reference.book Page 354 Monday, August 31, 2009 2:47 PM
4. Playback & video If your head is spinning after all this, don’t worry. Start small by experimenting with reverb, which is perhaps the effect that makes the biggest difference to the sounds produced by virtual instruments. Sibelius Player has its own reverb, but you can also add a separate reverb effect if you like. Once you feel comfortable with reverb, you might want to dabble with compression, which smooths out the dynamic range. You could even try adding a limiter set to -3dB or -6dB, to ensure that your overall mix doesn’t clip. (See, you’re already an expert!) If you want to try effects out, you can download many free ones from the web, including the Kjaerhus Classic series (www.kjaerhusaudio.com; Windows only) or Smartelectronix’s free Audio Unit effects (mda.smartelectronix.com/effects.htm; Mac only). But beware! If you get deeply into the world of effects, pretty soon you’ll find yourself talking about the “warmth” and “touch-sensitivity” of sound, spouting jargon like “riding the gain,” enthusing about “slapback echoes”... and then there will truly be no hope for you.
How to get the best out of virtual instruments and effects The downside of using virtual instruments is that they are yet another thing to use up your computer’s resources, on top of essentials like running the operating system and, more importantly still, Sibelius. You will find that the more sample-based virtual instruments you want to install, the more hard disk space you will need; and the more sample-based virtual instruments you want to run simultaneously, the faster the processor and the greater the amount of RAM you will need. (With synthesis-based virtual instruments there is less dependence on hard disk space and RAM, and a greater dependence on processor speed.) Providing enough disk space is a simple problem to solve: hard disks are inexpensive, capacious and easy to add (you don’t even need to open up your computer if you have a USB 2.0 or Firewire connector). It’s usually recommended to install samples on a separate drive from your operating system and applications, as this improves disk-streaming performance. The RAM requirements get complicated more quickly, not to mention technical – so if talk of “32bit this” and “64-bit that” frightens and confuses you, then skip down a couple of paragraphs: the most important recommendation for RAM is that you should buy as much as you can afford, and ideally 2GB or more. Most Windows computers sold for the past decade or so have used 32-bit microprocessors, which can address a maximum of 4GB RAM (they won’t “see” any more than that, even if you install it), but 32-bit versions of Windows are only able to make limited use of memory above 2GB, so this is the recommended maximum. Once you take away the memory required to run your operating system and Sibelius, you will find you have approximately 1GB RAM left into which you can load samples. The situation is similar on Macs: though theoretically Mac OS X can easily address more than 2GB RAM, typically individual programs cannot utilize more than 4GB RAM. Breaking this 4GB barrier is one of the main benefits of 64-bit computing. Computers that use 64bit processors can in theory address up to 16 exabytes of memory (that’s more than 16 million GB!), though in practice the most any computer available today will accept is 32GB. However, in order to take advantage of the extra power of a 64-bit processor, you also need a 64-bit operating system, and all your applications, including the program hosting the virtual instruments and the virtual instruments themselves, also need to be updated to take advantage of the greater capacity. 354