HI: I'm Horace from Argentina. Musician Songwriter. I've been doing music since I was 13 years old. My influeces has been The Beatles, Michael Jackson's Thriller, Queen, Yes. But I had always a special like for instrumental creations which I found very interesting specially when I played Lucas Monkey Island 4. Adventure Games became then another musical influence but separated from the rock and roll bands. Even I think that The Best Album from The Beatles ( in my opinion) is Yellow Submarine. Because there performs The George Martin Orchestra. I leave you a link to read more about George Martin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Martin I found in Game Audio and Music for Games the meaning of my career. All those things I've done before I reach this point has been practicing for this moment. Now I do Orchestral and All genre music and I'd like to do it for Games. What 'd like to know is where is next for me to do. I have the Great EWQL Symphonic Orchestra Gold XP. But I had to listen carefully to the EWQL DEMOS to see what is possible to do with that system. Then I found that in order to do that, I should buy the hole collection of Symphonic Orchestra which includes Srings Library, Woodwinds Library, Brass Library and so on... When I listen to my orchestral compositions I see the final result isn't bad at all, I also find the instrumens very realistic, but I still know that I'm so far to reach the realism of the best virtual orchestra musicians. I've read somewhere in the web that to be able to use the complete orchestra set in a professional way the system required is something about 8 computers connected in some complicated way. Can sombody tell me what system I should exactly buy to use a virtual symphonic orchestra in my studio for game music and film scoring? I mean how many computers Mac or PC and what components must they have in it, and software of course. Thank you very much Horace

according to eastwest:

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM
• Win XP, Pentium IV/Athlon 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, DVD drive
• Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, G5 1.8 GHz, 1.0 GB RAM, DVD drive

i assume the plugin will have a disk streaming option and other options to reduce quality for editing, for rendering a slower system would only mean it takes longer, no reduction in quality.

No clue about your question, but I just wanted to point out that in a recent Gamasutra article, Jeremy Soule(composes alot of game's sound tracks, if you didn't know) uses about 35 really nice computers to 'render' his music, and it still takes hours. Just to give you an idea of what big time composers use.

Quote: Original post by l0calh05t
according to eastwest:

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM
• Win XP, Pentium IV/Athlon 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM, DVD drive
• Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, G5 1.8 GHz, 1.0 GB RAM, DVD drive

i assume the plugin will have a disk streaming option and other options to reduce quality for editing, for rendering a slower system would only mean it takes longer, no reduction in quality.

Thanks for trying to help. Actually I have a Pentium 4 2.8 2gb RAM.
But what I want to know is how many computer should I have in order to use the Big EWQL Libraries

Thanks!!

Quote: Original post by Ezbez
No clue about your question, but I just wanted to point out that in a recent Gamasutra article, Jeremy Soule(composes alot of game's sound tracks, if you didn't know) uses about 35 really nice computers to 'render' his music, and it still takes hours. Just to give you an idea of what big time composers use.

35 COMPUTERS???
That's much more Ican imagine now. Even If Ihave the money to buy 35 computers I should move to a bigger place!!!

Thank for information, that gives an idea of how much complicated could be to perform a virtual symp. orch.

i'd venture to guess he uses something like the vienna symphonic libraries which are a whole lot bigger than EWQL Platinum (even when inluding the Platinum Pro XP). The VSL Cube will be 500+GB when all parts become available.

Quote: Original post by Ezbez
No clue about your question, but I just wanted to point out that in a recent Gamasutra article, Jeremy Soule(composes alot of game's sound tracks, if you didn't know) uses about 35 really nice computers to 'render' his music, and it still takes hours. Just to give you an idea of what big time composers use.

35 computers, at once?! I'd think that would be a little excessive.

For the larger EW libs, you could get away using one computer. I use computer, and I have produced excellent tracks. you just need to be smart about when to freeze the tracks.

Most people use 3+.

Sean Beeson

It's not really that complex. This is what you need to do.

Basically what they're talking about is placing the 8 sections of the orchestra on separate computers to take the load of a fully articulated virtual orchestra. There's no way to fit all of it on a single machine to reach a level of realism to make sure every small articulation is covered at the right time (if you want to go that far).

The idea is a single master station is used to control the midi and each of the other 8 computers is just a host for the VST. It's called a rendering farm. All the audio is fed back to the main machine via the Gigabit connections and you'd hear them on each bus as though the VST was running on the master machine.

For each workstation they don't need to be very fast, 1.4ghz athlons should be enough. Make sure they have 1gig RAM and you're using 7200RPM Drives like Segate Baracudas with 8m cache. The drives don't have to be huge as you're not holding a lot of data on them. Just enough to house your virtual library + any others you may use.

FX-Teleport is the software you'll need. It is your VST Host on each machine. It will take the MIDI from your master and then feed the audio signal back to the master. You will need a gigabit ethernet connection + gigabit cable so that it's fast enough for realtime multichannel audio streaming.

EWQL Gold Update is recommended as they've added new articulations and also a lot of the sections now work in a single patch by key-switching rather than having to load a ton of separate patches and fiddle with oodles of midi tracks one for each articulation. It's a disruptive process having to switch between 5 different midi tracks to write a single phrase of music for just Strings. With the key switching, you only have 1 midi track, and you use a switch key (say C0) to switch to legato, then switch to staccato with C#0.

All this talk of expensive symphonic libraries is giving me a severe case of techno-lust.

Someday...I will have the toys I want. Oh yes, they will be mine.

Brian