Producing Music can happen in many different ways, because music can be so many different things. If a band has a song that they’ve played live a hundred times, producing a record of that song is mostly a question of getting a good recording of a good performance by the band. Mixing and mastering are still important challenges, and the band may find new arrangement choices in the studio -- additional solos, background vocals, more complex instrumentation -- but the basic idea is to record the song that they already play.

Producing original music has evolved to include a lot of different approaches though, and much of what is recorded today is composed part by part in music production software, often with no reference to a live performance. Later, the artist may find ways to recreate the production in live shows, like when an act writes beats for a track and then has a drummer play them live later, but all of the decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out are made according to what makes the song -- and the production -- work the best.

Only recently has this approach really become practical with respect to classical instrumentation, and a lot of that is thanks to a truly amazing group of people in Vienna Austria called the Vienna Symphonic Library (www.vsl.co.at).

There have been samples of orchestra instruments available at least since the eighties, and there are many really good samples from a lot of different companies available now. There probably isn't any one who has developed a more thorough approach to getting it right than the Vienna Symphonic Library, whose latest offerings are called Vienna Instruments.

The track accompanying this article is the Piano Intro to "Time Now", the new ‘ohana track for Extensions Dance Company; it features the Vienna Instruments Bösendorfer Imperial -- a legendary concert piano made in Austria. The concert version of "Time Now" also features these piano tracks, along with string orchestra, also from the Vienna Instruments (http://aotpr.com/track/music-dance-ohana-time-now-section-i). The reason for including it with this article is to provide some idea of the incredible attention to detail that there is in the way VSL puts these software instruments together.

Apparently, they started out by building an extreme recording studio -- they call it the Silent Stage, I think, so that they could have some of the finest classical musicians come in and record in a perfectly identical environment, even over long periods of time. Except they’re not recording songs, or even musical phrases. They record one note, and then they record another note, then they record more notes. Then they record the same notes a little louder, then softer, with vibrato, without vibrato, on and on until they have a staggering number of samples. Then they write incredible software to play all these samples, and load it all onto DVDs that are so enormous they take you hours just to get them onto your hard drive.

Then months later, or maybe a few years later, somebody in Chicago called ‘ohana is working on a track for somebody in Chicago named Lizzie MacKenzie, and we all want it to be just exactly the right feeling before she starts choreographing to it for the new work by Extensions Dance Company, and the E on the violins has to sound so much like the B that was recorded at another time that it really, really sounds like somebody’s playing it. And it does, because the people at VSL are so unbelievably dedicated to details.

Believe it or not, that’s really only the beginning of the Vienna Instruments story, and there's one more part of the story that just has to be included, because it’s sort of jaw-dropping if you think about it. The really revolutionary innovation at VSL was that, although there had been some pretty good samples around (the strings on Unravelling the Myth are from another very good company), when you play a real violin there is a sound between the notes --- not just the E or the F sharp or the B, but the sound made as a player moves from the E to the F Sharp, or to any other note. Believe it or not, the Vienna Instruments have these micro samples, and place them seamlessly into the notes you play, in the background, without you doing anything. So if the string part goes B-A-B, the software goes and finds the micro sample of somebody in Vienna actually going from the B to the A and places it between the notes as you play them. (I've done a lot of editing, but I can't imagine how they ever edited those samples out of the performance files.) This is why, really for the first time, a composer can actually write and produce independent records that truly feature orchestral arrangements.

There are a few other things worth mentioning about VSL. First their support -- truly amazing, never lets us down. Although their support really covers everything, they also have a brilliant U.S. distributor called ILIO (www.ilio.com) who also supports the product -- but ILIO is the next story in this series, especially because I have to tell how they found the bouzouki I needed in “Breathe Again” for Melissa Thodos’ award winning choreographic work “Anasa” (www.thodosdance.org).

Secondly, the VSL community. This is really unusual, because you have forums where better than 27,000 composers from all over the world help eachother figure out what to do next, and share advice and information on just about everything that has to do with composition and arrangement. I recently met a really talented artist there named Leah Kardos, who composes outstanding piano and other classical tracks, but who is also the vocalist and piano player in a really cool fusion / jamband / rockband called Helzuki. Their first album is at iTunes, or you can check them out at www.helzuki,co.uk.

Finally, because recording every possible note on every possible instrument in every possible way anybody could play it wasn’t enough of an undertaking for the people at VSL, they have something they call the Vienna Academy and it is really worth checking out at http://vsl.co.at/en/70/149/150/46.vsl. (The crazy url is because they’re doing all of this in three languages, so to get you to the English one requires some directions.) It’s a guided tour of every instrument in the orchestra, with sound samples throughout the instrument’s range, really good technical information on how to write for the instrument, and a lot more besides.

If ever you were going to use orchestral instruments in your productions, you should really give VSL a good thorough look. The full libraries cost some professional money, but they have introductory levels (look for what they call the Special Edition) that are much more accessible, and they get you a long way toward really having access to an orchestra. On the ‘ohana track “Hidden”, for example, (http://aotpr.com/track/hidden) the bassoon, flute, alto flute, and horn were all from the Special Edition.