from several things including two musicals I liked as a teen. Never placed her name, now I see!

Nice find, even my current teen liked it. So a hit with two generations of teens here. Read she is retiring next year too.

Sonny Daniel, Rarotonga

Good Night folks.
Be well.

The samples have gotten exceedingly good, the sample libraries run into the multiple terabytes.

The scheme is you have several keyboard players/programmers and they play the entire score section by section. They end up much cheaper than an entire orchestra.

A top flight orchestra for a week will cost you two hundred thousand dollars. As far as her budget, the budgets are all cut way back.

The recording companies are on the rocks. And she is in the twilight.

So, I would be surprised if she HAD an orchestra. If she had one they would at least use a video clip of it.

As for the state of the art of sampling, here are several demos of the Vienna Symphonic Library

A youtube demo here

Five tracks without video here

The writing credits don't show on my browser but these are all rendered.

The second, third (Fanfare for the Common Man) and fourth track are very good.

The ensemble stuff is credible.

The third track shows the limits of exposed solo brass, they have fewer problems than the solo strings.

The fifth track shows the limits of exposed solo strings, Vienna is very good for the ensemble but there are better solo string packages.

The technological problem has always been the bandwidth for linear samples as opposed to loops.

That is now solved for the most part.

The problem musically can be in the inflection and hers sounds like a rendering to me.

I just listened again, IT IS A RENDERING. And not the equal of the Vienna examples.

Be surprised. And if you are a musician, be dismayed.

After the energy age we will be back to live instrumentalists and they won't be recorded.

I should add, that as a musician I am always in favor of performance by real live musicians.

And never for the substitution by rendering.

Of course rendering must be done by musicians, of one description or another.

What is different is the technology. The keyboard player now produces the sound of a violin (et al), playing the violin is a lifelong pursuit, simulating the sound might be the pursuit of an afternoon or a week.

I suspect, but it may only be beside the point, that programming will never capture all of the nuance of an actual performance. That it captures enough that we THINK we are hearing reality may be all that can be done and that may be too much for our own good culturally.

The string players (et al) came into a recording studio and played each individual note on their instrument, loudly, softly with the various bowing techniques ad infinitum. These were recorded and prepared into a digital package the components of which can used to simulate a piece of music that the instrumentalist did not play.

A composer can write a score on their computer and hear it in simulation. Or a programmer can do it for them. It can be put out on the internet or even as a commercial release.

Previously, the composers could only hear the music in their own minds until it was performed.

Now sometimes there is very little composition and mostly programming.

We won't turn back the history of technology but we can look for truth in advertising.

What do we say to the musicians who have spent a lifetime perfecting their art and craft if after their sound is sampled they never work again in their lives.

What is there to say for or about a culture in general when the people no longer know anything about what goes into to playing an instrument. The fuller appreciation of the complexity of music comes from having worked out at least some of those complexities oneself.

That is not an original thought on my part, it goes back one hundred years when recorded music first came about.

Amazon on the release here

Performers: Kiri Te Kanawa, Maori Music Group, Abbey Road Ensemble

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJuoP_4Ubp8