Albion One template?

[Justin Glibbery]

Hi, I just picked up Spitfire Albion One and am looking forward to using it for scoring and projects.  Does anyone created a template for this or maybe an orchestra template using Kontak?   I know there are many ways to set this up but wondered if any of you have found a successful template for good workflow etc.  Thanks! 

[Amicus717]

Hi Justin,

I use Albion One all the time, and have built a sizeable orchestral template that incorporates a good number of Albion patches, especially the strings patches from Albion Orchestra. There are a bunch of different ways to do that, based entirely on what feels right to you, but my current approach is this:

1) For strings I prefer using the individual articulation patches rather than the main group patch. This means I go into the "Individual Patches" folder and load the Sustains, Tremolo, Spiccato/Staccato etc articulations all separately into their own midi track. This is not technically necessary as I believe you can load up the strings main multi-articulation patch as many times as you want and Kontakt lets you control the various articulations simultaneously while only loading the actual samples once. But having each articulation in its own lane better suits my sense of organization.

These primary Albion patches form the backbone of my string section, and I think they sound just great -- glossy and big, with just enough ambience baked in. I then mix and match patches from other libraries to fill in whatever gaps are left over, such as section legatos and special fx patches. I don't much like the Albion strings legatos, as I find they are kind of limited and too low-key for my tastes; and other libraries have much more robust sets of fx and special articulations patches. So I mainly use patches from 8Dio, Musical Sampling and Sonokinetic for these roles. It takes a bit of touchy microphone mix, pan and eq work to get the various patches working together, but it's doable if you're careful. My current setup has the Albion string patches set to a mic mix that uses the decca tree with a hint of close mic to create a slightly closer-than-the-default sound, and then I tailor the other additional stuff to match. I have never gotten the various libraries to match 100% perfectly, but you can get pretty close, and within the context of a full orchestral mix I find that this works quite well.

Albion Orchestra comes with a full set of runs patches, covering different scales and octaves, but to be honest I've never really got the hang of using them, and anyway I have runs libraries from Sonokinetic, CineSamples, Project SAM and Red Room Audio that are much more configurable and easier to use. But admittedly the Albion runs do sound pretty nice and obviously their sound meshes perfectly with the main string patches.   

2) The woodwind patches in Albion are ok, but kind of limited and not granular enough for me - I prefer to use more configurable patches from VSL and CineSamples for that purpose.

3) I have a couple of the Darwin Percussion Ensemble patches in my template, mainly the Easter Island hits, Cymbals and Gongs, and the XXL Percussion patches. They are quite nice (I think the Easter Island Hits are the nicest deep percussion booms that I have in my library). I have found some of the Darwin patches to be a bit twitchy when it comes to velocity layers, so they sometimes take a bit of work in the piano roll view to get everything calibrated properly for the music in question. I tend to get the most use out of the Albion percussion patches when I'm doing more hybrid,/contemporary orchestral stuff. For more classical orchestral percussion, I tend to use other libraries, like NI Symphony Series and CineSamples.

4) The brass patches in Albion One are not my cup of tea at all -- kind of synthy and lacking character, to my ears. I never use them.

The other stuff in Albion One -- the Steam Band and Brunel Loops -- are fun to have around and they see occasional use, but they are not part of my standard template.

These two tracks were done using the setup listed above:

https://soundcloud.com/amicusaudio/a-song-for-the-trillium-queen-adrielles-theme?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

https://soundcloud.com/amicusaudio/the-soldiers-hornpipe-ver-4?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Hope this info helps. I don't use all of Albion One, but the parts I do use are pretty integral to my work flow and are mainstays in my template.

Rob