I am forming a small team and we will be heading towards making the game fast. We still have some tehnical issues.
I know, Google…but it has no human expirience.
I am looking for the program, software for composing music with different instruments and exporting it as audio file.
-Shortly: We need something to simulate orchestra…on PC…
We could arrange different music layers (guitar.mp3 + piano.mp3 … etc.), but it will be better to have option to do it in that program.
Our goal is to make discreet but still recognazible and authentic music sheets and other…NOT Something like super mario, zelda and other…
If someone knows similar software or something that fits the description, please post it right here.
What you sound like you are looking for is some kind of DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. If you google DAW you will find several options at various different price points. Commercial examples include Ableton Live, FLStudio, Reason, Pro Tools, Logic and Cubase while free options include Rosegarden and LMSS. The commercial options tend to come in several editions at various price points from <£100 to >£500 depending on which features you want/need. Be aware that not all tools are equal or available on all platforms. Some are PC only while others are only available on Mac or Linux.
These tools generally allow you to layer and sequence samples to create tracks in addition to supporting virtual instruments that replicate real world instruments (or totally crazy non-real stuff) and can be played through a midi device like a musical keyboard (or your PC keyboard if you can figure out where the notes are) and layered just the same. Most support the ability to add additional instruments as plugins adding to the overall capability. The amount of virtual instruments around for these things is insane with everything from Commodore 64 SID chip emulators to replicas of popular hardware synthesizers all the way to full sample based replication of entire orchestras. The price for these virtual instruments also scales from the free to the insane.
Once you are happy with your production you can export to various audio formats like wav and mp3 etc.
Have a look on google and see what takes your fancy. YouTube is also full of tutorials for most of the more popular ones (especially the paid commercial ones) so look there to get an idea of the overall workflow of the various products. Be warned that a lot of the tutorials at the moment seem to focus on making dub step or electro house etc. Don’t let this fool you. If you know what you are doing (or are willing to learn) then you should be able to make pretty much any genre you need although the learning curve can be steep and obviously things will go a lot smoother with a solid grasp of music and music theory.
Thank you for your time, actually I’ve alredy decided that the propellerhead Reason is the best for us just for now…
About price…we will see what can we do with free version and hopefuly go on with something better later.
It’s a little expensive, but I highly reccommend Ableton Live 9. I bought it back when when I was really into music production but now use it primarily for making game music. It is the best DAW for loop based music in my opinion. As for the orchestral sounds, you won’t really find those in a DAW, you will need a good plug-in or sample library. Miroslav is a really high quality orchestral plug-in. Again it’s a bit pricy.
I’m just going to say this now. If you want the tools to make high quality and commercial sounding music, be expected to pay for them. You could get away with using a lower priced DAW (Reaper is a good one) but the sound libraries and plug-ins are a “you get what you pay for” type world. So if you want high quality sounds, expect to pay for them.
A DAW alone is not enough, as some already stated. While some DAW’s provide virtual instruments and sample libraries too, for a convincing orchestra emulation, you NEED dedicated instruments/sample libraries.
Prices of these instruments/sample libs are from approx 100USD to thousands of USD.
One key element i experienced in this field is: the cheaper the instrument/lib the less expressive/realistic the emulation sounds.
Miroslav philharmonik e.g. low budget and sounds like low budget in many occasions. It might be the sound you are after… but there are many better sounding (in terms of realism) libs out there.
You have full orchestra libraries, and instrument/section specific libaries (which mostly have high detailed sound and playability).
Examples:
(in random order of quality and not considering price!)
Garritan personal orchestra
Miroslav philharmonik orchestra
And other very low budget libraries (as mentioned before)
You WILL grow out of them quickly if you a serious about orchestration with samplelibs. I’m not only talking about how they sound, but also the technical limitations (in terms of amount of choice of play styles possible, also known as articulations/bowings) you likely hit.
Some nice sample sites there, plus there a lot of good DAWs around Fl Studio, Logic Pro, Presonus Studio One and my free favourite LMMS. By the way I own all those big 3 DAWs. There are others like Reaper Sony Acid and Mixcraft which I’m thinking of buying just to test a new Daw toy hahahahaha
