Intro

Probably the most identifiable songs to people young and old alike are passages composed by either Mozart, Beethoven, or Bach. It’s no wonder as these timeless pieces are used everywhere; in movies, in advertisements, in television shows, in pretty much anything that uses audio as a means to communicate. It’s also amazing how universally accepted classical music is, and how well it can convey emotion and drama in subtle or in palpable ways so effortlessly. And what musician doesn’t desire to move his or her audience with such passion and splendor? Music played by a full orchestra, especially of your own composition, is a dream for countless, but for many, has been unobtainable. It’s been off limits for many reasons, such as the cost factor and energy of writing out a score for a real symphony to play, the knowledge of each instruments’ limitations, or even the cost of realistic sounds in our digital age of music. It wasn’t until Gary Garritan presented us back in September of 2003, something so affordable, so usable, and so accessible by anyone with a computer, a sound card, and a desire to write. Finally, the barriers have been broken with the introduction of Garritan Personal Orchestra.

What’s In The Orchestra Pit

As one would expect with an orchestral sample library, we have a plethora of orchestral instruments at our disposal. We are given violins, violas, cellos, basses, clarinets, flutes, oboes, French horns, trombones, tubas, timpanis, xylophones, and scads more. In addition to our traditional orchestral instruments, we are provided with a full pipe organ, a Steinway piano, and a harpsichord.

Traditionally, sample libraries have required an additional purchase of a sample player to utilize the sounds, but recently, there’s been an influx of libraries bundled with a sample player, and GPO is no different. GPO is packed with Kontakt Player, which does use Native Instruments’ new challenge/response copy protection scheme. Fortunately, I found the registration to be relatively painless, as I was up and registered inside of a few minutes.

Native Instruments has certainly improved the process since I first registered Reaktor 4 over a year ago with everything being taken care of on the web page instead of waiting for an Email. Also, for those of you who own Kontakt 1.5 or higher, you’ll be delighted to know that you will have full access to the sample library to fool around with and manipulate to your hearts content.

Most of us would be contented with just the sample library alone for the price, but Gary has really gone the extra mile to make this open to anyone who hasn’t made any previous musical purchases before. What’s also included is notation software, GenieSoft’s Overture LE, a sequencing/audio application, Cubase LE, which is being replaced by Cubasis for the PC, a custom stand-alone player, GPO Studio, and a nice reverb called Ambience that was customized for GPO. You can, of course, use any standard notation program or sequencer package that you already own, but it’s nice to know that if you have nothing, you can still get started with GPO. GPO does come in standard VSTi, DXi, RTAS, and AudioUnits plugin flavors, so you’re open to use it on pretty much any available sequencer on either the Mac or PC platform.

Also, one of the more notable features of GPO is the GPO Studio. GPO Studio is the first of its breed; basically being a virtual ‘rack’ that allows you to load up 8 instances of Kontakt Player, which in turn gives you access to 64 instruments concurrently. What this offers you is a direct interface to the GPO sample library from your notation software of choice. Those of you who are "notation only" writers will greatly appreciate this feature, as it’s been sorely lacking elsewhere in the market.

Life Of The Conductor

As with any orchestral library, it’s so easy to nitpick over the quality of the samples, but as always, it’s a matter of taste. With over a hundred user demos over on Garritan’s site, it’s pretty easy to figure out for yourself if you like the tonal characteristics of the library itself. Some of the highlights for me were the harpsichord, the pipe organ, and the harp, but the real highlight is the 250 meg Steinway piano. To my surprise, I even found the brass to be particularly good, which, for most libraries, brass has been its Achilles’ heal. Most of the woodwinds are pretty nice, but I found the vibrato flute came out a bit strong and unnatural for my taste. The strings also have a problem that there is no release envelope incorporated, but that problem is being rectified with the next iteration of the Kontakt Player. Right now, the best way I found to work around the deficiency is to use a nice, lush reverb to give you your tails instead for the time being.

What I did find very pleasant was the library was very usable with a little effort. For those of you not familiar with working with large orchestral libraries in the past, you had to learn to work around what was given to you, and that sometimes called for using another sample library completely to achieve the desired effect, if not multiple libraries. What’s distinctive about GPO is how instantly effective it is compared to some other orchestral libraries I’ve worked with.

A lot of the time, you are left sifting through multiple articulations to find the ‘right’ sound, and then once you find the sounds, you then have the issue of jumping back and forth between banks to do simple articulation changes on a passage. GPO, with its configuration of the sustain pedal, key switching, the mod wheel, and velocity, made working easier and faster than other offerings of the past, thanks in part to the Kontakt Player and the delicious programming incorporated into the library. GPO ends the frustration with its available sounds, and grand control over manipulation right at your fingertips. For example, the mod wheel manipulates dynamic control.

Another example is bow control for up and down bowing of strings can be controlled via the sustain pedal. Even some banks offer key switching controls to switch to a few other articulations by playing keys out of the range of the instrument. These features can make for quick work if you demand speed for your composition, and prefer to enter your ideas via a MIDI keyboard.

One of the hardest things to come to grips for a lot of people is just how time consuming writing a fully dynamic orchestral score can be. GPO is quicker, but make no mistake. Good scores are born from blood, sweat and tears, and no library could ever make writing totally effortless. The fact of the matter is you still need to write out each part of the orchestra, but it’s that building that makes your piece flourish and come alive. Because of this aspect, this seemed to be the end of the road in a fit of frustration for many aspiring composers. One of the biggest problems in the past, there was no one to call upon to get hints, suggestions, and advice on how to move beyond the levels of frustration, except maybe your local college course. This is the part where GPO shines brightest is its user community fostered by the developer to make your whole experience with the library an actual experience of joy rather than sheer frustration. The price tag alone of $249 is certainly a lot cheaper than a college course to get you started. Taking a look through the website, you are given access to tutorials, scores you can work with within whatever sequencer you have, and quite a few new tools have been built for the library by other helpful people in the neighborhood. I’ve never seen this sense of ‘community’ like I have with GPO, and that alone is worth the price of admission for anyone who’s new or just like to dabble in writing orchestral music.

Another GPO strength is the size and the speed of loading in the orchestra. Most banks loaded within a few seconds on my 2.53ghz Intel machine, the only notable exception being the large Steinway. Anyone intimately familiar with GigaStudio libraries and are familiar with waiting 10 to 15 minutes, if not more, to load in a template will breathe an immediate sigh of relief when they experience load times with the Kontakt Player. Also, very few libraries can fit a full orchestra into a gig of ram either, but even the memory issue is being alleviated with the inclusion of disk streaming in the next update of the Kontakt Player.

The beautiful and totally unique aspect of GPO is the ensemble builder. Traditionally, sample libraries give you sections of instruments playing the same note in unison. The problem with this is that each time you play a note, you have the same players playing the exact same thing at the same relative volume, the same intonation and in the same position. Say you have a section of French horns, which comprise 3 players. If you do three notes of C E G, you now have 9 horn players playing. If you wanted 2 players to both play C simultaneously and 2 players to play G simultaneously, you couldn't do it, as you were stuck with 3 players for each note, period. GPO gives you the separate individually programmed players (e.g. 8 of them with French horns) to build ensembles of your choosing. So you're not stuck with predetermined unison sections but can play individual parts, divisi parts, or build up sections the way you want them.

Conclusion

Garritan has been a man of firsts with each release. He brought us the first gorgeous harp library for GigaSampler with Gigaharp. He gave us our first multi gigabyte collection of orchestral strings for samplers with GOS. Now, we are presented with the first more affordable all-in-one orchestra that gives even someone with absolutely nothing a place to start. So nice to know that he’s not resting on his laurels either. GOS and GPO have continued to grow and flourish, and in traditional Garritan fashion, the updates have been free to existing customers. I cannot emphasize enough on how wonderful the extended support is out of the box, and while I’ve personally seen the smaller developers go the extra mile to help their customers, Garritan has taken this to a whole new level. That takes a lot of work and dedication to your customer base, and I commend him on his actions to giving the customer a reason to want to buy the library outside the samples alone.

While some of the samples might not float the boat of the most discriminating composer, keep in mind we have many options out there to slowly replace instruments if you so desire. Even the Vienna Symphonic Library is offered at a discount for GPO users if you wish to take the plunge into the single most comprehensive library available, but it’s certainly at a substantial premium. What I found that’s most important to a good number of people is that all the tools are available to you right from the start, and that sounds are merely sounds, and aren’t useful to you if you don’t already have the tools.

So take a gander over at garritan.com for yourself and wander through the hundred audio examples, the tutorials and tools that are available to you as a GPO user. Also, feel free to go over to the Garritan forum over on northernsounds.com and experience the experience GPO has to offer you. The resources without the sounds are more than worthy for the price of admission.

Finally, pick up that baton for the first time, and become the conductor with a bit of confidence that you have many people standing behind you to aide you in your musical journey.

Article brought to you by: Devon Brent.
www: Traxmusic.Org.