Conductor

Conductor is a MIDI 2.0 virtual instrument plug-in host built around our patented divisi process. Its multi-tiered divisi UI lets you play and mix an entire virtual orchestra at once, in real time.

Our virtual instrument libraries are included. The one featured in our videos, “Orchestra Art Live,” consists of ninety-two discrete divisi stems across strings, winds, brass, and choir, plus numerous percussion and keyboard instruments, including a one-hundred-rank pipe organ.

“Orchestra Art Live” was recorded with the Pro Arte Orchestra at Phoenix Studio in Wembley, England. The choir was recorded in Lisinski Hall, Zagreb, and the pipe organ and nine-foot Steinway in the Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand.

Conductor is for composers, live performers, and anyone who wants the most responsive real-time virtual orchestra available, in a single application or plug-in.

Combining many discrete instruments with our divisi process has paved the way for some unique features. You can play polyphonic legato without the need for legato samples, and volume stays constant no matter how many notes are in a chord.

Best of all, we solved a nagging issue with conventional orchestral samples. In a real orchestra, the faster the notes, the less accurately musicians can hold perfect pitch and time. And the farther a player sits from the conductor, the longer the delay. Neither is noticeable at slow tempos, but both become very apparent on fast passages. Our patent-pending “Humanize” feature recreates these physics.

None of this is processing applied afterwards to a blended stereo section. Every divisi stem is a discrete recording, captured from the first session with these processes in mind, which is the reason they are possible at all.

Our patented IR/IIR processes drastically reduced the space requirements for an entire library by faithfully simulating mutes and other instrument conditions.

Our founder, Chris Stone, is equal parts composer and live performer. He scores to picture by watching the film and improvising to it in real time, direct to the DAW, combining traditional orchestration and conducting with live performance. He developed the technique to meet stringent delivery deadlines, at one point scoring five television series simultaneously.

In his words: “I need the ultimate, extremely fast, real-time virtual instrument composition tool that allows me to play the entire orchestra at once, combined with the most faithful representation of how the orchestra actually works and sounds.”

That is what Conductor is for. Playing the whole orchestra at once is what the divisi process and the multi-tiered divisi UI make possible. Playing it convincingly at speed is what Humanize is for.

The same capability serves live performance. With divisi switched off, a section’s stems can each take their own play range, so one keyboard becomes a full orchestral split.