Over the Covid-19 Lockdown, while work had slowed a bit, I decided to invest in a huge orchestral upgrade so my compositions have even more punch and sizzle. After much pondering I went with The EastWest Hollywood Orchestra + Hollywood Solo Violin, Hollywood Solo Cello and Hollywood Solo Harp. It is AWESOME! Such beautiful sounds beautifully recorded and articulated. Very happy.
While playing around with the cool sounds I came across a Logic template that John Powell uses for film scores. It is crazy big. More than 350 instruments!!! Insane.
So I decided to completely revamp my own generic orchestral template using the awesome new Hollywood Orchestra samples. My previous one was a humble 25 or so instruments, so it was time to try something bigger. The result is not nearly as many instruments as John Powell's, after all mine is only 102 instruments, but it covers all the bases. The only downside to having a moderately big template with high quality samples is the loading time. It takes 12mins to load the empty template - and my computer is a pretty grunty machine. I'd hate to see how long John's template takes to load.
I've organised it in a standard orchestral layout: piano, 1st violins, 2ns violins, viola, celli, contra bass, woodwind, brass, unpitched percussion, pitched percussion, synths. So far I find it easy to use and all the core instruments are ready to go, which is the whole point of a template. If I do need something more specialised I just create a new track.
