From my vantage point I continued to wait for the invention of what I Iike to refer to as an "orchestra in a box".

It seemed to me such a conceptually easy thing to do that I was very shocked that it never really did happen.

Some programs pretended to be such a thing, but so far as orchestral mock-ups are concerned (in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars of orchestra time must be spent), they just simply were not up to the job.

To date it never has actually been done. 

The closest that has come to it is definitely Vienna Orchestra's product line.

They have, weirdly enough, been the one's to set the industry standards.

But it did not take long to figure out that the string articulations were going to be a serious problem.

Many solutions have been tried, but none has yet found market dominance.

Of course, on top of this there has been a sort of conspiracy between orchestras and their musicians.

This is because one synethesist can easily and inexpensively score movies without the need for those currently doing the job.

That is to say, I can single-handedly put a bunch of fellow musicians out of work so that all of the money that they are now making will, instead, come to me.

So synthesizers and samplers which are such an obvious choice for movies and videos are relegated to the netherworld due to union bosses and their patronage considerations instead of who can produce the highest quality of product for the most reasonable price.

Mark Snow composed for the X-Files, at the rate of one show per week for years, and showed just how good a job could be done with sufficient expenditure for top quality equipment to play on and record on, combined with his very masterful orchestral skills.

For me this was kind of a turning point, where I could see that the synthesizer was finally coming of age.

But, what has happened since that time can only be considered totally mind-boggling as we have gone the next step to the three hundred piece orchestra, with thick, rich strings, and full choir with multiple male and female choruses as well.

Suddenly, I am able to compose, not for a $20,000 per hour 110 piece orchestra (at no cost to me thanks to sampling technology), but, instead I can create my own $50,000 per hour orchestra and then use the huge masses of sounds in ways which simply have never even been thought of because there simply was no way to do the things which we are currently able to do.

And this while the technology is still very much only in it's infancy.

This is truly a remarkable thing, and something which I most definitely want to be involved with at as many different levels as I am able.

We can clearly see great things coming up in the near future.

Right now, the trend is to use multiple synthesizers.

This was always the case, and was the purpose of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) in the first place, but never has it been so user-friendly and with multitudes of truly marvelous sounds, with the ability to combine entire sets of sounds seamlessly, even live, in addition tio numerous ways to shape the sound, which are borrowed from sound synthesis, even while you are playing the piece or writing the piece in real time.

It's 7:25 p.m.

I am going to take a break.