One Synth Challenge #165: BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover by Spitfire Audio (Schiing Wins!)

[Yadrichik_Chaya]

@schiing Hahaha I'm glad you're being honest about your voting tactics/strategy
When I saw this:

NEW ADDITIONAL PRIZE for the Top 3 Winners of this challenge only:
Each of the Top 3 winners wins a license for ResonHeart + a license for ShineVerb + a license for WindChant

I wanted to respond jokingly: ”Great! Thanks to the new prizes everyone will change their votes, lower the scores and be very strategic about it… ”

[schiing]

Essay time. My voting was unusual this round...

Even though I feel your scoring a bit too harsh I also fully understand your point of view, when I try to put on your shoes. I mean, you made a really good song, with a lot of different sections and a really huge dynamic range but within 3 minutes length. The instruments sound very realistic. I guess you did a lot of work with expression automation and you probably have more experience than some of us.
So I understand why you find more problems than others might find.

In the end your post is helpful. This round offered so much to us to grow and you are part of it.
Thanks.

It's incredibly gracious of you to say so, Frank.

I wasn't quite sure what to do with my feedback this month, because I felt like I'd look like a bit of a d**k no matter what I said or didn't say. So your words are a great comfort, thank you!

[schiing]

@schiing Hahaha I'm glad you're being honest about your voting tactics/strategy
When I saw this:

NEW ADDITIONAL PRIZE for the Top 3 Winners of this challenge only:
Each of the Top 3 winners wins a license for ResonHeart + a license for ShineVerb + a license for WindChant

I wanted to respond jokingly: ”Great! Thanks to the new prizes everyone will change their votes, lower the scores and be very strategic about it… ”

Oh, that?? Pft!

[Yadrichik_Chaya]

@schiing Hahaha I'm glad you're being honest about your voting tactics/strategy
When I saw this:

NEW ADDITIONAL PRIZE for the Top 3 Winners of this challenge only:
Each of the Top 3 winners wins a license for ResonHeart + a license for ShineVerb + a license for WindChant

I wanted to respond jokingly: ”Great! Thanks to the new prizes everyone will change their votes, lower the scores and be very strategic about it… ”

Oh, that?? Pft!

LOL!

[zarf]

Yeah thanks schiing that was really interesting and helpful to learn from

[Mr Arkadin]

[*]Many fatally overlong pieces

[*][...] many fell for the temptation to go for minimalism + some for expressionist ideas. Now, it's incredibly hard to create interesting minimalist and expressionist music using an orchestra with no round robins, no exotic playing techniques, and a small dynamic range – and the attempts quickly become tedious, sadly
[/list]

I feel like you just described my entry. To be honest I was never bothered about winning, just some comments. I realise brevity would be better for a competition, but I've always had a problem with length (oo-er missus!) and generally don't mind pieces that take their time to develop. I guess that's individual and most probably skipped through the longer pieces. It would be interesting to hear your comments about the full BBCSO Pro version I'm working on (same length I'm afraid), I was acutely aware of the of lack round-robins but worked with what I had.

[*]Many composers unable/unwilling to use orchestral dynamics
[*]Too little focus on variation in dynamics and tempo - unnatural and boring as a result. Orchestral music lives and breathes, back and forth, slow and fast, loud and soft
[*]You can of course experiment and use an orchestra like a synth with lfo-like automation and stuff, but it doesn't yield too good results here. But Taron did program his slurs fantastically.
[*]This round raises interesting questions about external processing for me – it reveals that some will go a lot further with effects than I would consider within the scope of OSC
[*]Finally, the "experimental" tracks with heavy processing and sound manipulation don't seem to manage to take advantage of the production choice – it sounds artificial and simply don't bring out the best in the instrument – and even make its limitations more obvious than need be. There has to be a reason for experimentation beyond novelty, I think. Thus, very low scores there, to separate from everyone I felt tried to take advantage of the instrument's strengths
[/list]

Well luckily I did use dynmaics and tempo changes, so there's some upside

Actually my voting was similar in some regards (except being bothered by length). I wasn't really a fan of tracks that bascially twisted the sounds into a dance track or used what I considered a lot of effects. After reading the rules and then seeing people use lots of extreme commercial effects I was a bit confused to be honest. I've never done OSC before and I'm not sure what is allowable.

Of the orchestral pieces the biggest flaw for me was seeing a big block of audio. You really need dynamics with this stuff. I find it quite tiring on my ear otherwise.

[ZioMau]

Voted, but was harder this time. Furthermore, intense working time(and after dinner impossible-to-skip playing time with my daughter) left me not so much time to listen carefully all the tracks. Some votes could be wrong. For the same reason i didn't release comments.
Forgive me.
See ya in december round...maybe.
Ciaooo

[BrainBeatMusic]

I feel badly – you're all wonderful people, you obviously put a lot of work into this round, and you gave it your best shot. I don't like to hand out 1s and 2s, and I might ultimately, you know, be

While I understand some feel the need to give out 1s and 2s I will never give a 1 to anyone but myself and only a 2 to something that lacks all musical merit and is painful to listen to and I personally didn't hear anything worth less than a 3. I am probably a bit dumb responding to some of your comments but in the fun of discussing ideas here are my thoughts. I would think my track probably falls under most of what you have said too some of the comments are fair but some may also a bit harsh.

I am wondering if just because this is an orchestral sounds competition that everything had to sound like classical music. While I don't disagree some I think probably pushed things a bit too far and are very borderline if they should have been accepted and so I understand why you would want to score them lower. If however you or anyone scored lower because they were using the instruments right for a classical piece I would have to disagree with you there. Dynamics are important in most if not all pieces and I think most did make good use of this so maybe you were only talking about a few?

Given what you have said you scoring would suggest may be more important than most as your 1's and 2's might make a huge impact on who wins as I am guessing many (most) will likely have given 3+ to most tracks. It will be interesting to see the final score when they are released.

[liqih]

Now, it's incredibly hard to create interesting minimalist and expressionist music using an orchestra with no round robins, no exotic playing techniques, and a small dynamic range – and the attempts quickly become tedious, sadly

I think the Scherzetto by Sampleme worked quite well, as it's so far my favourite entry.

Also I don't think we have to underestimate human factor, just imagine an AI like GTP-3 but trained on hundred thousands of orchestral pieces and to use this rompler we had and a DAW. Probably it could make a very convincing, expressive orchestration, following all the rules (centuries old as you say), and we will all say "Wow!".
But it's a "wow" we are looking for? A cosplay of the best we heard?
So we can say that a single human alone with the right technology can replace the 90 players in a symphony orchestra + the director + the composer + the recording engineers?

Not for me. This is a single freeware plugin and lonely buddy behind. I feel this is the spirit of OSC.
Tech skills and needed, but I favour ideas and themes.

An interesting coming out from you mate. And so I wrote mine, LOL. Cheers and Respect.

[Yadrichik_Chaya]

Whoa, I see dick size jokes in the post by Mr Arkadin which only means..

…that there are no worries for me to post this first draft demo of the new Creamy Model in Emergent Drums that I posted earlier in the Tokyo Dawn Labs SimuLathe thread…

This has NOTHING to do BBC Symphony Orchestra, but the raunchy name of the track is very similar.

https://soundcloud.com/yadrichik-chaya/ ... al_sharing

Please do check that thread. In it I make fun of the Plugin Alliance CEO, I speak on behalf on the environment (vinyl is bad) and then I start posting pictures of chinese robot-horses and even come up with a new type of robot horse where the word Jockey in Disc Jockey makes perfect sense! Not a single person gave me thumbs up so naturally I posted the demo above using TDL SimuLathe to round things off.

[IV!]

What I would like to say while this river is flowing here. I thank the OSCers with the best orchestral tracks for their professionalism, and with the most interesting non-standard things for their courage and resourcefulness! For myself (to my "OSC Favorite" playlist) I have marked the tracks of Dorgan, Richard Semper, SilverPants, Rilderec, Davi-DJ and FrogsInPants, in addition, I have a high opinion of the tracks of Taron, Schiing, Milkster, MadMcMan, BrainBeat, and several others (I can't peek into the list now ), listening to music more than compliance with the canons of orchestration. I understand that many probably haven't even touched orchestra libraries, let alone in-depth study of working with them.
This month, I was a little upset that many people followed the ""easiest"" path of cinematic/ambience music (which, coupled with the absence of the points described by Schiing, gave a lot of rather boring and similar tracks), instead of experimenting and searching for themselves in this instrument. Although, for many it was probably the only opportunity to do something like this, so I don't blame them. Moreover, I myself did not cope with the orchestra this month. But I saw that a zero-point synthesizer makes most of the participants be much more creative than ready-made solutions!
And off topic:

…that there are no worries for me to post this first draft demo of the new Creamy Model in Emergent Drums that I posted earlier in the Tokyo Dawn Labs SimuLathe thread…

@Yadrichik Chaya - hello friend! I love your tracks, it's always something special, and now I'm sad to see this intriguing empty message( Please share this track in the Discord so that I can also join to listening to your art!

[ELEX]

I realize orchestral scoring is a sidestep for most of us, but it was hard for me to look past certain basic aspects of orchestration when I judged the entries, and it's perhaps not entirely fair – I don't know.

I do know: it is entirely unfair. Showing orchestral scoring skills was not the express purpose of this OSC round. It was only one possibility. Other were equally valid. Writing a harsh general critique from that standpoint, isn't fair either. Being a general critique, it is also not very useful. It mostly just leaves people guessing. Commenting directly on tracks would be so much better. As you are obviously very good at elaborately articulating opinions in little time, why not do so ?

[violator_alba]

Essay time. My voting was unusual this round (read: few on the top, ...

Thanks for your explanation: I'm kind of looking forward to see how you voted now! I don't think harshness (perceived or otherwise) in voting matters as long as it's applied consistently.

[doctorbob]

Thanks for the thoughts Terje. I take your point about not being able to "play in" an orchestral piece from a keyboard! But, we do have to be careful about fully accurate midi notes on a piano roll - can be like an automaton. Some quantizing/humanizing can help. Of course, an orchestra is kept in time across the board "at light speed", because the players watch the conductor. But, the also listen to others in their section and adjust their "tuning" all the time, hence the wonderful textures you hear in orchestral music (for all time!).

I admit mine was all played in, but... I did go in and adjust timings etc in the piano roll, whilst listening with a critical ear. With more time I would have gone the Sibelius scoring route, exported midi to DAW and worked from their (<sigh>).

I do think this was an interesting challenge, wish I had more time (but covid etc got in the way), many people stepped up to the plate and showed us some fine and unexpected skills. I do think everyone this round learnt a lot about scoring/composing and about themselves!

Hope this rings true with some folks here.

All the best,

dB

[nyxeles]

Essay time.

I think judging orchestration is totally valid and that was also part of my grading.
I definitely don't mind low scores, and well thought-out critical feedback is much appreciated and hard to come by, so thanks for expressing your ideas!
Would have welcomed individual critique as well. No need to be too nice :D

and I didn't want to risk anyone getting pissed off at me, punishing my score!

Also I don't think people would actually retaliate for receiving low scores or criticism?? If we were to be worried about how we rate or give feedback, would the rating process even be meaningful at all?