Recently upgraded to Dorico 3.5, as well as took advantage of the sale on Spitfire BBCSO Core. Decided to give it a try and see how well it all works together…
I found a short organ piece that I thought would translate well to strings, and did the work to arrange it.
Went in and tweaked some of the velocities on some of the staccato notes
played a bit with the tempo curve in Play mode
Exported to stems, did some final volume tweaking in the DAW, added some reverb (Altiverb)
Some light compression and EQ in Sound Forge
I’m very impressed. This took about 4-5 hours total (and that was with me learning everything on the fly!)
To be able to get it so close in Dorico made the final tweaks in the DAW very quick and easy… I am so going to enjoy this. Congrats to the Dorico team as well as Spitfire… (this is my first Spitfire purchase, except for one tiny one on StaffPad) I am glad to have BBCSO Core to play around with, and its a neat tool to add to my arsenal!
I saw the sale and was thinking thank God I’ve just spent just about the same amount of money just updating and adding to my VSL libraries and anyway would likely need a new PC, otherwise I might have been tempted…
Instead, I tried the free Discover version which I don’t think will convert many, sad to say.
Still, liked your piece. Many say that this library is better for warmly cinematic music than more classical. Do you find that? Are the articulations on short notes crisp enough?
I’m finding that I’m getting faster and faster in Dorico - putting that with the possibility of wonderful sounds, too… it’s a dream come true. There’s no way I could have done this little demo at this speed in Finale (and I’m a power user since 1994!) not to mention that even with Finale’s “Human Playback” rules, just not possible to the same degree.
The only thing I still need to learn is how to better make the music layouts behave better - I’m used to the way Finale allows you to force the layout the way you want it, and Dorico does it so differently I’m still having to wrap my head around it. I’m so pleased my initial suspicion that it was worth supporting Dorico in the beginning for an eventual better product is coming true. Bravo!
I actually think it might be really good for classical - I’ve not had much time to play with it yet, so it’s hard to say. I did find that I needed to tweak the staccato velocity in the Play window to get the sound I wanted… Dorico sometimes accents a different note than I’d choose.
My thought is that if this turns out to work as well as I hope (and even as it is doing so far) I may eventually spring for the upgrade to the full BBCSO. That will mean a new SSD, too, as I had just enough spare space to install Core. I’ll know more as I use it more (and perhaps I’ll post here as I do).
To clarify my original post a bit - this was a short organ piece by Malling, in looking at it I could see it would be a wonderful test piece for a string arrangement… and so it goes.
Just noticed that you bought the Core rather than full version. It would certainly solve the disk space issue at any rate. No solos, no various mike positions and, horror of horrors, no cor anglais (one of my favourite instruments). Although the woodwinds seem to me somewhat less good than the string and brass sections, on sale this would surely be a good budget library.
I think it is a decent budget lib. The main draw for me was the cohesive sound - I really felt like I could add in the occasional missing instrument pretty easily as well.