Recording - November 2012 - 48

Fig. 6

Sibelius 7
As A Tool For Sample Playback
below, third-party sound sets are available from online sources but Avid offers no support for these. If you’re a true geek with a lot of spare time, you can write your own. Adding LASS 2 The Sound Set for Audiobro’s LASS 2 comes from just such a third party— The Sound Set Project (www.sound setproject.com). It began in March 2008 when Jonathan Loving set out to create the first complete EastWest Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Kontakt Edition Sound Set as a weekend project. The Sound Set Project currently appears to have the largest collection of third-party sound sets available for Sibelius, and the documentation that comes with their sound sets is clear and thorough. Having just installed the VSL sound set, installing the one for LASS 2 felt a bit more familiar because the process was very similar, with one notable exception. In the Playback Devices window I activated an instance of Kontakt 5 and chose LA Scoring Strings 2 as the Sound Set (see Figure 6). The LASS 2 sound set allows for automatic switching (between instruments or patches), which allowed me to skip the entire process that we had to do in the Manual Sound Sets pane for VSL. I moved on over to the Preferred Sounds pane and highlighted Violin, Viola, Cello and Contrabass in turn, and for each I designated Kontakt 5 as the preferred Device and then added them to the list below. See Figure 7. Things came together rather quickly after that and I was able to export a stem of my string parts being played on LASS 2, which you’ll find in our online library as given by the link above. Note: LASS 2 requires Kontakt 5 Player to work in Sibelius. When I first attempted to record the string stem I found that the output was completely dry. Playback Devices other than Sibelius 7 Sounds apparently can’t access the built-in reverb, so I
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RECORDING November 2012

added a reverb plug-in to the master channel in the mixer to make the track sound more to my taste. LASS 2 has been a terrific addition to my setup, and blends very nicely with some of my other string libraries when I layer them in Digital Performer projects. For this test, it played back the string parts with a lot of realism and character, but not without a few quirks. One group of accents yielded attacks that were much stronger than expected, and a couple of dynamic levels were not what I’d intended, but this was all easily adjustable. And that makes this as good a time as any to explain what Sibelius 7 offers in the way of adjustments to note velocities and MIDI controllers. The Sibelius approach to mixing, or, The Score’s The Thing As with real musicians playing from a score, Sibelius produces the nuances in the music by observing and interpreting the specific information in the score. That’s how you sculpt your music into something brilliant sounding—by placing an
Fig. 7

http://www.soundsetproject.com http://www.soundsetproject.com

Recording - November 2012

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