Best Service The Score By Sonuscore

The Score offers a one stop, all‑you‑can‑eat, scoring buffet for composers in a hurry.

If your musical interests include music‑to‑picture composition, Sonuscore will be a familiar name. With both a range of their own virtual instruments, and a multitude of instruments developed in collaboration with the likes of Native Instruments, Steinberg and EastWest, Sonuscore’s product résumé is very impressive. The latest addition to that catalogue, released in partnership with Best Service, is simply titled The Score. So, when it comes to scoring your next film, TV, advert or video game cue, what’s the score with The Score?

Theory Of Evolution

In essence, The Score represents a substantive evolution of Sonuscore’s popular The Orchestra instrument, but with a nod in the direction of Elysion in that the sound set reaches out beyond just conventional orchestral sounds. Like these earlier products, The Score can be instantly gratifying, as a few simple chords can conjure a mightily impressive multi‑instrument arrangement. However, under the hood it can also provide the user with a very deep and powerful compositional toolkit. If I attempt to cover all of the depth The Score offers, this issue of SOS might burst. What follows, therefore, is a swift overview alongside a deeper dive into one or two of the more important elements of the feature set.

Feature Presentation

In terms of that overview, The Score includes a 20GB sample‑based sound library that offers 160 individual sounds. These are organised into five categories: Orchestral, Synth, Band, World and Misc. The user can access these through three different Kontakt front ends.

The first of these provides simple playable single articulations with the option to add effects and, while 20GB could perhaps be considered ‘compact’ in modern sample library terms, The Score’s instruments really do sound very good. In part, this might be down to some sensible design decisions. For example, with the section‑based orchestral instruments, you get ensemble‑style instruments such as ‘low string sustains’ and ‘high string sustains’ rather than individual bass, cello, viola and violin options. The same ‘low’ and ‘high’ approach is used for the other instrument groups.

The second is the Ensemble engine. This is similar in concept to The Orchestra, but the ensemble now offers 10 individual instruments — each with their own sequencer options — rather than five. This engine is supplied with 120 style‑based ‘Stories’ (presets) and, whether it’s mystical and magical, ominous and tense, or joyous and magnificent (and plenty of other moods/emotions as well), there is something to suit. Within each preset, keyswitches provide real‑time switching between five different sequencer variations. These are consistently organised to provide an intro, two main performances (with increasing intensity), an outro and a single note/chord ending. Stories are also fully editable by the user (you can change all the sequencer contents) and you can create your own Stories from scratch.

The Stories presets for the Ensemble engine span a whole range of musical styles and are fully customisable.

The third engine — Melody — allows you to load either one or two of the individual instruments and then provides a toolset to generate melodic ideas. As we will see below, the Ensemble and Melody engines can share chord sequences, making it easy for the generated melodic lines to sit perfectly with the ensemble performance. As it’s these Ensemble and Melody engines that are the highlights of the creative process, I’ll focus on these below.

Both of these engines also offer full MIDI export capability so the performances you generate can be moved to multiple MIDI tracks within your DAW for further editing and/or triggering alternative virtual instruments should you wish. In use, The Score’s RAM demands are modest, with even the Ensemble engine presets generally coming in under 300MB. However, with 10 instruments plus effects in full flow, users of older host computers might need to keep an eye on the overall CPU demands, especially when running multiple instances.

All Together Now

The UI for the Ensemble engine is split into three tabbed views: Find, Shape and Play. Find provides a neat browser with genre, style and time‑signature tagging for both preset and user Stories.

With a preset loaded, The Shape page shows five of the instrument slots at one time (you can switch between instruments 1‑5 and 6‑10) with typical mixer functions including volume, pan, solo, mute, and a reverb send. Clicking on a channel header opens a dedicated instrument browser, while the channel FX buttons open a panel for adjusting EQ, attack and release, and three instrument‑specific effects slots that offer a selection of common effect types. You can also access the Global FX options on the right of the UI. These offers a compressor, reverb (with convolution options) and an LFO. When engaged, the various ‘chain link’ icons within the display let you choose between the mod wheel or this LFO for individual parameter modulation.

From a performance dynamics perspective, the key control elements are the left and right ‘handles’ found within each fader strip. These define the minimum and maximum volume range of each individual instrument in response to the mod wheel, allowing you to easily modulate the dynamics of the whole performance. You can also invert the positions of the handles if you want specific instruments to get quieter as the mod wheel position is increased. As a visual reference, the current mod wheel position is displayed on the far left alongside the currently selected keyswitch (the five performance variations are triggered via C1 to G1).

Each of the 10 instruments within an ensemble features its own sequencer engine.

The actual performance details for each instrument — including the different settings used for each of the five keyswitches — are configured within the Play tab. As shown in the screenshot, sustained instruments have an envelope‑style sequencer, while non‑sustained sounds use an arpeggiator‑meets‑step‑sequencer approach. Again, this sequencer overview is split into two lots of five instruments. At the base of the page are global choices (they apply to all keyswitches) over the sequence length (one, two or four bars) and time signature (4/4, 3/4, 5/8, 6/8 and 7/8) with normal time, half‑time and double‑time switches also available. At the top of the UI, you can add two levels of accent to individual steps and the chain link icons shown here can be used to force non‑sustained instruments to follow these accents on playback, providing a cohesive rhythmic sense to the whole arrangement. Accents can be configured differently within each of the five keyswitch patterns.

The sequencing engine provides plenty of options for customising the playback for each instrument.

Double‑clicking on one of the instrument headers on the left side of the display opens a detailed editing view for that sequencer. There are a whole host of options here including setting the step duration for non‑sustained sounds (from quarter notes to 32nd notes and some triplet options). In all cases, you can define the upper and lower mod wheel dynamics on a per‑step basis. For non‑sustained sounds, various standard arpeggiator patterns are available, you can choose for an individual sound to only respond to certain notes within the incoming MIDI chord (for example, top note, middle two notes, bottom note, among a list of other possibilities), or you can choose a Custom option, which actives the lower ‘dot’ display offering full note triggering customisation — including multiple notes or no notes — for each individual step.

Amongst a number of other features contained within the Play page is the Chord Studio button. Once opened, you essentially get a playground to audition individual chords or chord sequences for use with the current Story. For chord sequences (up to eight bars in length), you can also add a dynamics (mod wheel) curve and set chord inversions. Each of the Stories includes an example chord sequence to start the ball rolling.

The Ensemble engine’s Chord Studio lets you experiment with chord sequences while you refine the performance.

The Play page also provides access to two forms of MIDI export. First, you can drag and drop from the mini keyboard icon (located top right) into your DAW. This creates 10 individual MIDI clips, the contents of which reflect the full MIDI note output from each sequencer engine during the last performance pass (triggered live or via a pre‑recorded MIDI clip). Obviously, once exported, they can be edited and/or used to trigger any virtual instrument. Second, if you create a chord sequence within the Chord Studio, you can do two things with it; either copy it into an instance of the Melody engine (more on this in a minute) or drag and drop the full chord sequence to a single MIDI track from where it can trigger the full ensemble and be edited further.

Take The Lead

Many of the Stories include melodic‑style parts but The Score’s Melody engine provides options for generating a more obvious melodic topline. Presets for this engine feature either solo or pairs of individual instruments with options to create your own pairs via the engine’s Sound tab. However, with instruments selected, the real fun is to be found on the Melody tab. This features a Chord Studio‑style chord sequencer that includes the option to import a sequence (via the receive button located bottom right) that you have already created within the Chord Studio.

The Melody engine provides a flexible toolset for generating melodic ideas suitable for use with a chord sequence imported from the Chord Studio.

With a chord sequence configured, clicking the Generate button will create a melodic phrase that works over the whole eight‑bar chord sequence. You can repeat this process as many times as you like until something inspires, and you can audition the results directly within the window with simple block piano chords provided for musical context. You can switch the melody creation algorithm between four different modes (Easy, Complex, Slow and Triplets), and define the note range to be used. However, clicking on the ‘three dots’ icon located top right opens a panel where you can customise a whole range of other parameters that will influence the melody generation process.

For each two‑bar chord block, the A‑D buttons allow you to create four alternate versions, and you can switch between these to refine the phrase or to create variations. In addition, double‑clicking on the chord sequence opens a full MIDI editing environment if you want to manually tweak the generated melody. As in the Chord Studio, you can add a dynamics envelope. And, of course, MIDI export lets you drag and drop the melody into your DAW for further editing and playback. This engine provides a clever dollop of assisted musical inspiration while still giving you complete control over the final results.

It really can be mind‑blowingly easy to realise a fully formed arrangement in real time.

Keeping Score?

The more I used the The Score, the bigger my smile became. Working your way through some of the preset Stories is instantly gratifying; you just voice a few chords (simple or complex; the engine copes fine), modulate the dynamics with the mod wheel, and switch between the five performance variations with the keyswitches. If you were looking to generate a short (60‑90 second) idea for a cue with intro, development and outro, it really can be mind‑blowingly easy to realise a fully formed arrangement in real time. The Stories themselves span a huge range of musical styles but I have my fingers crossed that Sonuscore have a plan to keep delivering fresh Stories; whether free or paid, I’m sure users would find great value in that.

Sonically, the overall ensemble results are very impressive for both pure orchestral and more hybrid scoring duties. The orchestral sounds are somewhat less raw than those in The Orchestra but, as a consequence, perhaps capable of being used in a wider range of contexts. If your project is unlikely to have a budget for a real orchestral recording, The Score would let you produce an end product that could be suitable for many broadcast contexts. And, of course, MIDI export lets you use your The Score creations with other sample‑based sounds should you wish/need to.

However, there is more to The Score than the instant gratification provided by the preset Stories. Under the hood, the user gets a tremendous amount of control to customise how the performance engine does its magic, and what’s really impressive is just how accessible that control is. The key here is the UI; The Score provides a very refined workflow experience. Users that spend a little time getting familiar with the full feature set will undoubtedly reap the benefits. This is powerful stuff.

Comparing The Score to other products, the most obvious candidates are Sonuscore’s own The Orchestra (still a great product but The Score undoubtedly improves upon the concept) and EastWest’s Orchestrator. The latter is part of both the Hollywood Orchestra Opus Edition and Fantasy Orchestra. Both, at full price, are more expensive than The Score (although they are also available through the very affordable subscription‑based Composer Cloud+ option), but also provide a much more comprehensive orchestral library. However, as EastWest partnered with Sonuscore to develop the Orchestrator, the conceptual similarities between these two ‘performance’ engines is hardly surprising.

Yes, Sonuscore’s latest offering will be beyond a casual purchase for many potential users, but for those prepared to fully embrace all the flexibility provided by the feature set, it packs a considerable punch for its price. With an impressive ensemble sound and a slick workflow, this is a hugely inspiring platform for composition; The Score scores on many levels.