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®
JANUARY 2009
VOL. TWENTY TWO
NUMBER FOUR
JANUARY 2009
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BY GARY ESKOW
Early last year Fable Sounds released a new virtual instrument called Broadway Big Band, distributed exclusively by
the Massachusetts-based developer of sample libraries,
SONiVOX. Based on the quality of the pre-release demos circulating on the internet, this widely anticipated title—the
brainchild of Yuval Shrem and Amit Itzkovich, founders of
Fable Sounds (www.fablesounds.com)—had attracted lots of
attention, particularly among musicians anxious to acquire
horn samples that can help them shape pop, Latin, and bigband lines comparable to those crafted by composers who
emulate orchestral performances.
BBB offers a vast number of articulations in nearly 100 GB
of sample data, including drums, acoustic bass and other
instruments that supplement the horns which are the
library’s centerpiece. It employs a radical method of placing
them under the fingers of the player, and—most importantly—they can create a vibrant character of performances.
A new way to work with horn
articulations yields incredible results
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RECORDING JANUARY 2009
The sampling sessions
The method that was used to record this library is uniquely interesting. After carefully researching recording studios
in the New York area, Fable Sounds selected three studios to
record in. Though he will not reveal which studios were used,
Yuval Shrem says that one of his main goals was to record
the musicians with multiple microphone setups in rooms
large enough to reveal the spatial distinctions that he was
trying to provide to the user.
“The concept, both from the recording and performance
standpoint, was to try and produce samples that will not
sound like samples but will rather accurately reproduce the
sound you’ll get in a high-end studio with live musicians. We
didn’t try to come up with fancy tricks to make the sound bigger and more impressive than what is natural, but rather we
went for typical recording techniques with standard and
familiar sounding results. I wanted to avoid the impressive
yet often unusable sound that is so typical to commercial
sample libraries. We recorded the Broadway Big Band’s
instruments with multiple microphone setups, using a variety
of microphones, preamplifiers and recording techniques.”
The idea is simple: if you’re trying to recreate the
Stax/Volt sound of the mid-1960s you’ll use a different microphone array and placement scheme than you would if your
goal is to achieve the sound of a contemporary smooth jazz
recording. This thinking led Fable Sound to record all of the
saxophones and clarinets with at least four mic setups.
“To achieve the ‘Close Mic’ sound we used a Neumann
M149 in combination with a Focusrite Blue pre-amp,” says
Shrem. “We also used the Focusrite Blue in conjunction with
an AKG C414 to capture the ‘Tight Mic’ sound. Some of the
longer mics used Tube-Tech pre-amps. We also added a plain
SM58 to some of the instruments as a ‘PA mic’ and ribbon
mics for the brass.”
“As all wind instruments were recorded in a large live room
with very high ceilings, we were able to acoustically manipulate the microphone setups to simulate various different
Excerpted from the January edition of Recording Magazine 2009.
©2008 Music Maker Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
5408 Idylwild Trail, Boulder, CO 80301 Tel: (303) 516-9118 Fax: (303) 516-9119
For Subscription Information, call: 1-800-582-8326 or www.recordingmag.com
REC 01-09 final: REC mag 04/05
11/26/08
acoustical spaces, by a careful placement of both the microphones and the
acoustical gobos, as well as the placement of the instrument players in the
room, practically ‘hiding’ the room
from some for the microphones and
acoustically bypassing the gobos for
others. This way we were able to
achieve everything from a super-dry
sound for our ‘mic-2’ setups and all
the way to a huge room sound for our
‘mic-4’ setups.”
Testing
Integrating BBB into your workflow
requires a bit of adjustment, but the
logic that supports the environment,
and the beauty of the results, make
the time investment worthwhile. BBB
is addressed by initially loading the
Broadway Performer, an application
that interfaces first with your keyboard controller and then with virtual MIDI ports (Maple Midi on a PC,
Broadway Performer ports on the
Mac).
Next up: your sequencer. I tested
this software on a 2 GHz dual Opteron
PC that was built for me by ADK Pro
Audio, running Cubase 4. The method
you use will vary somewhat based on
the platform and sequencer you use,
but at this time it seems that most
users will follow a procedure similar
to the one that proved effective on my
system: running BBB in the new
Hybrid Rewire mode.
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The importance of this advancement is hard to overstate. Although
BBB contains some polyphonic patches (primarily for live use and unison
stacking), this is essentially a legato
library, with each instrument to be
performed separately. If you have a
three-horn section, it’s easy to have
all of them release at slightly different points in a sustain, rather than at
identical times set by samples that
include both the sustain and fall.
Recording sample libraries is part
science and part art. While attempting
to create collections intended for
broad use, many developers often
squeeze the life out of the performances they capture. In a manner that
is almost revolutionary, Fable Sounds
has produced the most thoroughly
playable set of pop horn samples ever
brought to market. Call up Trumpet
Legato 1 and play Hello Dolly, or noodle your way through Harlem Nocturne
with the Alto Sax Legato Mic 1 on your
virtual lips, and you’ll see what I
mean. But if you really want to be convinced that BBB is in a league of its
own, whip out the Bb clarinet and play
Aveinu Shalom Aleichem in C minor—
up the octave second time around,
with a few more smears than are tasteful. Aunt Frieda will freak! In my opinion the name “Broadway Big Band” is
somewhat unfortunate, given that the
product can be used to create performances in styles that go well beyond
the boundaries of Guys and Dolls or
Sunday In The Park With George.
At its steep price, those who pine
for Broadway Big Band may ultimately ask for more modestly priced subsets, particularly ones that feature
only the winds and brass that are its
shining stars. Nonetheless, BBB as
currently constituted is a remarkable
accomplishment. In a cluttered field,
this library has raised the bar and
immediately takes its place as a standard against which future products of
its kind will be measured.
After loading the Broadway
Performer, I opened up a blank
Cubase 4 session, and then instantiated the modified Steinberg HALion
player—a component that becomes
yours when you purchase BBB. The
sample sets themselves are loaded
into the BBB HALion Player. The
Performer, when dialed into the same
sample set (“Trumpet Legato 1,” for
example) lets you visually monitor
the articulations as you activate them
with a series of special key switches.
Normally a cut and dry procedure,
the key-switching scheme in BBB is
extremely intelligent and well
designed, and it offers a level of
expressive possibility that no other
library in its category comes close to.
In brief, most of the horns load with
legato mode as the default (all
playable intervals up to a 9th were
recorded) and with many repetitions
available across multiple velocity layers. As is normally the case, striking
notes on your controller that lie outside an instrument’s playable range
selects different articulations, but
Price: $2495 (street)
there are some twists. You can, for
example, use “modifier” keys that let
More from: Fable Sounds,
you change the direction and speed of
www.fablesounds.com, dist. by
SONiVOX, www.sonivoxmi.com.
a fall. Even more impressively, many
of the library’s articulations can be
invoked while a note is being held,
allowing you to sustain a trumpet for
Gary Eskow would like to thank
as long as you like until you release it Yuval Shrem at Fable Sounds for the
with a fall, for example.
conversations quoted in this review.
Excerpted from the January edition of Recording Magazine 2009.
©2008 Music Maker Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
5408 Idylwild Trail, Boulder, CO 80301 Tel: (303) 516-9118 Fax: (303) 516-9119
For Subscription Information, call: 1-800-582-8326 or www.recordingmag.com
RECORDING JANUARY 2009
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