Piece for $99 Orchestra

Nice piece!

I suspect they will have a pretty hard time with all the syncopations. I wouldn't expect more than half the length of your piece despite what they advertise – especially with this kind of music.

Don't write 'measured' – it's just note repetition. The slash is enough.
Also I wouldn't use 'bring out' for this kind of session. Balance with dynamic or voicing instead.

 

It's an interesting philosophy to base one's business on...
"$99 Orchestra -- we're the RyanAir of session players!"

Great approach though, please share what you learned. It's a much less intimidating experience than hiring a full orchestra right off the bat, but I think I'd prefer contacting local or youth orchestras first (in my case anyway, since I happen to know people in them). Interested in hearing their interpretation, nice piece!

EDIT: Andre has been writing on VI Control and hearing more from his perspective and it seems like they're really trying to work on issues.

 

If it's my thread: https://vi-control.net/community/threads/99-dollar-orchestra.65643/ you can see that I had a lot of headaches not concerned with recording or quality of the musicians. I would love to hear how or if this has been improved.

 

I was in the same session!

Posted my session mix here:
)

The strings were definitely wonky, lots of intonation and sight reading mistakes in my session, too. Makes me wonder if I could have made things easier to read? Most of the iffy stuff was in the high registers on my piece, but I was able to cobble stuff together from various takes and make it sound alright.

I really enjoyed your piece! And it sounds alright to me in what you've cut together in the stems - those strings really need to be tighter though :-/.

 

My only experience with online recording was with Bratislava and they were tighter than this (10 years ago.) The click bleed sure is loud, maybe they don't have those one-ear headphones for string players? Great experience though, seems like a fun way to spend an evening. Good writing and orchestration, both of you.

 

Yea that click bleed was disappointing :-/

Does Bratslava do open sessions like this? Would you recommend?

 

Doug recorded his Bass Clarinet concerto in Bratislava, maybe he can provide some more info as well. I think he also noted that the harp and mallets are from samples.

 

I'd never heard this before, thanks for posting!

 

Oh Wow !! Thanks for the kind words everyone !

Huh..... out from the depths of the dark web pops my Bass Clarinet Concerto.

AV styles is absolutely correct. Bratislava is where it was recorded, and as noted Harp, Vibes, Celeste are from Spitfire's percussion library.

basically I did not want to pay for cartage, and celeste IMO is very hit or miss. Some orchestras have really nice ones, others have them in the basement
collecting dust for years.

The whole concerto was recorded within a typical 3 hour call. So 10 -15 minute breaks around each hour. I was very pleased with their performance.

I also had a 1 hour session with them for two works that my publisher wanted recorded. I think an hour might be as little as they offer. It makes sense.

Anyhow I got about 6:30 maybe 7 minutes from that hour.




As others have mentioned, I too have had really good experiences with Smecky studios in Prague. One thing that was a really pleasant surprise is they handle
other styles very well too. The rhythm section we had sounded like a jazz club in NYC. As long as the contractor books the right people there are plenty of
musicians who can swing over there, which used to be a knock on recording out of the US.



Lastly, I think I saw somewhere that $300 was a limit for budget or something. Aside from slapping the person, if that was really the case then the hybrid method works really well too. Having a really good string player, or two/three, who overdub and blend with samples can produce a really good result.

This was a pitch for a pilot show Fox was planning to make (it got shelved for some reason I'll never know) and I was the orchestrator.
I believe from memory there are three people playing strings. One covered all the violins and violas, and then a cellist, and a bassist.



Of course I am happy to pass along the details of the contractor for Bratislava is anyone is interested. Just PM me.