So, let’s talk a little about my first (and still only) symphony. First attempts I’ve found on my harddisk are from September 2001. Cubase VST 5 dot something, I suppose. And of course no money for a multi-gigabyte sample library. Instead, I bought the cheapest thing I could afford: a WAV-audio version of Peter Siedlaczek’s Advanced Orchestra and put it into a freeware sampler. Note for note had to be mapped, trimmed and looped. Whoa, took some time to prepare. However, the Siedlaczek Orchestra does not sound bad at all, I like the sound texture of it very much, especially the woodwinds. I think, this is still one of the really beautyful library recordings. Great work and many thanks to Peter Siedlaczek. Still, I could not compose with it. It simply took to much resources off my 199x-dated PC. So I developed a second sampler setup with all (several hundred) wave-files reduced to mono and a lower resolution. Only after everything was composed and finished, I took the „big“ library version for final rendering. The version was released 2002. Ah, and there’s still some choir voices in this version. Enjoy the 320 kbit/s rendering (this is something like a „historic shellack recording“…):
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste-v2002.mp3
After this, I decided to move on to a real orchestra library. Here comes Gary Garritan. Finally, something already taylored and programmed into the NI Kontakt player, which was simply amazing for me! Garritan’s Personal Orchestra was something like a revolution at that time and it encouraged many talented musicians to produce orchestral scores. So I began to move the symphony to that new library, adjusted controls (which worked in a different way now) and rewrote some parts of the score. The choir disappeared in this version. I released my new „Symphony No 1“ in 2004. Here are the 128 kbit renderings:
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste-satz1-128kbit.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste-satz2-128kbit.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste-satz3-128kbit.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste-satz4-128kbit.mp3
Still not satisfied after this, I changed my library again to East West Symphony Orchestra Gold Pro XP (what a pompous name…), which is a really marvellous instrument. Since I changed to Kontakt, this was a great tool for me. Sound is terrific, many articulations, easy usage. Again, I had rewritten some bars and changed some minor parts of the arrangement when I released this version of my symphony four years later in 2008.
Top favourite in download statistics is the fourth movement which has still 300-400 completed downloads each month (which is quite nice for a 21st century orchestral piece, isn’t it?) The second movement is next “in statistics” and this is a very emotional piece, beginning with calm and quiet strings – with continously building up tension.
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste_satz_1.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste_satz_2.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste_satz_3.mp3
http://www.andreaskrebs.de/assets/media/erste_satz_4.mp3
Enjoy,
Andreas
Ein Gedanke zu „First Symphony (everything you probably never wanted to know about…)“