Competitions for virtual instruments users?

[Michal Cielecki]

Greetings,
From what I could find, those competitions for composers out there are score writing oriented. Are there any competitions that are pure audio ones, game/film music oriented, for users of virtual instruments?
I know there were competitions under CGEmpire (won't be anymore), East West is making a contest with scoring a film every year (I think).
Are there any other compos for people using virtual instruments (especially virtual orchestras)?

Cheers,
Michal

[DavidQuaas]

Does anyone of you guys work with Kirk Hunter library? They are not too expensive but offer some great orchestral sounds though. But I don't think that they do competitions. Check out www.kirkhunterstudios.com

Michal, you really use FL Studio 8? Because what you do really sounds great! Back in the days I used FL for making HipHop-Beats, but I always missed the possibility to play real Instruments, so I switched to Logic and sticked to it. I would be indeed very interested in learning from you, do you work with loops?

Cheers, David.

[Michal Cielecki]

Hi,
Yeah I use FL8, but in a few days I am moving to 64 bit machine with Sonar 8, because the VSTis I use are too much for the Image-Line's sequencer. Since FL is not going to be 64 bit anytime soon, I am not going to wait.
Do you mean loops like audio loops in SD1 Intakt or do you mean loops as patterns and playlists within FL?
I actually use both, especially the playlist is useful when you make a piece that might be rearranged, so you can arrange the patterns in the playlist as you see fit or get rid of some and write/work with different musical ideas to incorporate them into the composition, without having to copy/move whole bunch of notes.

I never really liked KH's library, and today it sounds pretty outdated.

Cheers,
Michal

[DavidQuaas]

Hey,

Sonar looks great, but as I'm using Mac, I'll stick to logic, waiting for the 64 bit.. ;)

I don't know what you mean by using the word outdated for virtual orchestras. The KH library definitely has a different sound than the East-West-Packages and the VE Pro, but comparing them under the cost-effectiveness you'll see that KH does a good job. But nevertheless, I'll have to get the VE Pro-Software too some day..

Which library do you prefer for Solo-Instruments, eg. strings, voices, whatever? Because the KH library is definitely not too good equipped with them.

Cheers, David.

[Michal Cielecki]

Of course it has different sound, every library has it's distinctive sound quality. IMHO the prices are comparable between KH and EW libraries regarding cost-effectiveness, but I believe the sound quality in EW's orchestra is much better. With Silver version of EWQLSO you can do a lot, here's my example (although couple years old one, done with Silver Kompakt) - http://www.infinity-universe.com/~contribs/Mirrored/Mirrored_Infini...

As for solo instruments - it's really tough. I heard some pretty good results with Garritan's solo cello and violin (can't remember the name of those instruments). Also LA Scoring Strings have first chair solo instruments. Surely Vienna has some pretty good solo instruments avaiable for separate download. ProjectSAM Orchestral Brass has solo instruments that sound wonderful (I'm getting it this week, I'm tired of Symphobia's ensembles ;) ). If you have some good quality samples that you want to get more realistic results with, you can get Solo Instruments Performance Suite scripts for Kontakt - http://www.nilsliberg.se/ksp/scripts/sips/sips.htm

As for voices - I don't know, anything that suits you. :) I, for example, very much like Tonehammer's Francesca vocal library - http://www.tonehammer.com/?p=1510 and they have a couple more of the vocal libraries.

Cheers,
Michal

DavidQuaas said:

Hey,
Sonar looks great, but as I'm using Mac, I'll stick to logic, waiting for the 64 bit.. ;)
I don't know what you mean by using the word outdated for virtual orchestras. The KH library definitely has a different sound than the East-West-Packages and the VE Pro, but comparing them under the cost-effectiveness you'll see that KH does a good job. But nevertheless, I'll have to get the VE Pro-Software too some day..

Which library do you prefer for Solo-Instruments, eg. strings, voices, whatever? Because the KH library is definitely not too good equipped with them.

Cheers, David.

[DavidQuaas]

Wow, thanks for all the great hints! Just checked out tonehammer's libraries, there are tons of great material! The other ones will follow. Do you know when the next contest will come up?
Considering EWQLSO, I did not buy it because a) it's more expensive and b) Logic is still 32bit and PLAY uses the RAM of Logic. That's why I prefer Kontakt libraries. And since I just have a macbook, loading two different libraries is going to kill my Mac.
The SIPS are only for windows, right? Because I really am not able to understand how they will work...?! ;)

Thanks again, bye, David.

PS: Coming back to the competitions: I also found many composition contests in the net, but most of them are in Europe. Why don't enter such a "normal" composition contest and send in the score of your VSTI-pieces?

[DavidQuaas]

Totally agree, especially considering the hint with listening to symphonies for example while reading a score. Ah, that leads me to opening a new topic! ;)
But it seems to me that regarding the range of an instrument for example, many libraries put attention to realism.

Another problem of using libraries is in my opinion that they may lead you to dismiss ideas, which you have in mind but are not able to play with your libraries, whatever the reason may be. So I think the best way is to compose "dry" and then try it with your library.

What do you think?

David.

[Calle Edlund]

Maybe this is something interesting.

http://www.revision-party.net/