ASHLEY WITT: I'm Ashley Witt. I did the programming on the Modern Symphony -- the Modern Symphonic Orchestra [LAUGHING]. It was only named recently, okay? And did it actually specifically, even though it was done for other libraries before it was done -- I mean other samplers before, it was done specifically for the Emulator X because of my experience with the Emulators before Emulator X, and then we worked closely together actually with E-MU to make it so that Emulator can also change what it did so that it would take advantage of the library as I was taking advantage of the Emulator. It was kind of a real good mutual working atmosphere that's why all of the non-tool programming came about of this because we were able to work so closely on it.

For the modern symphony orchestra, which is I had got going here, I programmed it and one of the main issues that I wanted to make sure that E-MU understood when I started working on this was that everybody's got these tools going and a lot of people are getting a little frustrated, taking too much time using tools, so what I wanted to do right away was make it so that they didn't have to use tools to for most importantly was for the machine-gun effect which is hitting a note or a chord over and over again and you hear that same sample, and that's what I call showing your hand that it's samples right away, so you can hear it with this...

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING WITH THE MODERN SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA]

...so it's changing. It's choosing different samples and rotating so you don't have that machine-gun effect anymore. Um, that is the main patch that will come up when you open up one of our what we call flex patches. If want, from there you are able to use a keyswitch and do with pizzicato, in this case, we'll call it first and second finger...

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING WITH THE MODERN SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA]

...thrown back and forth first and second finger, when you hit the next keyswitch, it will just reverse that to the second and first finger...

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING WITH THE MODERN SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA]

...so you can create your own pattern with that, but it will be difficult with that creating pattern thing to do triplets so there's a keyswitch for triplets and you can reverse the triplets too.

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING WITH THE MODERN SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA]

And then what I call quadruplets so it's two up and two down, which is a lot more effective with brass and woodwinds, so that goes to the entire orchestra. That type of keyswitching, the very first one is what I would call kind of a random that avoids the machine gun effect, and then the others, all the other instruments follow the what you would call the double-tonguing for the brass or the woodwinds and the strings would be up, down bow, and then the triplets also are with the trombones and the range of winds, for everybody. So, if you create a part with a trombone let's say that went [ASHLEY WITT SINGING A RHYTHMIC BRASS SECTION PART] with the pattern, you can actually copy that or down to the other instruments and then end up with the whole orchestra following that same pattern since they all follow the same keyswitch structure.

So here, one of the things that we all do when we get a new library which is what somebody would do when they pick this up is they take one of their old sequences and they drop in their new sounds. Most of the time, no matter how good the library is, no matter how good the samples, the programming, when you do this "drop-in", it usually sounds really bad and you have to start tweaking right away. The reason that this sounds as good as it does on just a MIDI file, which this was a scan from the original score, and dropped in and the only change made was on the volume on the lead part which comes in, both of them came out just a little quiet, so I brought them up so that you can actually hear them. Other than that, this is a general MIDI file. You make sure the volume is around here.

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYS A MIDI SEQUENCE THROUGH THE MODERN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA]

So you can see it's playing right here.

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING A MIDI SEQUENCE THROUGH THE MODERN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA]

So usually a lot of these, you know, at demos, people like to make everything perfect and be a great sounding demo, but this at itself, just as a general MIDI file, playing back just dropped in sound, and it sounds pretty good and you wouldn't have to do much tweaking. In fact, when I did this, the job for this originally, it took me almost nine hours to make I so that it was marked up well enough for the score that it was being used for so that it could actually be used. This, just like this, it could have been used, because it wasn't used for the film; it was just used for the mockups so that it could be seen on film. I wish I would have had this back then.

So, this is just showing off basically the strings here, and this would be more like showing more of the whole orchestra and being played back in a laptop, two instances of the Emulator for about 30 MIDI channels, somewhere around 200 voices.

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING A MIDI SEQUENCE OF AN ORCHESTRAL VERSION OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER THROUGH THE MODERN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA]

So it really does show that Emulator X isn't all about processing among this among these such a -- I mean all of these as two VSTi's on a laptop playing around 200 voices on 30 channels so and the orchestra obviously is too huge for this to be played back.

[ASHLEY WITT PLAYING A MIDI SEQUENCE THROUGH THE MODERN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA]

So there. Every one of the patches that were being used in that song was all the Flex patches without any -- I didn't change articulations. I just left on the non-machine-gun effect patches and just let the thing play it. What it did is just allow me not to have to think about. Whenever it hit two notes, I didn't have to think about having to change velocities a little so that two notes next to each other didn't sound the same, you know. Well, that's about it on the orchestra. Part of it....