The Orchestral Factory

First things first: Synfire 2 is great. I love the combination of Factories and arranging its output as snippets, that can be individually fired – that’s really fun  :-)

And yes, many of the „Line“ and „Phrase“ Factories also work great for orchestral music (classical and film). But there are some things missing for a real „Orchestral Factory“.

Honestly – I am just at the beginning of exploring all the new features – along with those that were already there and should not be forgotten.

So maybe some features are already there and I have not found them yet. But I want to share my experiences...

For use with Synfire I like to use „marc sus“ articulations, Therefor I combine marcato articulation with a „sustain“ articulation and balance their volumes in a preset, so that the combi works for short notes like „Marcato“ and for long notes like „Sustain“.

Along with the new „Flow“-Parameter, fully supported by Factories, this gives good results without the need to switch articulations.

The combi of a short articulation (marc, stacc, spic,…) with a long one (sus, legato, tremolo) has also the advantage, that you can control their volume independently. The short articulation via velocity, the long one with Mod/Expr CC1/CC11 (works for most orchestral libraries).

This leads me to my Orchestral Feature suggestions:

1.  Orchestral „Swell“ Factory: make orchestral swells via MOD / Expr available for factories:
   1. Parameter Factory MOD/EXPR: Linear swell, sine / cosine curves, spread across a certain duration with a certain intensity,…
   2. Line Factories for rises and decays – enhancing existing line factories with swell parameter factory, bringing orchestral swells to  the lines
   3. Phrase Factories combining lines with different swells and velocities. E.g.: Decaying Woodwinds while Tremolo Strings are rising – with Sforzando swells in the brass section. Combining 3-4 lines in one orchestral phrase
   4. Could be also great for pop brass libraries to create individual sforzando swells without the need to change articulation (keyswitches,…).
   5. Many Orchestral Libraries offer examples to train the KIM engines :-)
2. Harmony Factories: currently there is only „Chordmachine“. The Functional Chord machine mentioned in Synfire Doku could be interesting for Orchestral compositions, but it is not choosable in my installation.
3. Chordlines/Voicings: There are not many ways to influence the voicings of chords in chordlines. Only Arpeggiated Chords offer more flexibility. For orchestral chords some voicing parameters would be great:
   1. Narrow or wide voicing (voicing patterns)
   2. Number of voices in a chord: currently there are 3 or 4, but could be also 5 or 6 for more colorful or more wide-ranged chords – depending on harmony or patterns. Or why not only 2 voices – with variations of “Start”-parameter they can also span chords.
   3. Powerchord Voicings
4. “Follow My Line”: Like with chords it could also be good to apply additional voices to melody lines (in narrow voicings), or basslines (wide voicings – octaves),… I often used the same figure on different instruments with different Transpose Parameter, but having it in 1 Figure – and let it be generated by a factory – would be great.
   1. 3 voices following a melody line in narrow voicing – as often heard in “Bee Gees” songs
   2. 2 Voices that follow a melody in thirds, as often heard in folk music,…
5. Orchestration Techniques: The “Skip”-parameter seems to be good for spreading rhythms across several instrument groups in an orchestra, but the “Skip” Parameter does not show up in my UI, although I have “Experimental Features” turned on.
   1. Splitting up chordlines to different instruments: E.g.: highest note  to Violins 1, second to violins 2,… so that single instrument groups do not have to play all “divisi”.

And now let’s have fun, putting everything together on the snippets grid  :-)))