What's in My Epic Orchestral & Hybrid Trailer Music Template

DAW & VE Pro Overview

I'm running most of these libraries in Vienna Ensemble Pro 7, which streams into my DAW, Studio One 6. I also own Studio One 7, Reaper, Magix Acid, and a few others, but for my workflow and performance/stability requirements, Studio One 6 is what I've settled on for now.

I used to run my libraries directly in the DAW on a Windows PC, but I'd get constant crashes and even lost a couple of files from corruption, because the PC blue-screened while the project was saving. I switched to Mac, started using VE Pro, and basically all of the crashing, in both the DAW itself and the VST instruments like Kontakt, completely disappeared. Everything runs so much more smoothly than before. I will say, it takes a fair amount of effort to set up, but it's definitely worth it, in my opinion.

Bus Structure & Track Routing

I have one articulation per track, each with a negative track delay set so that everything aligns with the grid. Each instrument (V., Va., Vc., Cb) and each sample library (Pacific, MA1, etc) has its own bus. For strings, I also have a separate bus for the longs. Each library's setup varies slightly, but to give an example, here's how I currently have Pacific Strings set up:

One thing to notice about my setup:

I only include articulations I actually use. So, for example, I don't have anything set up for Pacific's whisper sustains, since I never use them. This saves processing power, but more importantly, it saves visual space in the template. Even if you're disabling tracks, unless you hide them, they still take up room in the arrangement, which makes it take longer to find the track you're looking for. You could use hidden tracks for this, but I don't like them, more often than not you forget they're there, and they end up making the project file bigger without much benefit. My approach is to go through each library, find the articulations I actually use, include those, and drop the rest.

Plugin Chains & Signal Flow

Longs

The longs have their own dedicated bus structure because low frequencies tend to build up in sustained notes in a way that doesn't happen with shorts. To deal with that, all EQing and panning happens on each instrument's long bus (Violin Longs Bus, Viola Longs Bus, etc). Those all feed into the Pacific Longs Bus, where I have soothe2 and Pro-Q set up to control the low end specifically for longs.

The Pacific Longs Bus then goes to the Pacific Bus, where I have Contemporary Color, Gullfoss, and Room Widener set up. Finally, there's a send on the Pacific Bus that goes to my Reverb Bus.

Violin FFF Legato is a special case. You'll notice in the tree, that it feeds directly into the Pacific Longs Bus, rather than going through its own instrument bus first. Since there's only one articulation for that instrument, I can do all the EQ and panning on the track itself, rather than needing to sum all the articulations into a bus first and then doing the EQing and panning there.

Shorts

The shorts skip the Longs Bus entirely and go straight to the Pacific Bus. Since short articulations don't have the same low end buildup issue that longs do, there's no need to sum all the shorts into a bus, for extra low end processing. And because the only short articulation I use in Pacific is spiccato, I didn't need individual instrument buses either (no Violin Shorts Bus, Viola Shorts Bus, etc). The EQing and panning for the shorts is done directly on the spiccato tracks themselves, which then feed straight into the Pacific Bus. This is because my general motto is to keep the bus and track count as low as possible for efficiency and visual space. However, if you're someone who uses pizzicato a lot, you'd want to send spiccato and pizzicato for each instrument into a bus specifically for that instrument (V1. Shorts Bus, Va. Shorts Bus, etc) and then do EQ and panning there before send each of those to Pacific Bus. If you felt the need to process , similar to how my longs are set up.create individual buses per instrument and I was using pizzicato, it would make sense to

Reverb Bus

The Reverb Bus is set up basically the same way Joël Dollié does his: Blue Cat's Patchwork creating a parallel chain, with VSS3 on one chain and Cinematic Rooms Professional on the other. Joël actually helped me premix this template, so some of these choices were at his recommendation.

VE Pro Instance Setup

For my VE Pro setup, I'm using Kontakt 7 wherever possible. Mostly because Kontakt 8 didn't exist when I originally set up the template, but even if I were to redo it, I'd still go with 7, as it runs better in my experience. Less crashing, better performance.

I have instances set up for each instrument group. One for keys, one for harps, one for choirs, etc. Each instance contains one Kontakt per patch. Here's an example of how the Choir instance is configured:

Inside Studio One, I have the VE Pro plugin running that connects to the Choir instance, routed so each track points at the correct MIDI channel and output as configured within VE Pro. This part is DAW-specific and can get complicated, so if you're looking for detailed instructions on the DAW side, you're probably better off finding a video for your specific DAW.

For bigger libraries with lots of articulations — like Pacific Strings — I use one instance per articulation. So I have a Pacific Legato instance, a Pacific Spiccato instance, etc. Each of those instances contains one Kontakt per instrument:

In Studio One, this means I need one VE Pro plugin per instance, so five VE Pro plugins for Pacific Strings, each with multiple tracks assigned using the correct MIDI channels and outputs.

Sample Libraries

I prefer libraries with a lot of power that cut through the mix well and generally have a lot of emotion or movement to them, because my music tends to be heavily layered. This is my current list, but these do change quite often.

Synths

I use these a lot, but I don't keep them in the template since I try to go with unique synth sounds for each song. They get added on individual tracks as needed. Since they're not running through Kontakt, there are no stability or performance concerns with running them directly in the DAW. This list is also not exhaustive.