So I have brought EastWest "Hollywood Orchestra" and some other bits and bobs (and probably gone into debt) to feed my appetite for orchestral instruments. I am not a professional composer but I realize it's the path I find myself running down and falling head over heels along the way.
I only started to believe it's actually possible in FL Studio in a professional capacity after watching Rok Nardin, Alex makoula and a couple of others on youtube. Delving deep into FL's solution the cinematic, orchestral music has and continues to be a mind boggling blast of information and work arounds. First of all if you don't know about BRSO articulate (which you probably do) then i suggest downloading that right away. However when I researched templates and/or routing options for EastWest's "Opus" i was found wanting. Kontakt obviously is the big dog on the scene and alot of people use it including myself but i cashed out on Opus and until I actually recover from being broke and possibly losing my job, it looks like I won't be getting anymore instruments for the time being.
Because I absolutely suck when it comes to reading music, time signature changes, instrument articulations and pretty much everything about an orchestra, I found the problem I had was that I don't just "know" when to pick out an instrument I need for a specific part of the song and where to put it. So instead I added ALL the instruments from Hollywood Orchestra.. into one template. 49 instances of Opus that has EVERY SINGLE instrument from that library. Apart from the Percussion kits, every instrument uses BRSO Articulate for keyswitches using the colours in the piano roll. Alex makoula showed me this with his Kontakt template.
Now i know for a fact that this isn't the most efficient way to build a template and and desperately waiting for someone to show me an easier way but the ability to use ANY instrument at ANY time is invaluable for someone still learning on how to compose pieces. I could of just took essential instuments and used Midi out and saved much resources but not had the ability to switch between ALL the instruments at leisure.
Reading the forum I see user "Omnifold" and "SidDLC" and "Cinemachine" with their own way of working this problem. I would love to hear their input on this. Currently i have ALL but one single articulation incorporated into this FLP. (it was a lonnnng drawn out brass fx that i would have to go back and fix but didn't think it was worth it) It took me about 5 days an hour on each day and like 4-5 hours on last two days to finish up. (my girlfriend probably wants to kill me for being glued to the screen nonstop
)The details are this: Every instrument is linked to BRSO via keyswitch.
Most instances have 2 or even 3 BRSO's linked to cover all the articulations.
All articulations are purged.
Each instrument has the Modwheel and Expression CC's automation in the playlist under it (some instruments only use velocity and expression, not the mod wheel.)
Each instrument is linked to the mixer so all articulations for that instrument go to that one mixer channel.
because of this i have added an instance of Edison to each instrument mixer channel with it set to record "on play" to record on the fly for that instrument and drag it into playlist for further processing etc.
The percussion library are using MIDI outs as not all of them have keyswitches (timpani does though)
I have labelled every single articualtion for every single instrument in MIDI out and BRSO (aside from one articulation
)I have left the reverb on every single instrument that was on there.
Because the keyswitches sometimes travel over to the instruments keyrange it took FOREVER to re-key alot of instruments keyswitches to the full range of the instrument can be played on every articulation.
EDIT: I'm using the latest version of FL, OPUS and i have BRSO articulate so you need them for this template.
Currently my cpu sits at around 35 % on the top bar just loading this template up with all the samples purged so i hope someone tells me i wasted my time and i could of just done it a far easier way lol. If you do find this template useful i advise a decent pc with 64Gb ram, but who knows you might get by. I plan on adding Hollywood Fantasy Voices to this aswell so my pc might just blow up lol. Let me know if you want any of the BRSO presets making or any of that stuff. If you guys find it usefull i can make another one once I regain my sanity back. Thanks.
Ps heres the link for the awesome topic on orchestral templates by the guys i mentioned above viewtopic.php?t=260358