Ben Salisbury

"When you know that you are going to be using real players it actually frees you up because you don't have to worry so much about the programming details. A real orchestra will sound well produced, and so it can be quite a speedy way of writing once you know the setup. We had a decent budget but with a smaller budget you have to make do with samples. The difference between 30 different human beings playing one string chord and you trying to fudge it on samplers is still big. I know there are new Giga string sample libraries coming out, but we were using the Peter Siedlaczek stuff for mock-ups — you can get away with it for still, slow stuff."

"I've started using the EXS24 sampler more and more. I've got a couple of old Emus in my rack and they are great for keeping stock samples but I've now loaded everything into EXS24 so I've got the whole orchestral palette available in an orchestra template setup."