Ace Wonder Score Teaser #3 by BenBotkin

NOTE: the music doesn’t have any special connection to this artwork– it just makes the post look a lot more cool.

CineSamples just released their long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated (by me, at least) CineBrass. I payed the very reasonable $399 price tag yesterday and downloaded the 8GB of content which installed easily and runs in Kontakt 4 (4.2.3 required) as smooth as butter. This musical sketch below is the first thing I played around with after loading up some patches, and though it’s still quite sloppy, you can get a sense of the playability and credibility of these brass instruments.

CineBrass Adventure by BenBotkin

The interface is really simple and intuitive–there are many articulations but few patches to hassle with, and of course, it runs in Kontakt which just makes everything nicer. The first-play experience is incredible. The velocity-sensitive key-mapping in the “articulations patches” is brilliant. I’ve long wanted to carry a staccato trumpet or horn line and end the phrase with a marcato note, but having to load another patch and sync the two so it sounds like part of the same performance is always a headache and often a waste of time. In Cinebrass, you can control the length of your staccato articulations by the velocity of your hit, which is awesome.

This is by far the best brass library I have played or heard to date. We’ll see what East West’s Hollywood Brass has to offer when it is released next month, and though it will probably sound great, I somehow doubt that it will match the playability or deadline-friendly conveniency of CineBrass. Maybe I’ll be eating my words in a month, but kudos to the CineSamples team for producing an exceptional product that not only does better what other current libraries do decently, but one that expands the horizon of what is possible with sample technology.

I’m entering the final stages of the scoring process for Ace Wonder: Message From a Dead Man, and thought I’d include a teaser of some of the music I’m working on right now. This clip is from a segment of the film where mysterious turning point meets inquisitive youngster.

Ace Wonder Score Teaser #2 by BenBotkin

Here are a couple screen-shots of a cue in progress. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Workspace #1 - Master View

Most cues in this film use between 10 and 50 tracks, So it’s important for me to keep the main edit view as uncluttered as possible. Believe it or not, this is as “uncluttered as possible.”

Workspace #2 - Instruments View

A word on libraries: Though I have a decent number of instrument libraries I still have only one machine currently running and it’s equipped with a now-paltry 8GB of ram… but I still rarely max it out and I commonly have no more than 4GB of instruments loaded. The key to eliminating unnecessary memory usage is knowing ahead of time what you need to achieve with a cue and how to accomplish it. By the time I’m done with a cue, I rarely have more than one or two patches loaded that I didn’t use, and it’s because every track counts. This should be a composer’s attitude whether he has unlimited computer resources or not, and chances are, he doesn’t. Being limited by your system is the not greatest enemy of creativity… granted, it can be a headache, but it can also be the tutor that forces you to learn economy of notes and clean instrumentation.

In addition to that, if you know your libraries well, you will not only know the difference between a “lite” and “powerful system” patch, but you will know that the “lite” works just as well in most scenarios. By the way, having a good idea of how you’re going to go about the process beforehand speeds up the process significantly– you don’t end up improvising a million things (maybe only a thousand) that you end up sliding to the back of your project, plus there is less clutterage to get lost in.

Back in ‘09 when I was working on The Mysterious Islands I was caught with a cue assignment one morning while on the road a couple hours from home. I didn’t have to drive, so I took those few hours on the journey home to watch the clip over and over and think through my approach in my head–even jotting down a few ideas the old-school way… ON PAPER. I got home at about noon and by midnight I had a 5 minute cue finished and uploading. Obviously, God was merciful to me in that tight situation (and my sisters brought me food), but being restricted by my circumstances from reverting to lazy improvisational habits actually sped up the process a lot.

I will be posting more clips, teasers and announcements about this film, so stay tuned!

Gloria Algelis by BenBotkin