Orchestral virtual instruments

After returning to New York from Nashville I received a call from a producer in Houston who is producing a musical with approximately 31 songs. She linked me up with a composer and our job was to record 31 orchestral pieces from sheet music.

Now that’s a big job, so time is of the essence! Since we are MIDI sequencing all the instruments my biggest obstacle was how was I to come up with quality sounding orchestral instrumentation with virtual instruments.

So I started researching all the orchestral virtual instruments and found several but then realized that Reason comes with an orchestral library. So when the first session took place the composer and I sat down and he said “ok let’s start with piano”. So I created a Pro Tools session and Rewired Reason to several instrument tracks in Pro Tools. I used the Combinator from Reason and loaded a piano patch. We repeated this process with all the instruments forming a 13-part ensemble (Violin, French horn, String ensemble, Mallets, etc.) all using the NN-XT sampler from Reason. We are averaging a song every 45 minutes! Using Reason as an Orchestra in a rack and Pro tools as the MIDI sequencer.

The ease of use and quality of sounds is what makes this story so compelling. The composer and I couldn’t believe the quality of the samples. Of course some of the instruments will be recorded with “real” instruments, but I want to emphasize that we created an orchestral sound with all virtual instruments. So if you ever need some orchestral sounds or just looking for some fresh new sounds go for Reason as a solution.

I want to stress that setting up templates for Pro Tools sessions Rewired to Reason is an incredible time saver for these type of projects. Make sure that you save a Pro Tools session and a Reason session template with the same NAME on your drive. Then when you want to work simply open a new Pro Tools session and “import session data” from the template you previously created then import the virtual instrument tracks. When you import the Pro Tools tracks, Reason will automatically launch. Once everything loads you must then go to the “saved” session document for Reason (your template file) and voila! Your are rocking in Reason!