To those saying Garritan trumpets sound fake

[Kyle McHattie]

And just as a general side note. The initial post here at the forums claims that I said the trumpets sound fake. If you actually read my comment, that is not what I said. What I said is that the screaming trumpet doesn't sound like this and that it must have taken hours to get it to sound this way, which you have all confirmed.

[Credo]

Kyle,

No problem here. Your opinions and experiences are just as valid as anyone's and they deserve respect. No disrespect is intended by my remarks...so apologies if they sometimes come across that way. I honestly don't care about your comment on sound-cloud. I just hope to help people understand the instrument's nature (for better or worse), and get their money's worth out of it if they do own it or are leaning towards trying it.

Many posts ago, I just expressed to the OP that I disagree about the origins of the Demo track not being possible (or coming from a real player instead). It wasn't even perfectly clear to me which library was being discussed at the time. For all I knew...someone out there might have been trying to get those sounds with GPO4 or COMB libraries! Now THAT would be quite difficult (but still not entirely impossible)!

The way the demo track was posted on soundcloud (at least in my browser) didn't clearly say 'JABB3'. I just noticed the phrase, "Garritan Trumpets", and gathered with my own ears that the demo features JABB3, because it sounds EXACTLY like it to me. The lack in clarity over it all is why I went to all the trouble to listen to the demo, then draft out a long winded overview of the different Garritan libraries' brass offerings (COMB, GPO4, JABB3, IO) and give OP 'my opinion' of them after some extended use over the years.

As it turns out, I'd used several of the libraries over the years at work, and later got the Ultimate Collection personally, all at once, to use at home primarily with a tracking DAW, driven by a keyboard....JABB3 was just gravy in a box of bread and butter tools for me, so it's pretty evident that we both had different motives/expectations for sinking hard earned cash into the product, so your frustration is indeed appreciated.

In response to YOUR post....I have no motive in you changing any reviews or remarks here or elsewhere on the web. PR and reputation for the Garritan brand isn't my problem at all. The success of musicians enjoying international collaboration on music making is important to me however. I mainly wanted to perhaps remind you how tools a Master finds easy and fast today, were once new to him and took time and practice to master....not to be a jerk, but in the spirit of encouragement...then attempt to answer the call about making this dry sample set sound more realistic. We'll need to get 'specific' to really start making progress with fewer assumptions, hurt feelings, and possibly misspent words....but the long blathering posts on my part were/are merely meant to get mental gears grinding on how the sample set was designed to be manipulated in order to get those jazzy articulations and tones out of otherwise dull and dry samples. In many ways the very characteristics making JABB3 come across as harder to use, actually balance out with a lot of long range 'mixing' benefits for a wide variety of situations and music styles (perhaps not with a wind jammer....can't speak for that at this time since I've not personally tried it yet).

To be honest, I'm also selfish in that I find that the attempted efforts to help others in forums like this, and face to face, provides a little extra drive for me to learn new things and get better myself. Perhaps it's faulty logic on my part, but it's the way I'm wired. People often ask questions I never thought to ask myself...and in the drive to seek and offer technical solutions, I often come up with more simple musical inspiration for my own music.

I remember thinking something very similar to your JABB3 comments back when I got a Fantom XR and a hand full of pricey SRX expansion boards. Roland wouldn't let people post comments under the demo back then, or I'd probably have posted something very similar to what you said on SoundCloud. So my frustration was more aimed at my local music store. I felt pretty ripped off by some of the SRX boards and even tried to return one (they wouldn't take it back once it had been installed without a serious restocking fee that I didn't have at the time).

Irony...due to the opposite problem (the default patches were too phat, warm, wet, and saturated) I couldn't get them to sound anything like the demos using the default patches that came on the stuff! In time, I experienced that ureka moment of discovering all the CC messages and real time control possible to each individual tone generator and its multitudes of band pass filters and so forth...it ended up being a great synth/sampler...and even the wave tables in the SRX boards ended up being worth every penny for my needs. The SRX board I had tried to return ended up being my favorite, and still fetches more than its original retail value on the streets. Ironically....live wind jammer users are among the highest bidders trying to get their hands on these old Fantom bits.

I hope you'll stick around the forum and feel more than welcome...I'll try to get some JABB3 trumpet tracks up in the near future for study and discussion. Doing a good arrangement does take time....even if you're just making it on paper for live musicians to play and don't care much about a 'mock up'. There are quite a lot of things you can do in respect to this library that don't have to take a whole lot of 'extra time'. Once you get to know the instrument...you'll do 95% of it while you're arranging anyway.

There might be some other tools from Plogue (Bidule) that might be able to make JABB3 a more feasible 'live performance' instrument with wind controllers. I've not tried them yet, but...I've got an AKAI wind controller with some ARIA based instruments on the way as well (it's been years since I've messed with one). That investment is pushing me towards investing in Bidule as well. Perhaps we can swap notes on wind controllers with ARIA as well.

I could be very wrong, but I suspect that using a wind controller to maximum benefit with JABB3 might require a little SFZ tweaking to really tune it up for a wind controller. I'm looking forward to seeing how SFZ patches are put together for that wind jammer. I definitely recall it being something of a treat to see how patches were built for wind jammers on the XR...learned some stuff I still use to this day...even for keyboarding and sequencing

Credo

[martygras]

As an EWI player this has been a very enlightening thread. I have learned quite a bit about how to use the midi cc's to work the, "acoustic stage", if you will.

Thank you all for your perspectives. I am still in love with the Garritan libraries I have had for several years, and it keeps getting better.

[Bastard]

This thread is of interest to me. I think with sampled brass it's about the articulations (which cost additional midi tracks sometimes) and about the voicings. If you think five part close harmony and cluster the voices inside an octave. Or drop the 2nd and 4th highest parts down an octave - swapping the ninth of the chord and the tonic if the ninth falls below the tonic after spread). This removes the problem of a section sounding thin. Also consider using the top voice as a trumpet, the second as a saxophone, third as trumpet, fourth as horn, fifth as trom. You get a thicker sound by the overtones and harmonics being different. Also by voicing in fourths You avoid intersection of overtones in the section = thicker sound.

[Big Push]

Just read Credo's very thorough post. Didn't exactly use any of his comments but he did inspire me to just go back and explore the Score Manager and the different sounds in JABB3.

I've been using Finale for a looong time...loaded my first version on a Mac SE30... and trying to get good playback to give people an idea of what the piece will actually sound like. Been through a lot of grief and I think actually picked up some habits that are not relevant with newer versions.

Did playback for years with MIDI and an Ensoniq MR-76. I know some of the people who did the original samples for Ensoniq and they were actually pretty good. Not colored and you could adjust the reverb on individual sounds. For a long time that was better than anything I could get out of Finale or the early Garritan sounds. Big band brass players play with much more air and thus their sounds have a lot more overtones than classical players.

Then I got the first Jazz and Big Band and things got a lot better. But I ran into this issue where a particular patch would only play one note at a time...I was used to assigning several parts to a single patch on the Ensoniq. So when I assigned 4 trumpet parts, I assumed each one had to go to a different patch. Just figured out...duh...that the patches are just different sounds and you can assign the same sound/Patch to many different parts.

I have been soooo used to thinking of Trumpet 1....Trumpet 4 as different parts, that somehow I assumed they were supposed to be assigned to Trpt 1 KS...Trpt 4 KS. Nope...you want a punchy, bright trumpet section, assign ALL the section parts to Trpt 1 KS. Whew...took a while.

I also record real horns and I KNOW the importance of the right mic, a good preamp...this is not well understood I think, a lot of people use crappy mic pre's and the horns sound thin...and, a good room. When I was recording my small 6 horn big band, the Big Push in my handle, I searched all over for a good horn sound. Finally found an engineer who just knew how to make them sound natural...been there ever since and it's sneaking up on 20 years. We ALWAYS use a stereo pair of room mics in addition to individual mics for each horn.

Also, the quality of the reverb cannot be underestimated. Used Digital Performer for years...because I had MOTU hardware. Just...a year and a half ago...bought Pro Tools and the basic reverb in Pro Tools, d-verb, is just soooo good that it makes a world of difference. Haven't figured out how to plug it into the Aria player yet but when I get some time I will.

Now that we're talking about audio recording...as I was trying to get a decent rhythm mix on a BB piece I'm working on, I just realized how much i miss channel EQ in Finale. It would go a long way toward getting a good playback sound. There is a nice guitar part I want to include but the low frequencies muddy up the sound so that your only option is to put it way down in the mix.

...hey, just figured out I can do Channel EQ in the aria player. Like I said: Duh!. But was really able to fatten up the trombones. Cheeez...

Anyway... Got arrangements to do including...this is so fun...5 string orchestra arrangements for a very good ensemble doing a tribute to Prince.

[Credo]

Just read Credo's very thorough post. Didn't exactly use any of his comments but he did inspire me to just go back and explore the Score Manager and the different sounds in JABB3.

...

Now that we're talking about audio recording...as I was trying to get a decent rhythm mix on a BB piece I'm working on, I just realized how much i miss channel EQ in Finale. It would go a long way toward getting a good playback sound. There is a nice guitar part I want to include but the low frequencies muddy up the sound so that your only option is to put it way down in the mix.

...

I've recently started spending a bunch more time in Finale.

One way to really fatten up the sound of JABB3 is to grab the free ReaPlugs package and use EQ and Compression. Don't forget to get the 32bit version.

Just a little comparison of rendering one of the Finale Demo tunes with and without compression. These are wav file renderings directly from Finale 2015.5.6359, and converted to mp3 using Nero's lame encoder.

This take is how it sounds out of the box using the default Finale sounds. Only thing I did was set Studio for Convolution and Parlor for Ambient reverbs.
Rasmussen Take 1

For this one I split ARIA into 5 instances.
1. Saxes
2. Brass
3. Guitar and Piano
4. Bass
5. Drums

I did not 'remix' anything...I left everything just like in the demo but added some compression....

I gave all the instances the same reverb presets, but I tweaked the ambient reverbs a bit for each instance to better suit the instrument family.

I threw Multi-band compression (from the ReaPlugs set) on each instance and tweaked each section in an attempt to bring out the parts better.

In the Master Effects I added one more instance of that same Multi Band Compressor to give it a little more polish, and ended up with this.
Rasmussen Take 2

It took about 5 minutes....Not as good as it 'could be' with a little more time and care, but it should suffice to show what a difference some compression can make.

Just out of curiosity, is there a way to boost the bass voices using ReaPlugs?

Yes, you can boost the bass by simply loading an EQ in the Master series of effects and pulling up the bass frequencies. Better yet, roll off the high frequencies and then bring up the master volume.

You can also compress everything else to a similar db range as the bass, then bring up everything together as high as possible until you get clipping...then back off so it doesn't clip anymore. Compression is a cheap and easy trick to get the 'loud mixes' people are used to hearing these days. Loud mixes are gaining popularity because modern speakers are often smaller and less dynamic these days (trade off for portability, lower energy consumption/longer battery life, and lower manufacturing costs). One very different thing about music coming from loud-speakers vs a real acoustical symphony...is that your run of the mill consumer grade speakers just can't do it all...so we've got to use an assortment of psycho-acoustic mind-tricks to fool people into 'thinking' many of the missing frequencies and dynamics are really there...despite the limitations of our technology.

Your first few renderings with stuff that is new to you are going to take a little time and practice. I'm afraid there's not much way around this; however, once you get a feel for what EQ and compression can do, and how, it does become a fairly quick process. Think of it as learning a new lick or scale on your major instrument. At first you'll have to put a little time and effort into it...but once you've got it mastered it's a nearly effortless second nature process to 'make it happen'.

Start out with ReaEQ in the top Master effects slot. Play with that a bit. It's super simple, as it starts out as a basic parabolic Equalizer with a low shelf, two mid bands, and a high shelf by default, but you can add as many extra frequency bands and/or notches (narrow band filters) as you like.



When using shelves and bands, the EQ uses curves to shape the db levels of given frequency ranges. This is quite a flexible EQ though, so you can also make it work more like a graphics equalizer by changing the node types.

When you first load ReaEQ it has 'flat' settings, and you will not notice any change in the sound at all. To boost or reduce a frequency range you simply grab the dots on the graph (click, hold, and drag).

For learning a bit about ReaXcomp, I'd recommend limiting that one to percussion at first. I.E. Load something with a trap drum part that has bass drum, snare, and some overhead grooves going on (I.E. some of the jazz demo charts that come with Finale). Give this drum set his every own ARIA instance on a bank all his own, and load the ReaXcomp plugin in the VSTi instance slot. Solo the trap set on the mixer and start the groove playing. Play around with the settings in ReaXcomp to get an idea of how it can be used to isolate and compress bands of frequencies by 'frequency range'.



Naturally, you can get a much better mix if you take hours to sit there and play with the volume levels of every instrument, take extra care in panning everything out to a realistic settings, go into the synth itself and polish off the individual instrument sounds themselves, and insert tons of MIDI Controller events into the score to get everything 'just right' in terms of master volume for every voice in every phrase, and the list goes on. It would take many hours to get a well polished Mix out of Finale this way.

This is WHY it's worth it to spend a little time playing with EQ and Compression plugins. Once you master some basics, it really will add some polish to your renderings that you've never had before, while saving you scads of time in the future roughing in decent mixes in 'a hurry'. If you aren't much interested in pulling your composition into a DAW (where getting a polished mix is much easier) you can just throw in some of these plugins and get a quick and rough mix where one can at least 'hear all the parts' come through the mix.

The ReaPlugs save me a ton of time when it comes to using Finale and Sibelius for educational purposes. Most of my students are going to be playing things back on cheap lap-top speakers, ear-buds, or even over smart phone phone speakers, so I'll usually take a couple of minutes to EQ and compress everything so the students using these sorts of playback systems can hear what I intend them to hear.

Here are a couple of primers worth reading if the concepts of Equalization and Compression are fresh on your mind.

How to Use a Parametric Equalizer

How to Use Multi-band Compression in Mixing and Mastering

This chart showing the frequency bands of common instruments can certainly come in handy as well.

All the EQ Information You’ll Ever Need in One Handy Chart

[BenJH]

Credo:
You Rock! I have been struggling with this for several weeks. Don't understand why they don't simply include your explanation and examples in the basic training.

[mdiemer]

I don't come here often, but here's my two cents:

I have GPO 5, EWSO Gold, Vienna Sp. Ed. 1, plus I use the Dimension Pro synth, which I have from Sonar (although I'm actually using Reaper now). Like many, I struggle to get decent trumpet sound.

Now, those of you who know about Dim Pro know that it came bundled with Garritan Pocket Orchestra. It also has some of those sounds sprinkled throughout the synth. In the expansion pack, there is flute-in-the-venue, as well as oboe, clarinet and bassoon (no Eng Horn, unfortunately, but Vienna has a good one). I'm pretty sure those sounds are GPO, but they are sonically treated and sound better than the originals. Similarly, the Garritan Pocket instruments sound better. They are more up front, louder, and you can easily modify their sound.

Under the Brass section (not in the pocket orch), there is a trumpet which again i'm pretty sure is Garritan, and it sounds remarkably good, and that is my go-to trumpet. It usually sounds better than any others I have. It's bright, clear and strong, very suited to melodic lines. The trombone there is also good. No Fr Horn, but the Pocket Orch one similarly is very good.

In general, the Garritan sounds in Dimension Pro are wonderfully enhanced, compared to the originals. I use them a lot. I just wanted to pass along this info to anyone who has Dimension Pro. Take another look, you won't be disappointed.