I created some semblance of a beautiful piece I heard on that animated movie using mostly Virtual Playing Orchestra and a bit of Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra. I thought I’d just share. Youtube link is below:
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Nice piece! I’m starting to learn how to use virtual instruments on Ardour. See works like this made with Ardour makes me motivate to learn more. Thanks.
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Thank you. Listening to stuff other people make on Ardour certainly emboldened me. There’s a ton of people creating with Ardour.
I just found this…
Really nice piece of music!!!
How do you make the virtual instruments sound so nice in Ardour? I struggled for ages having just a piano sound for any instrument and recently I could set different sound for each MIDI track, but the quality is poor compared with what I hear on Musescore (using the same sound fonts on both). The (terrible) solution I found was to sync Musescore and Hydrogen (which is the jack master when there are drums) to Ardour and record their outputs in audio tracks (one for each software).
Best, Alexandre
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Admirable. Thanks for sharing.
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Wow! Those sounds are near perfection!!! Do you have to use one sound font
file for each instrument, right? What about the piano? I didn’t find it on
the zip file. Do you use another source?
BTW, I could use Musescore sound fonts (was mainly interested in the piano)
on a MIDI Bus to share it to all of the MIDI tracks (selecting instruments
for each channel, only once).
Best, Alexandre
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Yes, you are correct. No piano in VPO, since it’s not part of the classic “orchestra”. A good piano is Little LizardPiano: Index of /sounds/sfz (thanks to Glen McA. for hosting)
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Right! But those sounds of Little Lizard Piano sounded pretty weird here in Ardour. Changing back to Musescore sound found sounded as good as it used to be… 
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll keep working on it.
Best, Alexandre
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Thank you, Michael! I’ll try that.
Best, Alexandre
Thank you very much.
Well, I can’t say I did so much, to get them to sound nice. You should really get that Virtual Playing Orchestra up and running. For this very session, I used Linux Sampler, there’s one that has 32 channels. When you launch the plugin in Ardour, you can load up the samples when you install and launch Qsampler.
I think I’ve had good results with Musescore too. Whichever works best for you.
Thank you for listening.
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Remembering the fine vibes of the…Scribe’s original piece, I will simply add, lymber, that you are right, there is considerable latency in L.L. Piano (as well as the original Salamander by A. Holm), “jlearman” has done the world a favour by releasing a tighter, neatly trimmed version (in FLAC): GitHub - jlearman/SplendidGrandLatencyFix: silence removed from beginnings of samples
Nice job!
On the virtual orchestration part, one thing you can do is using Michael Willis’ excellent template for Ardour, which does indeed use VPO for all the instruments:
It also takes care of spatially positioning the different instruments in the orchestra (the repo has a graph that shows the placing), and includes different reverbs using the excellent Dragonfly Reverb. Notice the template uses sfizz and not LinuxSampler to render the SFZ files: sfizz is a much lighter implementation (at least in my experience) and has a very active development team.
For my own needs, I ended up editing the template a bit: I duplicated the tracks for woodwinds and brass, for instance (as two flutes need to be different instruments, for me, rather than a group of flutes), but the main change I made was I used my own version of the VPO SFZ files, so that I could use a custom MIDI CC for articulation changes. Michael’s template, in fact, has separate tracks for, e.g., pizzicato strings and tremolo strings, while I wanted a single one where I could switch between the modes dynamically. That’s because I score everything in MuseScore as a “regular” score, and then import that in Ardour where I do all the further manipulation (mostly articulation changes).
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