Orchestra Template for Ardour

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Michael Willis
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Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

As mentioned elsewhere, I've been working on an orchestral scoring project template for Ardour.

For anybody interested, an early draft is available for testing:

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... r-template

Please consider this still in the alpha stage; as of posting this message, the template has only been testing on one computer.

Any feedback is welcome: about the documentation, stylistic choices, audio mixing, something not working, etc.
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

An update is now available to address a few issues reported by other people.

The changes are documented here:

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... 0.9.0-beta

Find usage documentation here:

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... /readme.md
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Lyberta »

So how to switch between articulations?
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

Each articulation is on a separate track. I tried the keyswitch option, didn't like it, and decided that I preferred separate tracks.

The default view only shows one track per section, the other articulations start out hidden, to avoid an initial overwhelming view of over 50 tracks.

Go to the Mixer view, then look at the left sidebar. You should see a list of all tracks and busses, with a "Show" column that you can tick to show each track. For example, the first violin section has the following tracks:

First Violin
First Violin Pizzicato
First Violins
First Violins Pizzicato
First Violins Tremolo

You can reveal the "First Violins Pizzicato" track, then go back to the Editor view and enter notes.

Additionally, the majority of the tracks have an attack setting that is controllable by the mod wheel midi CC. Set it to 0 for a hard attack, 255 for a slow attack, or anything in between as desired. I think the only ones that don't have this feature are the percussion instruments, the piano, the harp, and the pizzicato/tremolo articulations on the string sections.
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

Any opinions about replacing the Maestro Concert Grand with the Salamander Grand Piano? I've had some people report issues with downloading the Maestro Concert Grand, and I'm a little concerned that there only seems to be one legitimate place to download it. Furthermore, the legal terms of the Salamander Grand Piano seem a little more friendly and solid, being the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, instead of the little off-the-cuff legal blurb from the author of the Maestro Concert Grand.
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by j_e_f_f_g »

The official version of the Salamander Grand uses a lot of RAM. Loading that, plus an entire orchestra, is going to choke many computers. Use my "Little Lizard" version.

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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

j_e_f_f_g wrote:The official version of the Salamander Grand uses a lot of RAM. Loading that, plus an entire orchestra, is going to choke many computers. Use my "Little Lizard" version.
Oh, that's a good idea. If anybody wants the sound of the full salamander (or some other piano for that matter), they can just use Fantasia or QSampler to replace it.
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

Oh, also, is there any interest in a smaller version of this template? I've been considering some variations, like maybe one that has two Linux sampler instances instead of four... Maybe the small one could use NBO instead of VPO...
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Updated: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

I just updated this template to use VPO 3 and Dragonfly Hall Reverb. The reverb replaces two other plugins that I was previously using for early and late reflections, as such the signal routing is much more simple, and it sounds much better. Hopefully I'll have a demo for people to listen to some time soon. In the mean time, could somebody look over my updated instructions on the github page and let me know if it works for you? There are several pieces that have to be set up correctly for this to work.

Again, the project is here: https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... r-template
The new release is here: https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... /1.0.0-RC1
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

I made a major update to this template. Now it uses sfizz instead of LinuxSampler, the signal routing is *much* more simple now, and I dare say that I have it mixed way better than my previous attempts.

The sfizz folks say they are gearing up for an official 1.0 release, which should hopefully include binary builds. Until then you'll have to compile it on your own.

Would anybody here be willing to review my documentation and see if they can get this template working?

https://github.com/michaelwillis/virtua ... r-template
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by tseaver »

Aarrgh! I've just been displaced from my home studio for an undefined length of time!

I did get sfizz ad VPO working minimally on my studio machine at home before leaving town, and so would have been in a great place to test your template, if only I were there.

Nevertheless, thank you so much for your work to make VPO a workable scoring choice under Linux (as well as for the Dragonfly plugins!)



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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by linuxgeek »

Just got Musescore/Ardour/xjadeo/Jack working for my son. Will try this soon.

Do you compose directly in Ardour using MIDI editor or do you use something like Musescore?
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by Michael Willis »

linuxgeek wrote:Just got Musescore/Ardour/xjadeo/Jack working for my son. Will try this soon.

Do you compose directly in Ardour using MIDI editor or do you use something like Musescore?
I use Ardour directly, but you can compose in Musescore and then import the midi into Ardour.
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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by jafarzangeneh »

Hi
The last link is broken in GitHub.

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Re: Orchestra Template for Ardour

Post by tseaver »

FWIW:

I haven't used @Michael Willis' excellent template for some time, as I found I rarely needed the full orchestra, but I can report that sfizz + VPO is definitely working well for me on both UbuntuStudio 20.04 and AVL-MX 21.1. I've been quite happy using Ardour + sfizz + VPO for sessions up to 48 or so separate instruments / articulations, on my quite modest AMD A12-9800 Radeon R7 box, with 32 Gb of RAM.

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