How do you setup your orchestra?

I am trying orchestral sections/classical solo instruments to accompany a dirty high-gain guitar and bass (+ other heavy components).

My favourite instrument from the orchestral/symphonic section is Stradivari Cello (it is solo one), I really love it (although I have another cello libs, this one became my favourite).

The others I like to use there are Session Strings Pro 2/Horns Pro, Symphony Series Woodwind Ensemble+Solo and Brass Ensemble+Solo, String Ensemble.

But I'm not even halfway there when it comes to mixing the sections together...

Cubase track disable is great, load your huge template super fast then enable as needed.

im not sure if Live 12 has this option yet.

私のPCのメモリはいつも足りないので、出来るだけ必要な楽器のみを使用して作曲し、余裕があれば録音した複数のTrackを後から合成したりもします。作曲の威最中にメモリが足りなくなるのは私にとってとても恐ろしい事です。読み込みの速さはメーカー毎にかなり差があり、それらの問題は気長に待つしかありません。

My PC is always short on memory, so I compose using only the instruments I need as much as possible, and if I can afford it, I sometimes combine multiple tracks that I have recorded later. It is very frightening for me to run out of memory in the midst of composing. The speed of loading varies considerably from manufacturer to manufacturer, so you have to be patient and wait for those problems.

Hi Laserbeak,

I am not that familiar with Ableton but when I load my orchestral template in Cubase, every track is disabled. When I am going to use a particular instrument/articulation I simply enable that particular track. My template loads within seconds because the instrument is only loading when I am enabling tracks. It doesn't have to load it all at once because that'll take forever and I won't be using every track every time.

The other thing is, when I have loads of used tracks, I use the 'render in place' option in Cubase. This mutes my instrumental MIDI track and a wav file appears so that I can still hear what I wrote. When I want to change what I composed, I unmute the MIDI track, change it and use 'render in place' all over again. That saves a lot of RAM and CPU usage.

Again, I am not familiar with Ableton but maybe you'll get to a solution yourself after reading this. Hope this helps!

All the best and have a great day!

if you want to enjoy all the power of the plug use a ssd nvme 2 pci 4.0 at at least 7000mb/s.

it will make your life easier!!

An SSD is a must, really, for the "live" tracks. Anything that's, like, rhythmic or set, I tend to "freeze" or bounce in place in the vain hope that I don't have to revisit anything other than the mix after initial composition.

Frozen stuff, i.e., WAV or AIFF files will load up a lot faster than a plugin for each instrument, so if you can eat into that power-hungry processing by freezing, then all the better.

5-10 minutes is a pretty long time to load a project imho!

Let's see if we can analyze some things...

When it comes to music production & using sample libraries in general, I think there are two main parts to look into - Storage & Resources.

As for the storage, I use a portable SSD (Samsung T7 2TB) to store all of my music libraries and all of those 'heavy projects' load up pretty fast. Besides orchestral libraries, I have also used other libraries like Lores, Choir:Omnia, Stradivari Cello, etc. at once in a project (which are also pretty 'heavy') and it loads up comparatively faster even on my 6-year old laptop (i7 7th Gen.) Like 1-2 minutes.

But if possible, I would suggest to upgrade to an internal NVMe SSD as it has speeds of more than 4,000 MB/s and it will be superfast to load the projects and libraries as well. Hooking up such an internal NVMe SSD into a dedicated M.2 enclosure is also possible but I am not sure if it utilizes the full blazingly fast speed of NVMe drives in this case.

As for the resources, the CPU & RAM are most important because once the project is loaded, any samples you add will get loaded into RAM first and when you actually play those samples, the CPU will begin it's task & play those out in all of their glory. The heavier the sample library (and more the no. of tracks), the more the RAM consumption. The more the complexity of a sample library, the more the CPU consumption.

You might already know about the CPU meter in the upper right corner of Ableton. Keep an eye out on the same while playing the libraries. If some particular library causes a huge spike, reload that library or purge unused samples.

Another important thing to check is if you have some background processes running or if your antivirus is interfering with the DAW. Some apps are notorious to run in the background and there are always some apps which we never use but are still there :) Check and uninstall these apps.

And last but not the least, try to keep at least 100GB free in your C drive. It just helps your system in the long run. Or take backup and format C drive (if not done in the last 2-3 years). Overall system performance and load times will also improve.

Hope this helps 🙂

There are some tools (midi devices) that I always dreamt of when thinking about “orchestration”: the one I’m always on the edge to buy is the Expressive E Touché, but also things like the Neova midi ring could come handy…move your hands like an orchestra director and the instruments respond to your leading ☺️

At the moment I’m doing similar things with a Leap Motion…but you know how GAS works…you always dream about next thing and think it could serve you better 😏