Blending With Other Libraries

We have spent considerable energy on making our collections fit into your existing workflow and make it work together effortlessly with other libraries you are using.

1. The right reverb

You can control the amount of room information with the adjustable microphone positions in the Mixer View.
The Tree/Room position is recommended for composing, providing a nice balance between presence and ambience. Surround and AB are much more reverberant and best used to add character to the sound. Using the Close position solely allows you to shape the sound even further by using your own reverb - at the expense of losing the natural sound of the Teldex stage.
In general, we suggest the use of an unobtrusive final reverb on top of the samples to blend everything nicely together in a coherent space and to allow for spatial positioning of instruments within the mix (or in plain words: to move instruments further back or to the front in the mix).

2. Volume Control via Kontakt

We have chosen to not normalise the audio samples used in our collections. This means that all samples are at their natural volume, making some instrument ranges much quieter than you may find in other libraries. This is intentional to give you the full dynamic spectrum. If you want to raise the overall volume of the patches, you can either raise the volume of individual patches or raise Kontakt’s master volume slider.

Volume Range Slider

Dynamics is what makes an orchestra sound good. And incidentally, it is also what makes many mockups sound bad. A piano can be really quiet and a forte can be really loud, not something in-between. Because there is a fixed amount of velocity layers in any sample library, it can happen that a real musician could play that piano part much quieter than your samples do. On the other hand, having the quietest samples at too low a volume can make a library hard to use. We thought about this and have a solution: The volume range slider in the Settings View allows you to set the overall volume range of your instruments between the lowest and the highest velocity.
If the Volume Range setting is at 0, the samples will have their recorded dynamic range. Move it to the far right and the lowest velocities will be very quiet while the highest velocities will be pretty loud, giving you the full possible dynamic range. By default, this slider is set to give you some nice dynamic range compared to the raw samples while at the same time not leaving you with almost inaudible low velocities. Experiment with this setting and use it in your templates to bring out the full dynamic range of your orchestrations! The volume range feature allows you to blend our collections with your other libraries with ease - but then why would you want other libraries?