Many churches desire to have the full sounds of an orchestra to accent their services. However, the available talent within the church may not include musicians that are qualified to play the instruments necessary for this. Praise and worship are still essential facets of modern life, though, and everyone remembers the first time they stepped through a church’s massive doors and into the soaring atmosphere of a choral concert or organ recital. Many churches today find themselves unable to provide live orchestral accompaniment for the musical portion of the service. Fortunately, the digital age has supplied a solution.
Sample Libraries
Worship and music have been inextricable from one another since before the advent of recorded history. When you walk into a church the choir’s music is an unconscious attendant to the experience. Churchgoers have come to expect the atmosphere, to take church music as a given without considering the time and skill poured into individual performances. Sample libraries, digital sound databases popular with composers of film scores, are a way for a worship leader or a worship team to capture the majesty of orchestral and choral music without the prohibitive costs of retaining professional talent.
This software also offers the ability to maximize a recording studio’s performance. Rather than paying musicians each time they enter the studio to record, the entire session can be supplemented through the use of pre-recorded digital files.
Sample libraries contain exhaustive recordings of musical performances made by industry-leading musicians and vocalists. These performances can be adjusted and fitted to add to the impact of worship music. Churches, youth groups, and conferences can make good use of this music for worship. It brings the grandeur of the world’s great opera halls and cathedral choirs to even the most humble building. Every aspect of an orchestra’s performance is captured by state-of-the-art recording equipment and made available to the database’s owners.
ProjectSAM
ProjectSAM has led the industry since its founders, composer Maarten Spruijt, composer-arranger Marco Deegenaars, and songwriter Vincent Beijer, came together in 2001 to found it. It has proprietary access to a huge archive of choral and orchestral music for worship and other purposes. They have been immensely popular with film and game composers throughout the last decade. Renowned and award-winning artists like Carter Burwell, Daniel Licht, and Bill Jolly have all made extensive use of ProjectSAM’s libraries.
ProjectSAM’s product line includes the popular Symphobias I and II, the True Strike series of percussion recordings, Organ Mystique, and their premier Orchestral Essentials. Worship in music is ideally positioned to take advantage of ProjectSAM’s depth and utility. A church’s range of musical expression and its need for awe-inspiring, cinematic sound production make it a perfect place to explore the capabilities of ProjectSAM’s software packages. Even industry evaluators like MusicTech have praised the company’s releases.
Based in Utrecht, ProjectSAM has the benefit of its founders’ experience. All three have worked and currently work in composition for games, television, and film. The breadth of their experience has heavily informed the quality of their software and of the recordings selected for preservation in each sample library they maintain. While none have direct experience with worship in music, their software is tailored to meet virtually any requirements.
Orchestral Essentials
Orchestral Essentials is ProjectSAM’s essential scoring software. It offers the ability to incorporate orchestral percussion instruments, piano, strings, woodwinds, and brass all together at one time. It is immensely popular among film and game scorers because of its versatility and because of several unique recording features, like its natural recordings of instrumental sections playing in concert. This genuineness makes it perfect for a worship leader or worship team looking to improve their center of faith’s atmosphere through music.
The software is composed of several exhaustive musical libraries. These libraries are incredibly diverse and flexible. They contain recordings of percussion instruments of various origins, woodwinds, brass sections, string sections, and many others. Music meant for praise and worship can benefit from the meticulously planned program and its wealth of recorded sound. Piano, harpsichord, and harp add a particularly appropriate range of musical expression to the panoply of available sound.
The music available through Orchestral Essentials is a firm cut above synth and keyboard tunes. It’s also playable via keyboard once the computer on which it is installed is hooked up to an appropriate instrument. There’s an intuitive and user-friendly process for assigning certain recorded notes to certain keys. This lets a single keyboardist do the work of an entire orchestra. The software offers a great base package of samples, and the sound quality and clarity are unmatched. While the sample selections may be a good beginning, for the price of just $449 you can have the full sound of an orchestra at your keyboardist’s fingertips. Combined with an appropriate sound system it can completely change the mood of a place of prayer or of a given sermon.
Conclusion
Prayer and music are symbiotic in their function. Both reach into people to their best natures, touching deeply held values and drawing up powerful emotions. Software like ProjectSAM’s Orchestral Essentials lets clergy and laypeople take a more decisive hand in the role of music in their spiritual lives. From the tinkling of a lone keyboard can emerge a full orchestra’s performance. It’s far, far less expensive than engaging an orchestra even for a limited run of performances, and the customizability of the software is greater than that of even the most versatile orchestra. The testimonies of noted composers across several mediums only serve to reaffirm the obvious: Orchestral Essentials is a natural fit for the music played in houses of worship around the world.