After 9 months of development, Infinite Brass 1.4 is out.
Update 1.4 is a monumental milestone for Infinite Brass and paves the way for the future of Infinite Series. It features all-new spaces, recorded and rendered with new technology and techniques developed specially for Infinite Series. The new spaces give a completely new sound to Infinite Brass, allowing its note-to-note and dynamic consistency to shine like never before. The rooms were picked to closely match the old ones in terms of reverb time, or rather to fulfill the Large—Medium—Small—Dry selection of default spaces. Due to some complications, the “Large” space is not present in this update and will be added in the future.
Also, trumpets have been completely reworked from the ground up, much like horns back in January 2019. Update 1.4 also adds a piccolo trumpet to the already impressive instrument list, as well as new, expanded euphoniums.
There are plenty of improvements and changes. You can find out more on the website.
Nice David, I’m sure you will be very pleased with this brass library!
I know you have the Expressive E, what else do you have? I have BBC2 breath controller. I thought about the leap motion that Aaron @AaronVenture uses, but it seems very hard to use in a consistent and controlled fashion…perhaps I am wrong.
Oh, initial impression is, it’s exactly what I expected, except better!
Actually, I believe the “inconsistent” nature of the Leap Motion is very much desired! It crossed my mind to use subtle input from the tilt sensors of the BBC2 for a similar effect - and what I’m referring to here is “humanization.”
The thing is, just as I expected, and heard in some demos, these instruments are extremely clean and accurate, which is of course great, because it gives you complete control, without random artifacts. Unfortunately, it means you need to constantly breathe life into them through the controllers. A straight tone with no vibrato will invariably sound synthetic, because no human player is able to sustain a note that perfectly for more than brief moments. Just slightly nudging the pitch bend wheel randomly while playing instantly removes that synthetic feel.
On that note, simple hack: Just never completely disable the vibrato. For example, layering all the horns in Kontakt and just giving them subtle vibrato at different rates, instantly gives you that massive sound you’d expect. Of course, playing each horn individually would be even better, but I think this hack sounds good enough that you might get away with it as a direct substitute for sampled ensembles for the most part. I’d just start with that, and if/when that doesn’t cut it, split up to solo instruments.
Good points regarding “humanization”, even though some aspects you really don’t want to “randomly” introduce without control…such as flutter or growl
The attack variations in Infinite Brass are beyond amazing to me, as I can now record by performing even Star Wars style repetitions and it sounds lively (meaning variation in note lengths from my performance).
The clean dynamic smoothness from ppp to fff, and consistency over the entire instrument range (which is huge), is also such a breeze of fresh air to finally get!
Did I miss to point out the humanization knob? If I did, explore that David. Also variation on attack accuracy and placement automatically by the default parts per instrument ensemble (Horns 1, Horns 2 etc.) really makes a big difference.
Finally…no, I’m too lazy to record separate lines per instrument of a section lol
Yeah, effects like that don’t happen by accident, so if at all, those should only be “humanized” when actually used. I’m thinking pitch and dynamics, primarily.
Indeed! The attack variations are very nice, and along with the Humanize feature, and seem to cover the range from “surrealistically clean” through “precise, but realistic.” I think they pretty much need to be restricted to that, since they’re randomized. If you want it more “wild” than that, there is vibrato, and manual controller modulation, which allows you to do it in a controlled and deterministic manner.
As for actually playing each instrument solo (as opposed to copying and messing a bit with the curves), that might be overkill for most orchestral work, but provided you can play well enough, it’s probably the most effective approach for more lively stuff, like jazz and similar, and for aleatoric effects.
On that note, can’t wait to try some big band jazz style stuff with this…! Absolutely incredible feeling being able to just straight play runs, trills, shakes and whatnot on the keyboard!
Exactly, just having it at 3-5% works well. However, the mf in the meat register of each instrument is where they actually can sustain pretty consistently, so if you want that, take it into account.
Even if you play them all in, it’s by far the fastest way for best results. Let’s say your piece is 3 minutes long. So if you’re very good (and playing your own music which you should know how you want phrased), you can play in the whole brass section in a little bit over half an hour (or a bit more if you’re using a bigger section). Even if it’s under an hour, it’s still very good time. Sure, in tuttis copy pasting will be unnoticeable but with exposed lines, try performing each line individually vs. copy pasting and you’ll hear the difference yourself.
Well I am used to cheating with unison or octave lines for layering that I copy/paste, by using slight humanization in Logic on (start position, velocity and note ends). Also simply adding a few ms differences in the “track delay”. And then I just quickly draw new automation curves for the dynamics, that is “sort of the same” but with slight differences. Those are my quick and dirty tricks lol
I’m slightly worried that with these instruments being so precise, there is a risk of the brain picking up on reused automation data, especially if it has a bit of “character” to it. This isn’t a problem with traditional sample libraries, as they blend the automation data with recorded human feel through round-robins, but I suspect it might be an issue here, especially if you don’t use Humanize.
Either way, with the right controllers, and some practice, I don’t think it’s going to be all that much extra work to play solo instruments, and well worth the effort. You can have all those tiny mistakes, slides, subtle grace notes and whatnot, that bring real recordings to life, but are usually left out of sample libraries, as they just cause problems there.
True, and you mentioned earlier in this thread about aleatoric music…That aspect of combining separate lines for instruments is starting to become more and more interesting to me personally. It opens up a world of tension building on another scale! An unexplored deep water for me basically
Oh, yeah! Hadn’t really thought that far in this context, though I’ve had ideas about synths, cello, or violin; things like aleatoric atmospheres that gradually “focus” into chord progressions and vice versa. There are nice aleatoric fx libs, but they just do their thing, and there’s generally no path from there to melodic playing, so it becomes more of a “spice layer” than an actual part of the composition.
Problem with the products and presets out there, is that they are “static”…ehm perhaps not the right word…but they have a set time to resolve and speed curve. I hope I make sense here
For a great example. Hans Zimmer spent 3 weeks with one of the best cello players in the world…just to record the “perfect” aleatoric effect of a semi tone harmony “dancing” between half step interval and unision…never reaching perfect unison. That was the “sound” of the joker. In the Dark Knight movie, not the new joker movies.
Yeah, samples are samples. Some libraries offer a few different lengths/speeds of each articulation/effect, and you may get away with a bit of fading or time stretching, but there’s only so much you can do before it sounds off.
In short, blurring the line between composition and sound design.
Awesome library. The 1.5 update has the cembasso and is great. Not to mention Infinite Woodwinds 2.0 which has been released this week. It is very good, the improvements in the flutes are remarkably good.
