Some orchestral music

Community Made With Ardour
#1

I used Ardour, Sfizz for SFZ and Virtual Playing Orchestra (VPO) to compose some classical (film) music.
Check out the middle part of Jäger. :slight_smile:

I think it is amazing what you can do with those three packages.

Maybe the following is helpful for future composers googling around:

  • I had to fix a bug with Sfizz playback but other than that it worked flawlessly.
  • I compressed VPO with FLAC to 668MB since Sfizz is able to read FLAC.
  • I installed Deb packages from Debian experimental on Ubuntu. Sometimes I had to (dpkg -i --force-depends) but it works as expected.
5 Likes
#2

Could you elaborate?

These pieces are beautiful. If you don’t mind me asking, what other plugins did you use?

1 Like
#3

I think it was playback related and only because I compiled it myself. There should be a thread there discussing it. It should be fixed by now.

Thanks. No other plugins were used. It’s the raw cut. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#4

Nice job !! Really beautiful sound !
Made me discover VPO which I didn’t know. I just downloaded it and am already starting using it on a new project, so thanks for that :slight_smile:

1 Like
#5

Thank you for sharing your work! I really like how you’ve used VPO here.

Can you share your Ardour session as a template?

#6

No, but it’s really simple; in the processor box of a mixer strip add Sfizz, double click on it, and select the SFZ from VPO.

#7

Really good effort, @gonsolo! I’ve been playing with Ardour+VPO myself for orchestral works (a couple of symphonic poems with a soundtrack feel), and while it’s been a challenge I too love how good the results can be.

I did start from a template, though, an excellent one made by Michael Willis:

Michael’s template has the advantage that panning and reverb (via the excellent Dragonfly Reverb) are already set properly for all the instruments, and is very easy to extend. Besides, it uses sfizz to load VPO, even though it uses the performance VPO files by default; since I needed a different approach, and the ability to change articulations dynamically via CC messages (that I could script) rather than keyswitches, I refactored some of the VPO SFZ files for the purpose:

The whole approach is described in detail in a couple of posts I wrote on LinuxMusicians, if you’re curious, specifically those related to the symphonic poems I worked on: