On 4 Nov 2005 at 12:19, Darcy James Argue wrote: > Fenton: > > > And, frankly, I'm not all that impressed with the basic quality of > > the GPO demos that I auditioned on the Garritan website back when > > Finale 2006 came out. > > Did you listen to this demo? It just came out last month. > > <http://www.garritan.com/mp3/Dvorakcomparison-narration.mp3>
Well, that's a real tour de force of sequencing and mixing, but it doesn't really change my impression of GPO. I've always felt that for orchestral music it's really quite spectacular for the price. But it's with solo instruments that it falls down. That demo doesn't really show much about solo instrument sounds, as there are no solo strings at all, and the solo winds are always playing over a bed of string sound, the upper partials of which will tend to hide the lacking ambience of the solo winds. The timpani didn't sound good at all -- sounded like the sequence used a sample that was recorded with hard mallets, when it should have been soft mallets. I've played timpani, and I know what they sound like, and that was not good. All that said, it was a remarkable comparison. Whatever lacks were apparent in the side-by-side comparison were still relatively minor in comparison to anything available at the same price point that I've ever heard. The differences between the GPO and the real orchestra reminded me of the way I felt when first hearing early instrument orchestras. For instance, volume 5 of the Hogwood/Academy of Ancient Music Mozart Symphonies sounded kind of threadbare and thin in comparison to what I was accustomed to hearing, and that's the impression I get from the GPO. I've since learned to hear the true richness of early instrument orchestras (as well as recognizing that the Mozart symphonies were not recorded terribly well -- I don't think at that point the engineers had quite yet figured out how to record and mix for CDs), and I'm sure GPO would make very satisfactory demos for orchestral music. But I don't do orchestral music -- I do chamber music, and for that, none of the sounds are really all that remarkable. And I don't think the piano choices are interesting or attractive at all. So, I'll grant (as I've actually said before in previous discussions of GPO) that for orchestral music, GPO is really quite a remarkable accomplishment at the price point that it's being sold. But that leaves an awful lot of music that it's not such a grand improvement for. And, BTW, I'd love to hear the mirror image MP3 of that demo, with the GPO and real parts flipped. It seemed to me that there were a number of cases where the choices were such that the demo was exploiting what GPO does well and avoiding the things it does poorly. It would also be nice to hear the same passages back to back. I'm not saying this to badmouth GPO, I'm just interested in a real comparison of what synthesized sounds can do in comparison to real instruments. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
