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MillimeterSampler — August 24, 2005
Aug 24, 2005 5:59 PM
Vienna Symphonic Library: Orchestral Samples Come Alive
Not long ago, a musician acquaintance of mine sent me his latest demo CD, looking for feedback. As usual, the songs were mostly pretty good: the playing quite strong, and the vocals—his admitted weak point—better than usual. What really grabbed me, though, were the string arrangements on two songs. One was a fairly lush country-ish backdrop, almost in a Billy Sherrill vein; the other was more spare, with just a few strings, the cello most prominent. When I asked how he managed to afford bringing in an orchestra for a demo, he shocked me by saying that the strings had come from the Vienna Symphonic Library of string samples. An inveterate studio tinkerer and electronics ace, he had taken the samples, arranged them using the VSL's proprietary software and his Tascam GigaStudio, and "performed" them as overdubs weeks after his live-in-the-studio tracking dates. They sounded fantastically natural and real. That's when the Sampler section of my brain lit up and I decided I had to find out more about this extraordinary sample library, which I had heard of previously, but had never actually heard.
Although the Vienna Symphonic Library's (VSL) First Edition came out just two years ago, founder and managing director Herb Tucmandl, a one-time cellist for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and a later a film composer, conceived of the orchestral sample library a decade ago. Frustrated by the limitations of existing libraries, not to mention the inferior synth string and brass patches employed by so many film composers, he set out to improve on the state-of-the-art. Luckily, he found an investor who believed in his ideas, and he proceeded to create a special acoustically controllable environment—dubbed the Silent Stage—expressly for recording samples. He brought in top Viennese engineers to capture the sounds of orchestra musicians playing together and individually, recorded at 24/96 for maximum fidelity to the source. The first two releases in 2003, First Edition and the more expansive Pro Edition, were very well-received and widely used.
One reason the library was so adaptable to different applications is its exclusive sophisticated software adjunct, known as The Performance Tool. According to the company, the software "allows users to reproduce true orchestral techniques; [for instance] the user can play many different articulations on a single MIDI track, without being distracted by having to operate key switches. Up to 12 consecutive articulations can be pre-defined and stepped through as the user plays in realtime, switching automatically from one playing technique to another."
Last year saw the release of VSL's Horizon Series, which turned the spotlight more on solo instruments and small groupings, including solo strings, harps, French oboe, saxophone, mallet instruments, classical guitar, and even such rare instruments as glass harmonica and verrophone. And early next year, the VSL will take another major step when it introduces the MIR, Multi Impulse Response Mixing and Reverberation Engine. This time, working in conjunction with AKG acoustics, the VSL is striving to add even more depth and flexibility to its sample libraries by adding spatial dimensions, allowing the user to "place" different instruments in various sound fields. As the company's literature states, "The reverb engine is actually a complete mixing station. With a few intuitive movements, the user can control every parameter of a virtual orchestration—volume, the position on stage, distance from the virtual microphones—and all the necessary spatial parameters are connected in one macro environment. ... Output on up to eight audio channels covers even extravagant surround formats, allowing the complete re-creation of the entire acoustic space in 5.1 and other three-dimensional systems." All in all, it's sure to be an important addition to an amazing product which continues to draw raves both in the audio press and from its ever-increasing base of satisfied users.
To read a detailed review of the VSL's first generation library click here to go to Mix magazine's website (one of our sister publications).
For other information and questions about availability, contact the VSL's U.S. distributor, Ilio Entertainment, at www.ilio.com/vienna. We'll have more on Ilio, which has a number of very interesting offerings, next time in The Sampler.
Some Sound Advice: Give A Listen to Kung Fu Hustle
I know it isn't the function of this e-newsletter to give film recommendations, but as a guy who listens to films almost as much as he watches them, I'm occasionally struck by an outstanding piece of film sound work, and often that sends me off on a scramble to learn more about it. One soundtrack that knocked my socks off recently was Kung Fu Hustle, which was just released on DVD in mid-August. I should preface my remarks by admitting that I have not, traditionally, been a huge fan of Hong Kong kung-fu films. Like everyone else, I saw and admired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I've seen my share of Jackie Chan's American film output. But I haven't seen Legend of the Drunken Master or most of the acknowledged early jewels of the genre. My wife and teenaged son saw Kung Fu Hustle during its theatrical release earlier this year and raved about it, so when it came to video, I was ready to be wowed. And "WOW!" is the right word to describe my reaction to this film, which is essentially a kung-fu comedy.
Set in Shanghai in the 1940s, the story pits a group of poor folks who live in an overcrowded tenement known as "The Pig Sty" against the bloodthirsty Axe Gang, who control life and commerce in the area. That doesn't sound like a funny premise, but the way director/star Stephen Chow handles the story and the action sequences is hilarious. The fighting sequences are extremely exaggerated (even by kung-fu film standards; realism is not their strong suit to begin with, to put it mildly), but with an often comic purpose. I was not surprised to read that Chow is a fan of Warner Bros. cartoons, because that's really what Kung Fu Hustle resembles more than anything: a live-action Roadrunner cartoon, complete with chases at unbelievable speeds; people being knocked through two, three, four, five walls, leaving a silhouette on each; and crushed body parts being literally flattened before they spring back to life. It helps, too, that the story also has some supernatural elements to it. All in all, it's a visual feast—a high watermark for digital visual effects. The cinematography by Hang Sang Poon is beautifully sumptuous.
Sonically, the film is also a masterpiece, combining broad, cartoonish FX that are sometimes hyper-real, other times completely fanciful, mixed with some mild electronic treatments and a musical score that is part brassy Peter Gunn-style bombast, and part classical Chinese orchestration. It's quite a mix of elements. (The film won the Best Film and Best Sound Design awards at last year's Hong Kong Film Awards.)
I was somewhat surprised to learn that the postproduction sound for Kung Fu Hustle—and, it turns out, many of the big Hong Kong films of recent years, including Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and many more that haven't hit these shores yet—was done not in Hong Kong, but Australia, by a post house called Soundfirm, which has studios in Melbourne, Sydney, and, now, Beijing. At the helm of this particular film was Steve Burgess, who acted as principal sound designer and supervisor and spearheaded the mix. Since the late '80s, Burgess has been involved with film sound in numerous capacities—most often as a foley artist or sound editor. I tracked him down at Soundfirm's Melbourne facility, where he had recently finished another Chinese film, called Seven Swords.
"Kung Fu Hustle was a lot of fun to work on, as you might expect," Burgess says, "but it was done on a very low budget with a director that wanted big returns. But we had a lot of trust in the film; we knew it was going to be really good." (It went on to become one of the highest-grossing films in Hong Kong movie history.)
"I mixed it [on a Harrison console at Soundfirm Sydney], designed all the fight scenes, and for the rest of it I acted as the supervisor. I have extensive sound libraries I've developed myself from working on so many films, and over the last three or four years I've been recording heavily in multichannel. So I supplied a lot of the sounds I had in my libraries to my designers. I also used some things from commercial libraries, as I have in the past, but these days, if I have the budget, I tend to record as much as possible myself."
"What does dealing with broad, slapstick action in a film do for a sound designer?" I ask.
"It puts a big smile on your face," he says with a laugh. "For a film like that, and even on House of Flying Daggers [for which I was an FX editor], the design of the sound isn't reality, nor is the action, so it enables you to go right out on a limb. You can come to it from a different angle and try some interesting things, as long as the sound still fits the action. I mean, you couldn't put a piece of Kung Fu Hustle on top of Daggers and have it sound right; they're two different films. But each allows you to step away from reality and try some new things."
Burgess says he likes to use natural sounds, rather than electronically created ones, to act as building blocks to come up with unusual SFX. "Nowadays, I tend to book a foley room all by myself and go in and spend three or four days creating elements, and then bring them into the mix environment. Then I'll say, 'Can I take that sound and put it outside?' and I'll work on creating an exterior environment." Burgess says his principal recording tool is a Fostex 6-channel DVD RAM recorder with a Metric Halo front end.
Natural sounds aside, there are some wonderful electronic washes and FX that pop up at opportune times in the film—particularly in one epic battle scene involving guzheng, giant Chinese stringed instruments, that blast phantom swords and killer sound waves when they are strummed. Burgess says that the work of Los Angeles-based sound designer/editor Stephen Ticknor was an important part of that sequence.
When I mention to Burgess that in the United States, SFX creators are putting out their own commercial libraries in increasing numbers, he says, almost conspiratorially, "Actually, I've got one of my own that I'm building online; it's been a pet project of mine for a few years. We're nearly there—it maybe another year off until it's completed. One of the things I want to do with my sound library, though, is concentrate on 5.1. I think that would be really valuable to people. I've already designed some sections of it in the foley arena. How can I explain it? You're in a virtual-reality kitchen, for instance, and you can walk in and when you touch the knife and fork drawer, the sound effects will appear before you ... or you hit the oven and other sounds come up; it's very geographic. But that's just a part of it. Obviously there will be much more. I'm quite keen on finishing it, but I've been quite busy."
Forks? Ovens? Okay, but we're also counting on some body slams, punches and martial arts mayhem. That will, no doubt, be part of it, too. So, we'll keep an eye out for what is sure to be one of the more intriguing libraries to come from the film sound world. In the meantime, what are you waiting for? Get thee to thy video emporium and rent Kung Fu Hustle!
Until next time, you can find me in cyberspace: blair@blairjackson.com.
