In 2012 Orchestral Tools released Berlin Woodwinds, which quickly became one of the most professionally used woodwind sample libraries in the world. Our long term vision stretched far beyond this initial release however: Even then, the goal was to create a comprehensive, deep-sampled orchestral library recorded by the finest musicians in situ at the famed Teldex Scoring Stage in Berlin.
This vision became a reality in the form of the acclaimed Berlin Series, our flagship orchestra. Today, over ten years after the release of Berlin Woodwinds, we offer three additional main collections—Berlin Strings, Berlin Brass, and Berlin Percussion—containing both individual instruments and ensemble patches recorded with a wealth of articulations, as well as extra libraries like Berlin Symphonic Strings that extend the sonic possibilities of the Berlin Series.
All instruments were recorded at Berlin's Teldex Scoring Stage in situ, with musicians in traditional seating positions, to provide a balanced, organic sound out of the box. The modular nature of the Berlin Series means that you can preserve the spatial and volume relationships of the room and the player when you combine instruments. All collections integrate together perfectly, allowing you to seamlessly incorporate new sounds and customize your virtual orchestra for each project.
In the first installation of a two-part interview, our CEO and co-founder Hendrik Schwarzer looks back at the initial concept for the Berlin Series, and what makes it stand out from all the other orchestral sample libraries.
Sampling a full orchestra is such an ambitious project. What did you want to achieve with the Berlin Series when you first conceived of it?
Our initial idea with the Berlin Series back in the day was to come up with a virtual orchestra that enables you as a composer to achieve comprehensive orchestrations. When you go back to when we started, all the orchestral libraries out there were pretty much focused on the style of Hans Zimmer—massive sound walls that involve all these samples stacked up on top of each other. When it came to orchestral libraries that were capable of handling agile melodies or ornamentations, the little details, the overall market was quite small. We knew people wanted orchestral libraries that could handle hybrid music, and when you listen to composers like Ravel and Stravinsky, or John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, you realize that you need a lot more tools and attention to detail to capture that range of instruments and variety of articulations.
Another important consideration was the sound itself, of course. When you're working with a lot of voices, which is the case when composing for an orchestra, you want to be able to situate them in a cohesive environment to achieve a realistic sound. The goal for the Berlin Series was to have the same production standards as you would in a real scoring session taking place in a large scoring stage with the right acoustic properties. You need all the musicians sitting in their correct places within the orchestra, for example the violins on the left, the celli on the right, the woodwinds behind the strings, and the brass in the back together with the percussion. It's crucial to record the instruments in situ to really get the correct sonic representation of this.
I listened to a lot of mock ups, and I discovered quite early on that the reason why a lot of them sounded fake wasn't because people didn't know how to use orchestral sample libraries—it was because they didn't know what a balanced orchestra sounded like. There's all these complex volume relationships between instruments in an orchestra, meaning that if you combine first violins with first trumpet for example, and the first violins are too loud in comparison to the trumpet, then everything will be out of balance and it will sound artificial . If that balance is lost during recording you'll never be able to fix it by adding loads of plugins to try and get rid of the offending frequencies. To really solve that problem you have to prevent it from happening at all, by recording all the instruments with the same gain levels during the sampling process. If you do this correctly, when you're playing the sampled instruments and riding the mod wheel to change the dynamics, or combining various articulations, the natural volume relations not only within the instrument but also with other instruments will be preserved in the same way they function in a real orchestra. This concept was very new for orchestral sample libraries around the time when we started making the Berlin Series.
Why was it so important to you for the Berlin Series to be modular?
We've been recording the Berlin Series for nearly five years now, and we're still not finished. There are so many aspects to sampling an orchestra, and that's the reason why we created everything in a modular fashion. We could have done a full orchestra in one package—we just released the Berlin Orchestra: Created with Berklee, for example—but the issue with that is that you'd need to make too many compromises along the way. Certain elements would have had to be left out, otherwise it would cost 10,000 euros for a license and no computer in the world could run it!
To illustrate this, take the string section as an example. With strings you can play short notes and you can play long notes. Also, you can play flat release sounds or harmonics, and transitions from one note to another. But then there is also the sul tasto technique, which means playing with the bow in a sweet spot between the bridge and the fingerboard resulting in a slightly softer note, and with that style you can then do a different version of everything that I mentioned before ! Most libraries come as an all-in-one package that include a sul tasto patch, but to do it right we came up with a specific library just for sul tasto and sul ponticello, which also features the note variations within that. As a result you get a huge depth of articulations.
One of the things that users of the Berlin Series bring up when they talk about the collections is the sheer detail and nuance that’s captured in the recordings. What goes into making it so distinctive in that regard?
The detail in the Berlin Series comes from our comprehensive approach to capturing articulations. For example, in most other string libraries there's usually only one legato patch, but we include a variety of legato playing styles—playable runs patches, fingered legatos, slurred legatos, and so on. We also include techniques that deviate from what you might consider as standard playing styles. For example, we recorded special 'Blurred' articulations that are short and long notes played with blurred intonation, which took some time because the musicians were more used to playing with the best possible intonation. When you play the patch by itself it sounds horrible, the musicians all sound drunk, but combining this articulation with a regular staccato or spiccato patch is the key to programming fast arpeggios.
That's the kind of thing we think about when it comes to the detail of the Berlin Series, all these little ornaments like short trills and double strokes. It's something that we've always been so focused on, especially when it comes to sampling woodwinds or brass. Take brass for instance—you have horn one, two, three, and four, and what all the other orchestral libraries do is they record a solo horn and a horn ensemble, because for them those are the only two possibilities. Of course, that's not how an orchestra works normally; you orchestrate with chords or triads across the horns, you can't play them with the same horn player. Each horn has its own timbre, and its own position in relation to the other horns that's affected by the room and how the players breathe. We decided to capture the first horn position, the second horn position, and so on, and then record the entire section, and therefore you can orchestrate for all the individual instruments. The same thing goes for the woodwinds.
Another thing that made sense to include, especially for the brass and strings, were various kinds of attacks for notes. When you think about it, the most crucial moment of a note is the first few milliseconds, because as a musician when you start to perform a phrase you already know how long you have to go to the next note, whether it's a quarter note or sustained over two bars for example. That makes a huge difference, for example with a very long note the attack at the beginning would be a lot softer, because you're sparing energy over a longer duration. On the other hand, if you're playing a phrase with lots of short notes the attack is very immediate and most of the energy is put into these quick moments. For this reason I thought it made sense to record various kinds of attacks; softer, more immediate, and accentuated versions.
In the second installment of this interview, Hendrik discusses how the Berlin Series came to be recorded at Teldex, and why the famous scoring stage was perfect for the project.