Abbey Road Orchestra - balance test and default volume demonstration

[@c-c-laurin-lenschow]

You may want to turn up your volume for this one... If you don't own any Abbey Road Orchestra libraries - or maybe even no Spitfire Audio libraries in general - you may be surprised to learn how quiet they really are at their default settings. In everything you've ever heard from them - every video demonstration, every demo track, regardless if they were made by Spitfire or someone else, the volume is always boosted. Always. There's just no other way to do it - or can you hear the lowest dynamics of the Xylophone at your normal listening settings? ...anyway, someone asked on VI-Control how well the sections of Abbey Road Orchestra are balanced against each other - showing that is the main purpose of this video. I then also added some tracks with instruments from "Abbey Road One Orchestral Foundations" because it would make sense to use this library together with the (incomplete) Abbey Road Orchestra. Two moments in this video get particularly loud - pay attention to the text on screen to be warned in time. All libraries shown in this video are used at their default settings - Mix 1, no external reverb, no volume boosts.

[@OliKember]

Do you think it’s all balanced to the same gain setting so that if you compose with these they play out as loud as they sound? In theory that’s the goal isn’t it?

[@garret.johnson]

Hey, Laurin! Love your videos. I have almost the exact same library setup as you do: Mostly ARO stuff, and I just picked up Beaufort ... but now that I'm venturing out of ARO, I need to balance all of my volumes so everything can be used more cohesively. I was going to start doing that before I saw this video, and thought I'd reach out. Have you found a default volume that you move all of your ARO libraries to so that they are similar in volume to Beaufort, or other libraries? I was thinking of just some trial and error, moving the Spitfire player volume for all instruments in my template up to 200% at first, and then adjusting as needed, but I thought I'd reach out and see if you would have any input before I spend a whole day working on volume for my template

[@c-c-laurin-lenschow]

In my experience Spitfire libraries (and the ARO series even more so than others) are incredibly quiet when compared to basically any other library out there. For a while I've always turned up every ARO instrument to the max of 400% straight away, which you can do with almost all of them without running into clipping problems. However, some instruments are an exception to that (like the snares from ARO High Perc or the Toms Ensemble from AROOF), so you can't turn literally everything up to 400%, which then would cause problems with retaining the natural balance. In the orchestral template I made recently I believe I set most ARO instruments to about 250% and then turned the rest down (if necessary) to match them. The exceptionally loud ARO instruments are below 250% because I don't want them to completely overshadow the rest and/or cause clipping problems - I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of the natural balance there. I hope these thoughts help!