Katawa Shoujo Orchestrated - Katawa Symphony

[Fanuilos]

Hmm, Parity is a tricky one and I'm not sure it would work well in an orchestral setting anyways. Maybe a jazz combo?

[SkyraScarletXVII]

That's the thing, the songs that typically aren't orchestra material give me a chance to show a different way of looking at the piece. I've chosen my next song now anyway, might leave Parity til later.

[SkyraScarletXVII]

Speaking of which, piece 5: Painful History! Where the only more painful thing imaginable is the difficulty it took to make.

[SkyraScarletXVII]

Piece 6, after a health-related break: Fripperies!

[SkyraScarletXVII]

The long awaited (hah) seventh installment in the project, Nocturne!

[pandaphil]

Ooooh, is this new?

[NekoDude]

For me it does sound like you took midi tracks and replaced typical midi instruments with sound samples. That sounds weird.

That would be because I'm limited in my options, I don't have a real orchestra to play them nor do I have a high-quality DAW like East West. So I'm making do with what I have, a composing tool (Finale 2011), a soundbank from a symphonic orchestra and a freeware DAW in the hope it works. Which apparently it's not.

I know I'm late to the party, but try using VST instruments from DSK Music. I have no affliation with them, and some of their instruments make Cubase crash constantly on my system (I have a feeling they're not happy on a 6-core system, they run fine on my 2-core laptop), but when they work, they sound pretty damn good for the (free) price. I use the (non-crashy) electric guitar and bass synths all the time.

For percussion, I'll either use pieces of a drum kit (Drumcore 3 Demo is free) or Syntheway Percussion (cheap but not free). Drumcore 3 Demo is limited to one kit (that's why it's Demo), and every Syntheway VST I have produces a continuous tone around A-440, at somewhere around -52dB -- this is solved with a Gate. For some strange reason, Syntheway Percussion's timpani are off by exactly 10 semitones. 12 would make some sort of sense, but 10? At least it's exactly ten, which isn't hard to compensate for.

Most of my winds, and sometimes my strings (I use Syntheway strings some of the time and not others, DSK Strings and DSK Virtuoso crash instantly) are the stock patches from the Garritan Aria software that came with my EWI USB. That's a weird case, where it's not free but I didn't have to buy it either (just like Cubase came with my USB audio front end) – it came with hardware I bought for live performance, in which I generally use Samplemodeling "The Trumpet". If you don't like the slow attack envelope of most string patches, use a Maximizer to put some punch in the beginnings of notes.

The only expensive virtual instruments I use are the ones I bought from SampleModeling -- Mr. Sax T and The Trumpet. With a little pitch shifting, I use Mr. Sax T for other sizes as well, and The Trumpet set to a pitch of -12 works reasonably well as a trombone. Now Samplemodeling has those instruments I'm faking, but like I said, their products are a little bit expensive. They're great if you need that level of realism though. (Caveat: if you don't know how to play those instruments, you may use them in such a way that your realism goes out the window. This is not the instrument's fault.)

Here's something I've done as described above. In particular, all the sax-heavy stuff leans on pitch-shifted Mr. Sax T when it's not one of my real (physical) instruments. And this is the stuff I've done as White Mice, the band in my book. I too have wandered into the field of re-working KS themes, only in this case it's "what if KS was a first-person shooter with a metal soundtrack?"