About

Creation of Virtual Playing Orchestra

Virtual Playing Orchestra began as a project to enhance Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra (which I believe was the first, most complete, free sample orchestra to exist) by adding missing articulations (most specifically staccato) for all instruments. The missing free sound samples were not available when Mattias Westlund created Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra but became available around the time I went looking for them.

I brought together instruments from multiple newly released free libraries and a few other older libraries to get the best of each to build a new library on the foundation of Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra and finally fill in the missing gaps.

Looping the Samples

I was satisfied for a while but in using my new creation, I realized some of the samples were too short. The notes didn’t sustain as long as they should if a real person were playing the instrument. I decided to see if I could loop the samples so that each note would play for as long as I wanted.

My initial tests went well and some samples were easily looped on the first or second try but I eventually discovered that in some cases it would take literal days to loop one note from one instrument. Not wanting to waste the progress I had already made, I spent the months that it took and found a way to loop all the samples as seamlessly as I possibly could. It was exhausting but it worked.

The Performance Version

Growing tired of key switching to get different articulations, I wanted a more natural and expressive way to play. Seeing how some other, professional sound libraries worked, I began experimenting to see if I could blend the sustain and staccato samples to seamlessly transition from notes that start slowly to notes that start suddenly with a blend of everything else in between. This resulted in the splitting of the library into 2 versions. The original “Standard Orchestra” where key switches determine how each note is played (slow vs staccato) and the volume of each note is determined by how fast each key is pressed, and the “Performance Orchestra” where how fast each key is pressed determines how each note is played, and the MOD wheel determines the volume instead of the velocity of the initial key press, so that it becomes possible to vary the volume after a note is played.

On this web site you can download Virtual Playing Orchestra for yourself, listen to many pieces of music where I’ve used Virtual Playing Orchestra and learn from various blog posts and tutorials that I’ve found useful.

Paul Battersby (creator of Virtual Playing Orchestra)