Cinematic Orchestration News

Yesterday I got Unit 4 of my Cinematic Orchestration course completed and packaged off to my tutor, which is a big relief.

Here are links to the submission track and the associated score.

For the score I've started using Notion3 which my wife bought me for xmas... it's really easy to use though it may not have all the features of Sibelius, it's doing fine for what I need to do right now, and it's a fraction of the cost.

I've also upgraded to Cubase 6 which has some of the best tweaks I've seen in the package yet... like in the piano roll editor, you can select a group of notes and then in the controller pane below, you get little drag-handles that allow you to lower or raise the controller value as one group! There are also drag-handles in the corner of the selection box that allow you to ramp-up or ramp-down the controller values, giving you a quick way of adding dynamics. Brilliant IMHO.

Anyway, I await my tutors response...

Cubase 5.01 - Normalisation and Event Volume Handles

I am a long time Cubase user and fan but have hit a problem whilst working on my latest film that has driven me to post in the Cubase.net forum... my first post and it was a whinge!

I have two problems but I think they're related as they're both concerned with volume adjustment... you'll see below.

I'm working on a feature length film on the mix for the dialogue, foley etc so I've been provided with some long audio files.

As I've gone thru chopping up the files to remove useless bits, I thought I'd boost one of the audio events by pulling up on the square blue handle in the audio event in the project window and... BANG. Crashed Cubase and does so consistently in this and every other project I have.

So, as an alternative I tried to normalise the event up a few db (and only a few db) which seemed to work fine. However later on when I re-played that section, the clip I normalised suddenly went off the meters, totally clipping out in absolute distortion.

I've tried all the routine stuff.... re-import audio (plays fine), re-load project, re-boot machine multiple times and this still happens.

Now dear reader, please don't fixate on "normalisation" and whether it should or shouldn't be used, or how I'm using it. I know how to use it and always use it sparingly... I've read a lot of the posts in the Cubase.net forum about it and I agree that it's not a commonly used tool, but I have no course to get a better version of the audio, it's some foley shot on location, and it's the only clip I wanted to boost in volume.

To me this seems like a bug, but not having seen anyone else post anywhere on the net about it (and I've searched lots!!), I'm losing hope that it is a bug... maybe my system is poorly :-(

VST Expression Maps for VSL & VSL+

VSL have released Expression Maps templates for their VSL SE and SE+ editions - and Steinberg are now providing them on their site too.

http://www.steinberg.net/index.php?id=1944&L=1