Sonuscore - THE SCORE

got it

It’s good to have a sample talk thread though, since comparisons to competitors’ products are discouraged on commercial threads.

This adjective overdosed review from a shill convinced me it's another 'nice' but overpriced library that will fit into the "Buyer's Remorse" category.

Buzz said:

This adjective overdosed review from a shill convinced me it's another 'nice' but overpriced library that will fit into the "Buyer's Remorse" category.

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It all depends on what you mean by "overpriced." Compared to what? Buyer's remorse likely will kick in if you believe the marketing that you'll be able to produce a finished professional score at the touch of a button with this library.

I'm quite curious about the Score just in terms of what sort of composition it might enable, also the other libraries it compares to. I mean, first of all, how distinct is it ultimately from TOC3? We know that the library for the Score takes an ensemble approach, like the Albions, the Arks, the Symphobias whereas TOC is a more traditional sections and soloists. This has a lot of advantages for something like the engine, because fewer instruments are needed to produce a full orchestral sound. And I don't mean just as tutti. But much will depend here on how well the ensemble samples have been selected for their use in various stories. My hope is that the samples in the Score have been tailored to the engine and the stories rather than the approach of TOC, where the engine makes do with the samples that are available. It's not clear whether this is the case.

The broad outlines of the stories reminds me of the Sonokinetic phrase libraries. That was true of TOC as well, but with only five slots and the samples that populated TOC, its ability to encroach on the territory covered by the Sonokinetic phrase libraries was somewhat limited. I don't know if The Score will in fact be able to effectively cover any of the same ground, but given that in general the engine of TOC allowed more complex harmonic treatment compared to Sonokinetic, I'm hopeful the Score might have something interesting to offer in that respect and also for the sort of mood sketching, cue starting function that the Sonokinetic phrase libraries excel at.

I know a lot of folks look askance at phrase libraries like Sonokinetic but it really depends on the material, and whether it is suitably generic that it doesn't get in the way of any composition. Basically what I am looking for in these sorts of libraries are the ability to quickly get across accompaniment figures that evoke moods, atmospheres, and genres—the terms that come to mind when I hear "stories" used in this way. But the idea is that these accompaniment figures evoke those moods, atmospheres, and genres because they are built from musical conventions, that is, the sorts of things you don't expect to be compositionally original in the first place.

Sorry for my English, it is difficult to translate this kind of words.

I went to University to learn Music, the teachers are giving you tricks.
All the rules/tricks given are based on the writing of the geniusity of Jean Sebastien BACH.

I use "THE ORCHESTRA" it is helping me to orchestrate, only a help.

I just upgrade to "The SCORE" I will also use it as a help to do my orchestrations. What seduced me in the Score is the arpeggio of the piano and it is less "mechanic" than "The Orchestra"
I am not using the instrument of this library, only the notes produced. I use VSL to play the instruments, and there is quite a lot of work after so it sounds what you want it sounds.

The notes provided by software like this belong to rules, some rule are boring it is up to you to alter what is given so it make your piece evaluate, also to correct because some time the score produced is not of your taste.

The work "to be a composer" demands much more that a software can provide.
You need to put your talent, your ideas in your piece so it is not just note after notes.

What IS important is THE melody, THE melody, THE melody ...

Look at the Beatles, what made their success are the melodies, look at major orchestral pieces, it is the same. Everybody know the Adagio of Albinoni, the New World of Anton Dvorak.....

When you have listen to a piece of music, it must be in your head.

Voilà !

I don't own this or the other earlier products from this line. I've always been intrigued as I am huge fan of 'algorithmic' stuff to help jump start ideas. I see the value in having all of this in one nice tidy package and it appears to be very well thought out and put together! Though there are alternatives out there if one likes the basic functionality/ideas behind this, but maybe not so interested in the included sound sources....

First, I would suggest a 'phrase arpeggiator' along the lines of Venomode's Phrasebox. It will respond to the input chords like an arp would, but you can also program chord rhythms (ostinato tool anyone?) and 'offset' the notes to other scale tones, so its not just always playing back the chord tones in your sequence. Add to that the 'chance' parameter and you can have evolving (or non evolving) sequences in seconds.

The chord functionality - again there are a number of additional products available to do something similar and some with more functionality. The Orb Producer Suite has a chord module as does Captain Chords. I like Chordjam by Audio Modern and there is also the Rapid Composer program (and Vst) as well. There's Instacomper too... the list goes on.

The melody function - from what I have seen so far in the videos reminds me of the output one gets from the Orb Producer in 'Lyrical Melody' mode. Melody generators are hard to wrangle in...most of what these developers call 'melodies' are what most of us may call 'top lines' in electronic music. Some seem like more sophisticated arps than lyrical melodies. Captain melody can come up with neat repeating motifs just like Instacomposer can. Melody Sauce spits out some nifty starting ideas too....In Rapid Composer there are a few melody generators (even a Markov generator), but they seem a bit convoluted and the lines don't really 'breathe'... lots of notes.... adding rests, etc seems way to difficult.

Again, I am not against the Score or the Orchestra at all... as I say I love these things! I suppose I would fall under the category of the person that loves the idea behind it, but not so keen on purchasing the sound library along with it.

antret said:

Again, I am not against the Score or the Orchestra at all... as I say I love these things! I suppose I would fall under the category of the person that loves the idea behind it, but not so keen on purchasing the sound library along with it.

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I would counter that to do it right, to make stories that follow well the conventions of genre and mood—and I'm not saying that The Score in fact does it right—that the samples would need to be designed for the engine and the stories rather than an engine running on an abstract set of libraries where the libraries are not properly set up to realize the needed conventions. So I would say instead that a sound library for this sort of thing needs to be a very particular kind of library, and its sounds might not have that much flexibility outside of their use for the stories made with the engine.

One of the disappointments I see in The Score is that though there are on the one hand a lot of stories, these stories all fall under a fairly narrow set of genres, and as someone noted in one of the threads (maybe this one) the difference among the stories especially within a genre is less distinct than one might hope.

Another thing I'm not wild about is how many of the stories lean into synth sounds, so it often feels like the conception of scoring in The Score is inherently hybrid. I mean, there is nothing wrong with that hybrid sound in and of itself; it's just something you should be aware of if interested in the concept of genre conventions and stories but not necessarily the hybrid variants. (I'm going here by some walkthroughs I've watched so I don't know for certain that this hybrid character in fact dominates the stories, that's just my initial impression.)

I feel like it spreads itself too thin - jack of all trades, master of none. A better move (in my useless opinion ) would have been to release genre specific versions. Like a hybrid trailer score, fantasy score, horror score etc, with each one having a unique set of instrumentation and a LOT more stories than just the 8-10 on offer in this version.

antret said:

I don't own this or the other earlier products from this line. I've always been intrigued as I am huge fan of 'algorithmic' stuff to help jump start ideas. I see the value in having all of this in one nice tidy package and it appears to be very well thought out and put together! Though there are alternatives out there if one likes the basic functionality/ideas behind this, but maybe not so interested in the included sound sources....

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I'm not sure that the Sonuscore products are quite what you think...
While they have a similar end goal of helping you generate music, they are not actually what I would call generative music plugins in the same vein as RapidComposer or InstaComposer.
(Exception being the new Melody Studio in The Score which has a Markov melody generator that is presumably similar to the Markov melody generator in RapidComposer.)

Rather they effectively provide a series of handwritten presets (written for particular styles/moods) that can be played with various chords, combined and adapted.
I would say they are more similar to Sonokinetic's phrase-based libraries, though unlike Sonokinetic's libraries they work with MIDI data rather than being recorded phrases.
I think the main innovation with the Sonuscore products is that they use a special engine (called the Ensemble Engine in The Orchestra series and re-used in The Score) which provides some nice functionality for splitting out the chords you play among different instruments and adapts the MIDI based on your Mod Wheel.
Some people have described them as being glorified MIDI packs, which they kind of are, but MIDI packs that come with their own samples and automatically adapt to your chords and Mod Wheel.

I've seen several comments which seem to suggest that the Melody Studio has some sort of ability, like the Melody Studio, to generate chord progressions.
Unless I've missed something important, I don't think this is the case.
The Chord Studio is really just a Chord track (similar to what is build into Cubase) where you can arrange your chords rather than playing them in manually.
It does have the added convenience of being able to set the global dynamics, choose story presets (i.e. intro, A, B, Ending variations) and then send the chord progression you've programmed across to Melody Studio for it to use in generating your melody - that is the sole generative aspect of The Score, however.

One the whole, I'm really liking what I see of The Score (having just watched The Sampleist video), it looks nicely put together, has a nice range of presets and is really a step more towards what I've been looking for when compared to The Orchestra series.
Just a shame they've decided on this limited time crossgrade at such a high price, as it really feels like I'd be paying a premium price for an expansion to The Orchestra Complete 3.

davidson said:

I feel like it spreads itself too thin - jack of all trades, master of none. A better move (in my useless opinion ) would have been to release genre specific versions. Like a hybrid trailer score, fantasy score, horror score etc, with each one having a unique set of instrumentation and a LOT more stories than just the 8-10 on offer in this version.

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I don’t know. Given that the stories within each genre aren’t terribly well distinguished from each other, I’m not sure if that would have been feasible without a different approach to the stories themselves. And maybe producing more distinctive stories within each genre is indeed an approach they should consider going forward, if it ever comes to The Score 2 or new story packs.

jbuhler said:

I don’t know. Given that the stories within each genre aren’t terribly well distinguished from each other, I’m not sure if that would have been feasible without a different approach to the stories themselves. And maybe producing more distinctive stories within each genre is indeed an approach they should consider going forward, if it ever comes to The Score 2 or new story packs.

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Yeah, I think the main point of The Score is that is covers "all the bases", rather than being too focused on a given genre.

Good point about the story packs, I wonder if they will take this approach and add any further free or paid stories (like with the EW Orchestrator).
This would be preferable to having to wait 1+ years for The Score 2 and then upgrading, which is the model they employed with The Orchestra Complete.

I don’t play the piano, and already have the orchestral libraries i need. Usually writes in a software like sibelius or in the daw with the mouse.
The thing that takes me more time is write the notes and humanize them.
This new library could help me with that last part? And then play with the libraries i like?

Tracks said:

I don’t play the piano, and already have the orchestral libraries i need. Usually writes in a software like sibelius or in the daw with the mouse.
The thing that takes me more time is write the notes and humanize them.
This new library could help me with that last part? And then play with the libraries i like?

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I don’t think so. This is more like you notate a chord and The Score figures the parts for you according to the algorithm of the story.

Whether the playing sounds humanized or not is down to how the engine renders things, but so far I haven’t found it exceptionally mechanical or human. It’s fine for composing, better than straight notation, not as good as something like NotePerformer or massaging midi yourself in a DAW. But of course the effect is immediate so you don’t have to spend time with the midi or wait for playback as with NP. Still it sounds like something like NP might serve you better.

jbuhler said:

I don’t think so. This is more like you notate a chord and The Score figures the parts for you according to the algorithm of the story.

Whether the playing sounds humanized or not is down to how the engine renders things, but so far I haven’t found it exceptionally mechanical or human. It’s fine for composing, better than straight notation, not as good as something like NotePerformer or massaging midi yourself in a DAW. But of course the effect is immediate so you don’t have to spend time with the midi or wait for playback as with NP. Still it sounds like something like NP might serve you better.

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I saw note performer 4 but needs a lot of ram, like 64 or even 124gb of ram for my libraries. Also have to said that i like to use hookpad import a song that already exist and change almost everything at the point nobody would see any coincidence. Just because gives me notes already writed that has a decent rhythm that works me to save time.
But it’s only have one melody line, not sure with how mich lines this software could handle to gives me a starting point

CG Smith said:

Yeah, I think the main point of The Score is that is covers "all the bases", rather than being too focused on a given genre.

Good point about the story packs, I wonder if they will take this approach and add any further free or paid stories (like with the EW Orchestrator).
This would be preferable to having to wait 1+ years for The Score 2 and then upgrading, which is the model they employed with The Orchestra Complete.

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I would have thought that enterprising professional composers could use The Score engine and make sets of User stories which could be sold to amateurs, like me.

CG Smith said:

The Chord Studio is really just a Chord track (similar to what is build into Cubase) where you can arrange your chords rather than playing them in manually.

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That's actually nice. I use Studio One Artist, and that function only exists in Pro version. I sometimes forget my own chord progressions in projects, and I've been looking for something easy that can help me see the chord arrangement, and also make the chord workflow easier.

I am overall really intrigued by Score and am really tempted to get it, it's just that Black Friday is around the corner..

milford59 said:

I would have thought that enterprising professional composers could use The Score engine and make sets of User stories which could be sold to amateurs, like me.

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This would depend on how the samples in The Score are set up to work with the engine and stories. Are they well coordinated? This was always one issue I had with the presets in TOC. Most of them felt like they were making do with the available samples rather than things being designed to slot neatly together.

So far the stories of The Score seem a bit better in that respect, and the additional slots are also helpful (you could do that in TOC but it required multis). But it’s not yet clear to me if there is suitable flexibility in the samples to create strikingly different stories or if in the absence of new sample content it will generally only yield close variants of what is already there.

Then, too, as with synth presets there’s no way to lock down any new stories to offer them for sale. Obviously a market of sort still works for synth presets, if the user base is sufficiently large, but the inability to protect the content adds a lot of friction to the market.

milford59 said:

I would have thought that enterprising professional composers could use The Score engine and make sets of User stories which could be sold to amateurs, like me.

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Yes, I've always been a bit surprised nobody has done something similar for the EW Orchestrator or TOC.