Hi everyone,
Recently, my soundtrack for Treasure Trackers—a family-friendly Halloween feature—was released. I had the absolute pleasure of writing a 76-minute classic adventure score for the 90-piece Bratislava Symphony Orchestra. Since the budget was tight, I had to become a one-stop shop for everything, right up to the point where I delivered the PDF files to the orchestra. Dorico was an incredible help throughout the process.
I’d be delighted if you gave the score a listen:
If you prefer better audio quality, it’s also available wherever you stream music:
As I’ve received quite a few messages asking if the sheet music was available for study, I also made it available for download and this being a Dorico Forum, I can imagine that there might be some people interested in it as well:
Robin, your music is truly astounding! Tell me, did you create it in a DAW first, or did you compose directly into Dorico? Also, which libraries do you use in Dorico (Noteperformer, NPPE, VSL, BBCSO, etc.)?
Wow!! @RobinHoffmann, amazing Project, Music, Score and Performance!!! And so generous from you to share it all with us!!! Thank you and congratulations!
Wow, thank you all so much for your kind words! I really appreciate them!
I worked straight into Dorico full score. I use Noteperformer and NPPE, though at the time of writing that score, there was no NPPE version of Noteperformer released yet. Fortunately, the mutual trust between the directors and myself was big enough that they would be happy signing off on NP demos. If I would have needed to create HQ mockups first, it wouldn’t have been possible in that time frame.
Thank you so much! Yes, I am very happy with how the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra played it and how the recording turned out!
Did Noteperformer show a convincing representation of the orchestral sound when compared to the final result? Especially in terms of shaping the overall loudness balance?
In the score, you were rather cautious with playing instructions for dynamics. I always need a lot more instructions with NP to achieve an acceptable experience. So did you hide many such markings in the final score? I see a lot of hairpins that “go nowhere” without being followed by specific dynamic indications.
I’d say NP does a relatively solid job. There are imbalances that you need to know about so completely relying on it is not a great idea. But it gives you a relatively solid base line. You can see yourself, here’s the NP base sound rendition of 1M1:
I think the weakest point in NP is the balancing of non pitched percussion which are always way too soft (or others too loud)
I clearly wrote the score for performance and not for playback. The directors are fortunately musically educated enough to abstract from even relatively crappy demos. There are a few hidden dynamics indeed, but my main goal was/is to always write as readable as possible which means to avoid cluttering the page and also avoid micro managing as if musicians are stupid. So for instance if dynamic shapes keep repeating, I reduce the written information to the bare minimum as everybody will get that the shape is repeating.
