional musicians to tell the difference between a sample library and the real thing. You don't have to own the most expensive or hip sample library out there to have your MIDI'd music sound eerily similar to a live orchestra if you only know how to properly use the samples you have.

My name is Dan Brown, and I'm a film and television composer working in Los Angeles. In this two-part series on MIDI orchestration, I'm going to teach you some basic and more advanced ways of creating realistic and professional MIDI sequences. This video series assumes that you already have basic knowledge of how to work professional audio recording software and sample libraries.

You should know how to bus audio, and adjust volume and panning levels, and create MIDI, audio, auxiliary, and instrument tracks in both your sequencing software and sample library plugin. The main philosophy behind MIDI orchestration is to place yourself in the performer's shoes.

Start by first making sure your music is physically capable of being played on what you're writing for. This is a composition and orchestration problem that can really screw up your final recording before you've even started inputting MIDI data.

Our ears have listened to real musicians for years on movie soundtracks and in concert halls, and they have a very clear and accurate aural image of what a real orchestra should sound like. Our ears subconsciously alert our brains to common mistakes novice MIDI composers make. One frequent error is writing brass parts that are both high-pitched and quiet when our ears know that the higher any brass instrument goes, the harder the performer has to blow.

[Trumpet playing a scale]

You can force your MIDI brass to do this, but your ears will realize that something doesn't sound correct about your high-pitched, soft, and tender brass section.

Another common mistake is writing fast-moving or long, sustained sections for wind players without giving them the chance to breathe.

[Flute playing a scale]

Unlike your MIDI musicians, flesh-and-blood performers occasionally need oxygen to stay conscious. You can fix mistakes like these by giving parts that don't work on one instrument to another that is more physically suited to it or by trading off musical phrases between instruments to give players time to breathe and relax. These sonic color changes will also make your music more interesting.

Simple writing mistakes start to pile up, and it doesn't take very many to make the whole recording seem very artificial. If you're not sure something you've written can be played on its in-real-life instrumental counterpart, run it by someone who plays or composes or orchestrates.

Now, let's assume you've done the first step correctly and your music won't kill any musicians who try to play it. You can now open up your favorite DAW, or digital audio workstation, like Pro Tools, Logic, or Cubase. Any professional audio software that can sequence MIDI, use third-party plugins, and mix and record audio will do.

For this example, I'm going to use Digital Performer. I've already written the music I'm going to be sequencing, and we can see on the page here that I'm calling for solo English horn, French horn, bass drum, and a full string section, or Violin I, II, Viola, Cello, and Bass.

Transcript by https://www.opaltranscriptionservices.com/

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