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| Recording and Concept |
Collection User Guide
III
Recording and Concept
We are happy to have found a sonic home for our collections at the
Teldex Scoring Stage
in Berlin.
The large recording stage at Teldex looks back on a long tradition of many well known and Grammy®
award winning recordings. Famous orchestras, like the Berlin Philharmonics and great film composers from
the USA and Europe trust and love the wide and clear acoustics of this room. One of the
best sounding
scoring stages
in Europe, this room together with a fantastic complement of legendary microphones catapults
our work to a new level of orchestral sampling.
The quality of a sampled collection begins with the recording. Every Orchestral Tools collection is recorded
at
96khz
with state of the art equipment. The full editing and post-production process uses these 96khz
recordings
without downsampling
. We very rarely denoise our recordings and never treat them in any other
automated way. If tuning is needed, it is done
by ear
without resorting to tuning algorithms. Only at the very
end, right before the samples are mapped into their instruments, the content is converted to 48khz for best
use of resources.
Our goal is to provide a set of tools that easily adapts to any workflow and creates a
coherent sonic
representation
of the orchestra. The main way we achieved this is by recording every instrument in its
orchestral position
. All collections come
pre-panned and pre-mixed
with their respective volumes
balanced. If there are multiple types of the same instrument, they are recorded in
slightly different positions
,
yet still in their general section area. The different snare drums in Berlin Percussion, for example, have been
recorded slightly spread over the general "snare drum area" within the percussion section. This allows you to
have a very wide and full sound when combining multiple instruments.
We deliberately choose to also record non-traditional instruments as
belonging to a symphonic setup
, like
electric guitars and a drumset in our Metropolis Ark Series. Modern media scoring introduces a host of new
instruments into the established orchestral lineup and we feel these instruments deserve the same
care and
precision
in fitting them into the symphonic sound as their traditional counterparts.
All collections feature a number of
microphone positions
commonly used in orchestral recording. The
position of these microphones is
identical in every collection
, which means that for example the Tree is much
nearer to the string section that it is to the percussion section (because the percussion section is situated at
the back of the orchestra). This enabled
lively acoustics
that come pre-mixed for the respective stage
position. The choice of mic positions also depends greatly on the instrument. Some instruments, especially in
the percussion section, benefit greatly from a M/S position to enable accurately positioning the sound
source.
Wherever possible, similar instruments use the same
mapping scheme
so it is usually possible to transfer
MIDI data from one instrument to another easily. This is especially important and useful for percussion.
