Nutcracker, Garritan, and Sonar!

http://www.garritan.com/Nutcracker.html

I'm the one who did the Nutcracker at the above site.  It took about a year to sequence the ballet which is about 90 minutes of music.  It's using just the samples in the Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO) plus the ProjectSAM brass that is now included in GPO4.

The Los Angeles Ballet used my sequences triggering GPO along with 29 live musicians a few years ago.  The pit wasn't big enough to hold more real musicians.  The sequences filled in the string sections as well as playing the 2nd & 3rd parts for the woodwinds and brass.  GPO also supplied half of the percussion instruments. 

Jim

Jim:
That is beautiful. Sure puts to shame the version of Nutcracker I put together for last Christmas - took me a year of on and off work. Bummer is all I had available as music were the major pieces (Overture, March, the various Dances, etc.) but none of the other music (like trimming the tree, kids gallop, etc.). Could you post the source of the score you worked from? If I understand the website linked to it's something like 500+ pages.

The score I used is the Kalmus edition which comes in 2 parts.  It's quite pricey!

I played all the parts in using my Roland XP-30 keyboard starting from the Basses and working up the score to the flute/piccolo parts.  Volume (crescendos, diminuendos, etc.) is controlled by Modulation (CC1) which I have programmed to a fader on the XP-30.  Legato mode is triggered by sustain pedal.  All editing is performed in the PRV.  The piece used the original version of GPO in Kontakt which was upgraded in the middle of the recordings to the Kontakt 2 version.   I had to slow down some parts such as the harp.  I played all harp glisses in by hand which is really time consuming.  

I submix each section (Strings, Percussion, Brass, Woodwinds) to make it easier to balance the sections.  I use different amounts of reverb on each section.  Strings have less reverb as the sit by the front of the stage.  More reverb on woodwinds and brass.  The percussion usually has the most.  The reverb is the Lexicon Pantheon reverb included with Sonar which was matched to a recording of a real orchestra.

Tempo changes are the most time consuming part and can take half as long as recording the parts!  I usually import an audio recording of a live orchestra playing it and work the tempo changes against it.  Most orchestras don't play more than one bar at the same tempo.  I shut off the grid and use the line drawing tool.   Some measures have constant tempo changes going on especially for rubato playing.  The tempo maps for each piece have thousands of events.  One of the toughest time signatures is 3/4 time.  There is a constant push/pull going on.  The tempo maps had to be redone for the LA Ballet as they were practicing with a different recording.  So I ended doing a big chunk of these for the live performances.  We had a couple other people doing the rest because of time restraints.  The Russian Dance was slowed down quite a bit because the Russian Dancer was jumping so high that he needed more time.  This guy was amazing.

Live performance was quite tricky.  The whole orchestra was wearing headphones so they could hear the click track and the recorded parts.  The conductor was used to working with click tracks as she has conducted quite a few movie scoring sessions.  Most of the musicians in the orchestra were top LA studio musicians.  This really helped with working with a click.  These are the people who can sightread this kind of music and play it perfectly the first time!  There were only a few hiccups during the shows which was amazing when you think about the amount of tempo changes.  One was with the beginning of the Pas De Deux which starts with 2 harps playing.  We only had one live harp and the other one was recorded.  The live harpist started just a tad late the one show and it took a few measures to fall back into sync.

BTW, this recorded way before GPO4 was out!  Many of the recordings go back to right after GPO was first released.  The PC used was a Pentium 4 with 2 GB of RAM.

I've been a Cakewalk user since Version 1.0 for Windows and have continued to use the Cakewalks products over the years.  So that's why I still use Sonar.
 
Jim

Jim,

Excellent piece of work. I hope you were well compensated for the amount of work you did.

I normally start with the tempo markings from the score without using rit. or accel.  This makes it easier to slow down difficult passages that are hard to play on keyboard.   I usually import the audio when first starting the project which helps with planning things such as string slides, articulations, etc.  The audio is muted though while recording parts.  When I'm ready to do the tempo changes, I solo the audio track and turn on the metronome during playback.  I listen to the audio track for the feel and where it speeds up and slows down usually a few measures at a time.  The audio is then stopped and the tempo changes are drawn in.  Usually I'll start with the basic tempo for the measure and then draw in the little changes.  The tempo changes can actually change for every 32nd note played in some passages especially for harp parts.  I have to be very patient with the tempo map.  The tempo map can either make or break a piece.  

I'm much faster doing tempo maps now than years ago.  I can now hear most of them and draw them right the first time.  So it's one of those things that just takes a ton of practice.

Jim 

I haven't tried the AudioSnap feature for this but it may not work well.  Orchestral music doesn't always have strong transients like rock or other types of music.  Also, finding basic tempos isn't that hard.  It's the stuff within the beats such as speeding up notes in arpeggios in the middle but hanging on the last note before the next beat. 

Jim

There's a new feature in the latest version of Sibelius that allows you to conduct the tempo in real time using the space bar.   Maybe that could be the place to do that part of the work? 

A1MixMan


From the website "and the amazing Nutcracker sequences that had been painstakingly programmed by James Ortner, who had spent over three years inputting the bulk of the score using the GPO software and Cakewalk’s Sonar sequencing program"
 
 
Wow, I guess the staff view really does suck in Sonar!
 

Nowhere in that stement does it indicate he actually used the staff view in SONAR...

There are no real players in this mockup using GPO so there is no covering up. 

Another ballet company up in the northwest used the GPO mockups for their ballet.  It was cheaper than paying the royalty fees for the audio recordings plus we were able to change the tempos for their performance.

GPO was used to show what a small orchestra library can do without the costs of purchasing the larger libraries.  I think that the Nutcracker proves the point that you don't have to have the huge libraries to get decent results.  What you hear in the recordings cost $149 for the library and ARIA player.  You can't beat that for the money. 

I do use many of the larger libraries for my other work such as Vienna, ProjectSAM, Kirk Hunter, Sample Modeling and a few others.  Even in my large templates, there is still quite a bit of GPO instruments.  The woodwinds blend quite well with other libraries.  I also use the Garritan Authorized Steinway quite a bit.

The best thing about the Garritan libraries is how well they work with notation programs.  I've been using the Concert and Marching Band library in Finale for doing marching band arrangements.  

I use the piano roll view for all MIDI editing.  It's what I started with many years ago.   I do use the staff view for recording live instruments and vocals.  

Jim 

Thanks, Eric.

I'm still blown away what the great composers would do with just pen and paper.  I like to do mockups for relaxation just to study what they did. 

Jim

I'm still blown away what the great composers would do with just pen and paper

haydn12

And they didn't have all the "distractions" we have today....like forums, etc


I sometimes wonder what these composers would have done if they had all the tools we had today.  Would they have been more productive?

Doing the tempo map takes patience!
 
What I do is solo the audio track that is the tempo reference.  Then turn on Metronome for playback.    I find the basic tempo and line up the first beat.  I let a few measure play to see how steady the tempo is.  I use the line drawing tool in the PRV view for drawing in changes with Snap to Grid turned off.   At this point start drawing the tempo changes.  Sometimes you can use an accelerando for gradual speeding up.  Sometimes you may have to go quite a few measures forward to see how the tempo is drifting. 
 
I find drummers have a tendency to change tempo around fills.  Usually they rush during the fills.
 
The more you work doing tempo maps, the faster you will get.  I'm pretty quick and hearing the little fluctuations.  Rock music is easier to map versus classical where the musicians make many changes within a beat.
 
Jim

When I need to snap the timeline to an audio track for transcription, I generally use SONAR's Set Measure/Beat At Now (Shift+M in X3) - very precise and ultimately about as quick as any method available. I use a combination of listening and tabbing to transients with visual confirmation that the transient marker is correctly located to ensure I'm setting the right timeline beat to the right audio event.