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Do yourself a favor, discover Anne-Kathrin Dern if you haven't already. Composer expenses and income 2024.

I studied at a conservatoire (and now teach part-time at one) first and foremost as a musician, to be around other musicians who could push my standard up. I ended up composing while I was there as a student, but my selected joint first studies were piano and percussion, partly because I always felt uncomfortable with the way the composition faculty was run. The ‘approved’ styles were vigorously endorsed at the expense of greater creative freedom and there was a stranglehold from Faber-backed composers in the UK that remains to this day (check the proms this year: Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson for the umpteenth time).

Anne’s thoughts are bang on the money in so many ways, but I will say that, if you do want to study the classical side of things and hear your results, it does help to have decent musicians available to play your work for free on a regular basis and you’ll find them at conservatoires and good universities.
 
Gerbil said:
The ‘approved’ styles were vigorously endorsed at the expense of greater creative freedom and there was a stranglehold from Faber-backed composers in the UK that remains to this day (check the proms this year: Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson for the umpteenth time).
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What, you don't think every new symphonic concert piece should require a dozen percussionists and two pages of program notes to ostensibly make the music intelligible?!
 
I'm really sick of the beautiful views at the beginning of these videos that make me want to move yet again. Gonna cost me more than a few VI purchases, that's for sure.

But actually don't stop please. I'm stuck in central Florida for a while longer.
 
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"Not everybody thrives in an academic environment" - This is very true.

I'm a kinesthetic learner (bit dyslexic) and always found it extremely difficult to learn anything taught in an academic environment. Learning something requires to be hands on, seeing / hearing something being explained practically. Back at school (not sure if this is true now) they didn't really cater for those who learned differently. They never structed classes around different needs.

Those who couldn't learn / do well in class, were treated differently and put in 'special needs' classes. Teachers taught in the same fashion, but the information was primary school level. Which they thought would make it easier for students to learn. Ironically, completely ignoring HOW people learned. Which even now, people overlook.
 
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Bee_Abney said:
So the clear implication of Dern's reasoning is that if you know what you are doing, you get better results with better gear.
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This is often use-case driven. To take Anne-Kathrin's camera example a bit further, there is a dramatic difference in function between one of the top-end SLRs and the consumer/prosumer models when it comes to things like auto-focus and shutter response (ie does it have to sit and think for a while after you hit the button) – as well as what happens if you drop it.

The higher-end cameras always take the shot and it will 99% of the time be focused just right automatically. But if you're taking landscapes, none of that matters. Similarly, if you're shooting at f/16, the lens probably doesn't matter either. At f/2.8, you will notice clear differences in bokeh and other out-of-focus things under tricky lighting conditions. But a landscape at nine in the morning? Who cares?

Conversely, if you have no idea how the focus options work – Nikon has a number of distinct modes and your life is made a lot easier – it will often go wrong. And this can be worse on the higher-end products because they have a zillion selectable focus targets where a cheap point-and-shoot has a few in the centre and takes its best chance.

Photography forums are hilarious at times because you will see people rag on the lens they've got the way people bang on about legatos here and on the rare occasions where they post the Raw file with the focus settings in the metadata you can often see they've got the focus target in entirely the wrong place, they've used a wide-area average mode where some objects are several metres further away than others or they simply don't understand how auto-focus works in that you need to find a target with clear, sharp lines*. "But this lens has got back-focus". Yeah, OK, whatever.

tl;dr - the expensive thing is likely to be better under more extreme conditions or requirements but 90% of the time won't seem to make much of a difference.

* Hint for budding portrait photographers: aim for an eye, not the cheek or the nose.
 
gamma-ut said:
This is often use-case driven. To take Anne-Kathrin's camera example a bit further, there is a dramatic difference in function between one of the top-end SLRs and the consumer/prosumer models when it comes to things like auto-focus and shutter response (ie does it have to sit and think for a while after you hit the button) – as well as what happens if you drop it.

The higher-end cameras always take the shot and it will 99% of the time be focused just right automatically. But if you're taking landscapes, none of that matters. Similarly, if you're shooting at f/16, the lens probably doesn't matter either. At f/2.8, you will notice clear differences in bokeh and other out-of-focus things under tricky lighting conditions. But a landscape at nine in the morning? Who cares?

Conversely, if you have no idea how the focus options work – Nikon has a number of distinct modes and your life is made a lot easier – it will often go wrong. And this can be worse on the higher-end products because they have a zillion selectable focus targets where a cheap point-and-shoot has a few in the centre and takes its best chance.

Photography forums are hilarious at times because you will see people rag on the lens they've got the way people bang on about legatos here and on the rare occasions where they post the Raw file with the focus settings in the metadata you can often see they've got the focus target in entirely the wrong place, they've used a wide-area average mode where some objects are several metres further away than others or they simply don't understand how auto-focus works in that you need to find a target with clear, sharp lines*. "But this lens has got back-focus". Yeah, OK, whatever.

tl;dr - the expensive thing is likely to be better under more extreme conditions or requirements but 90% of the time won't seem to make much of a difference.

* Hint for budding portrait photographers: aim for an eye, not the cheek or the nose.
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Of course, I was joking about how we can always continue to find ways to persuade ourselves to do or believe things as it suits our inclinations (and not always or even often to our own advantage!).

But better gear does not necessarily mean newer, more sophisticated or more expensive. I agree that it is also contextual - the gear that is better for the job at hand. And to go further into the context, the gear that is better for me to use given the job at hand - as in, use one I know how to use well.

I missed whether Dern mentioned when she was using that library to get jobs. I wonder if it would be more of a problem now. She said herself that she could make a better sounding mock up using better libraries. It depends in part on who you are trying to persuade, and how good they are at using mock ups to discern the skill in using them, or the suitability of the compositions and skills for their hiring needs.
 
I think debating whether EWSO mockups would be good enough to get jobs with today is kind of missing the point, though. What I got from the video wasn't that everyone should specifically use the library she was using when she started out, but rather that we'd all be better off really learning to make good use of what we already have, because just about any of it can fill that role.

She even says in the video that libraries today are generally more capable than what was available or affordable when she started, so the idea definitely isn't that we should all go back to 2003...
 
Bee_Abney said:
I missed whether Dern mentioned when she was using that library to get jobs.
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She talks about when she and her writing or production partner ran into problems with Play just ahead of a recording session which caused her to abandon it at that point. I'd have to go back and check if she mentions a year but she did say she bought it around 2007, around when it went Kontakt to Play – there was a big sale on it at that time if memory serves.

Bee_Abney said:
Of course, I was joking about how we can always continue to find ways to persuade ourselves to do or believe things as it suits our inclinations (and not always or even often to our own advantage!).
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Don't worry, I got that. I just saw the opportunity to make a point.
 
I still use good ol' EW Symphonic Orchestra as my primary percussion, FX, harpsichord and some solo instruments. I scored a lot of productions using the old Kompakt version (Gold XP) and it earned me a good amount of $$. The strings, especially, have come a long way since then (primarily legatos), but it's definitely a good idea to question if you actually need to buy that next library. If you don't already know what's legitimately missing from your current toolbox, then you most likely don't need it. We are all guilty of GAS though, myself included.
 
MartinH. said:
@A.Dern I love it when someone uses such an old tool just for the lulz and no one can tell :D. Great mockup and video!
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I started out with Turtle Beach soundcard using Cakewalk Home Studio and Voyetra DOP and they ran through a Yamaha midi playback software. As for creating it's been a serious decline. I'm more into learning how to create Trance and get sucker into buying more orchestra libraries when they are cheap. There is also this reality that you can hoard to the point of almost maxing out a system of 8TB storage. Every cheap library puts you further away from upgrading to SSDs.

There is a DAW forum where they post challenges of creating using certain instruments that have been around. Imagine a GPO, IK Miroslav 2, Kontakt factory challenge and only using those.
 
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