REQ: Sound Magic China Ensemble

China Ensemble is designed to represent a big traditional Chinese orchestra. Presently, very few people are aware that modernized traditional Chinese orchestras might even be larger in scale compared to the full symphony orchestras we commonly see.

Sampling such big orchestras is never an easy task, even with enough money, time and technology. To make things worse, the combinations/settings of the instruments used in the orchestras also differ in different areas of China. So, nowadays, the Chinese orchestras found on the market usually fall short of the standard ones—they lack both in depth and details. That’s why we feel it is our job to represent a full, detailed traditional Chinese orchestra.

We began the project 12 years ago, after a detailed plan was made. The project is so big that it seems to be an endless one. As the combinations/settings of the instruments are quite different in different parts of China, we need to record the same instrument ensembles with different numbers of players. Thousands of players, hundreds of recording sessions, hundreds of people who work in front of the computers and million-dollar bills/costs consisted of the major memory of this remarkable project.

This deeply sampled collection has over 6,310,000 samples, 24 instruments ensemble sections. Every instrument ensemble section is recorded with multi velocity layers, round-robin samples and multi-microphone positions.