I would like to air a general thought about sampled instruments with the group here, and I´m very curious to hear what everybody thinks! (careful it´s a long post) Today every composer is used to being able to create complete, professional sounding mockups of film music inside a laptop all by himself, using a few thousand dollar´s worth of sample libraries. And it´s become part of the composer´s skillset to not only invest in those libraries, but to spend a lot of time learning how to simulate real players most effectively. Sometimes even to the point of knowing the sampled sounds and how to make them sound good much better than knowing how to write for the actual instrument and its player. Depending on how skilled the composer is those mockups can sound fairly realistic and natural, to the point of being indistiguishable from a recording of a real player/real players to the ears of a non-musician, including directors, producers and large portions of the audience. (I am not talking about electronic music, synthesizers, drumloops etc here, just sampled emulations of real instruments) It concerns me that this development causes most people (directors, producers, listeners, but also the composers themselves) to get used to the somewhat stale, lifeless, undynamic and robotic sound of samples. And to start thinking that recording live players is optional, a nice luxury, but not an integral and neccessary part of creating a successful score. Sure, music with samples can sound quite good, but everybody that has witnessed a sequenced part being recorded by a great live player (or e.g. an orchestra) will know that there just is no comparison. The amount of dynamics, phrasing, emotion, detail etc that good live players contribute (plus maybe some variations the composer would have never thought about) leaves the best mockups miles behind. Are we contributing to an undesirable development? Are we lowering our standards, and those of our clients and listeners? Isn´t it part of our educating the client skill to make clear that there always has to be the possibility and the budget to record real players, that an all sampled soundtrack just isn´t good enough? That it is just a demo, a simulation of the actual thing? And - how do we go about that? How do we convince our clients to plan in enough fonds for a recording, to plan in extra time for score preparation, recording and mixing? How do we stop ourselves, in the case of a package deal, from rather delivering a sampled piece of recorded music and keeping the whole composer´s fee for ourselves than spending time, effort and money (that maybe isn´t in the budget), on recording players? I have a lot more questions than answers, my apologies ... What do you guys think about all this?
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 22:41:21 +0000
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