Two days with the Miroslav Philharmonik...

[Caleb]

much to my chagrin

I've always loved this expression and use it frequently.

Can you please use this expression in your next 10 posts?

Thanks.



Caleb

[Joseph Burrell]

Much to my chagrin, I'm too busy to think of an intelligent post at the moment, please try again later.

Any more questions, guys, shoot em at me. I'll answer them if I can. I know you're dying to have the product, the least I can do is tell you how good it is and rub it in your face.

[Shantar]

Much to my chagrin, I'm too busy to think of an intelligent post at the moment, please try again later.

Any more questions, guys, shoot em at me. I'll answer them if I can. I know you're dying to have the product, the least I can do is tell you how good it is and rub it in your face.

Hey, I've got a question for you!

Will Miroslav Vitous respond to CC11-controller-data? I prefer to use an expression pedal rather than the modwheel and wonder if MP is programmed to respond to expression-data...? And also: Will it respond (by default) to normal midi-controllers such as attack, sustain, decay etc?

Could you tell us a litte more about the choir? I am interested in hearing about the do-re-mi samples. Is it hard to make the choir "sing" (by using the do-re-mi samples)

Thanks, and BTW your review was indeed good reading!

Chris

[Squids]

Much to my chagrin, my chagrin is in need of chagrining.

Awesome posts guys. Feels good to hear. I will tell the team to read this. They've worked so hard on this collection that to come up for air and see people appreciate what we THOUGHT was a really good idea (and different for us to do this) is great. I mean, we are a sample company! We do our own samples usually. But, working with Miroslav's samples was interesting and exciting in a different way. A challenge and a responsibility (kind of like restoring a film or even like someone making a film from a screenplay that was never going to be finished as a film... like A.I.).

This would not have existed had we not done this and I like to think we did it justice. Actually, Miroslav himself loves Philharmonik. He's thrilled and thinks it will do very well. He's brutally honest too! He'd have no problem telling us otherwise. I don't know how much he approves of the lower price but I think he understands that you have to offer more bang for the buck these days. We're always the Robin Hoods of sampling though!

[MGH]

Also thanks for the review, Joseph, and all the input from Squids! As an educator, given the way the articulations work in Miroslav, how would you sequence a passage that started with four legato 8ths followed by four pizz 8ths (probably unrealistic, but you get the point)? In Garritan, for e.g., I would either "play" the passage using keyswitching, or simply ignore the articulation while playing it, and then go back with the "scissor" tool, cut, and slide down to a new track containing the alternate articulation, such as pizz.

The problem with the latter method is that quantization has to be off, because often you have to play a little on top of the beat to get a patch to "speak" in time, and the beginnings of notes can get cut off in the process. And then it's easy to have the part "shift" slightly when moving to a new track. Any thoughts on the best type of approach to use with the Miroslav library?

My biggest concern with all these new string libraries, is that people still need to learn orchestration, and not play them like a keyboard!

Marcel

[Sepheritoh]

If you need a full comprehensive set of percussion and that's the only reason you're interested in Miro, then maybe you should make sure you really look over what its offering. You may be better served with the percussion from VSL or from True Strike. If you need some orchestra instruments to augment what you already have, then its kind of a no-brainer to me to pick up Miro as well.
.....sniped
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Thanks Joseph. Nah, I don't want it for the percussion only. I need to expand my GPO with more orchestral variety and Miro seems like a great choice. As I mentioned it now becomes a matter of in wich order I should buy things as I can not get everything I want in one shot. But then If I'd get everything I want one-at-a-time I would still be buying in 100 years time

[Joseph Burrell]

Shantar,

For each articulation there are multiple ways to control the instrument. There are the AMV (aftertouch/modwheel/volume), there are patches programmed to work with a breath controller, and patches mapped for expression (CC11) control.

MGH,

The process needed for utilizing Miro to its fullest will differ depending on which application you use to control the samples. I'm using Geniesoft's Overture 4. I'm going to plug our program a little while explaining the process that I would use to work in the scenario you lined up. Say I have 8 eighth notes in a passage, four of those to be pizzicato.

I would load the normal sustain patch and the normal pizzicato articulation into the Philharmonik player. Each set to a different channel. Inside Overture 4, I would set it so that for the violin track there are two 'voices' or layers. The first voice or layer assigned to channel 1 the second layer assigned to channel 2.

I place my eighth notes on the score and to trigger the pizzicato samples for the last four notes of the passage, I simply select them, and with two clicks tell them to play back on voice 2. Any notes entered after the pizzicato passage would play on the sustain layer (or send midi note data to channel 1) so there's no need to do anything else. The track maintains its original channel assignment and every time during playback when it comes to those 4 notes, it will automatically jump to channel 2 and after the four notes, it will return to channel 1 (voice 1.) No need to enter notes on different tracks or different layers, just place them all in the same track select the ones you want sent to a different channel, click click and you're done. Just enter a pizzicato expression on the score and that's that. If you'd like (and with your consent Dave) I can sit down when things calm down and do some video tutorials about how to best utilize the programming in Miro. I can't cover every application in the world, but I think just a couple will give everyone a broad idea on how it works and how to best utilize it.

Trust me, there are many many ways to go about doing this.

Another option is to load both patches (sustain + pizzicato) to the same channel and define a velocity range using the Philharmonik interface for each patch. So for instance any velocity less than 64 triggers sustain, and anything more than 65 triggers pizzicato. This will limit the velocity curve for the samples in this scenario, but its a nice alternative to keyswitches. I have a gut feeling there's another way to do this, but I'll have to investigate it more thoroughly tonight.

If you will give me an idea as to what you're using I can explain better the process that I would advise you use. With programs like Cubase and Sonar you can just split the midi track and drag it down to another channel. There's lots of ways to use the program without keyswitches which I find combersome. I'd much rather change channels in Overture 4 using the Playback Voice feature than worry about adding keyswitch expressions to my score, but that's my workflow and I understand that everyone has different needs.

[MGH]

Thanks for the thorough reply, Joseph! For a notation program, this makes total sense ( I used to use Overture in the Opcode days, but now I'm using Sibelius and Finale). It just occured to me that in Cubase, it would be very easy to slice a part that contained the alternate articulation, and then send to that say, channel 2, where the pizz would reside, etc. This could be done in the info line of SX3.

Thanks for the ideas,

Marcel

[Joseph Burrell]

MGH, well, I think you may soon want to check out Overture again. We will be the only notation program that natively hosts ALL VST instruments. We will be the only one that natively hosts the Sampletank engine.

[nexussynth]

Thanks for all the great info, Joseph Burrell

I think I picked the right orchestral library!

Thank you Joseph!

[Joseph Burrell]

I was right in my estimation (based on clues by Dave of course) you can Mute and Un-Mute channels on the fly by assigning them midi controllers. This means you can have multiple instruments set to the same channel with each having an 'on/off' controller so you can switch samples. Not a bad idea. Too bad there wasn't some uniform patch desisions made that meant these came with the program in the form of combi's. This IS something that I would presume users could share. I can see a whole lot of user made combi/multi patches flying all over the net.

[Squids]

Actually, we did do it in a uniform way in the combis as an experiment but weren't sure if we should make it a prominent feature. It's still there though, it just has to be unlocked. It is a little secret. I didn't even put it in the manual but someone could discover it on their own because it is visible when you check the midi controller settings (so not much of a secret really ). The reason we wanted to keep it not prominent is because it requires all parts to be played simultaneously which eats up some CPU. Some people's systems can handle that better than others. I didn't want people focusing on that but rather the many other things that are incredibly accessible and efficient about the collection.

However, for those that want to play around and have some fun (as long as you have a fast enough computer), we set up all of the MULTI patches to easily be able to do "control switching". Parts 1-4 default to being controlled by CC#71-74 and Parts 5-8 default to being controlled by CC#91-94. So, if you set all of the articulations to the same midi channel (a pretty large layer taking up some serious polyphony) and set up a midi controller with those CC assignments then congratulations you have control switching (key switching's cousin ).

But, again, this was not initially designed to do this. It was just a clever trick we discovered we could do in the programming because of the mute and solos becoming destinations in the midi control assignments. The multi articulations already take up more CPU than lighter combis or single patches but to be able to use them layered this way takes up even more. But, you can also use just part of these combis that way and of course one can set up their own schemes too! Philharmonik is pretty flexible to do a lot of things.

[nexussynth]

Much to my chagrin, I'm too busy to think of an intelligent post at the moment, please try again later.

Any more questions, guys, shoot em at me. I'll answer them if I can. I know you're dying to have the product, the least I can do is tell you how good it is and rub it in your face.

Okay, how about the CSR reverb? Does it sound as lush as it does in the demo?

[Squids]

I know you want Joseph to answer that and I will let him. But, I will add that the sound quality of the send fx and the CSR adds so much to this library in an ST-based engine. It glues it all together nicely. Majestic.

[Joseph Burrell]

It is every bit as lush and warm in the videos, probably more so when you hear it in person. Its a very hard sound to duplicate with my other plugs. The only problem is that its 'per instance' so you have one enabled on each instance of the Philharmonik that you load. This will increase your CPU overhead for reverb processing immensly when working with large scale orchestrations. You will find yourself having to disable it during work and enable it during render. Its nice way to make you want to buy the real deal though, a very clever marketing strategy.