Do orchestras tend to have too many instruments?

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Orchestral music was invented before electricity and before amplification / sound reinforcement.
Orchestras often were designed to play in a big specially designed venue that sympathised with the music (often designed to create a natural reverb that complimented the orchestras music).

A full orchestras can play to a big audience, and the experience can be very beautiful.

There are a couple of reasons why composers started to build sections of instruments (i.e. a section is a group of instruments that are the same and which play the exact same part in the composition).

Firstly there is volume, as the more instruments the greater the volume.

Secondly, when several same instruments play the same note, although they are playing the exact same note,
there will be a natural chorus effect created which is caused by the micro tuning variations in each instrument or player, but also micro timing variations in each player that makes up the group.

This natural chorus makes the instrument part much wider and more powerful.
And is a similar effect that has been used in rock / heavy rock and metal music (among other styles of music)
using the wall of sound theory (Philip Spectre).

So when composing using a computer / synthesizers and sample based virtual instruments,
if you are trying to recreate the sound of a real orchestra, i would recommend seeking out the best orchestra virtual instrument library that i can afford, rather than use synthesizers.

If sounding like a real orchestra isn't what you want, they sure, using synthesizers or any thing that make the sounds that you like is also valid and there are some excellent examples of this type of this type of re-interpretation.

Will Orbit comes to mind in particular.
Will Orbit Adagio for strings

Oh okay thanks! But I am using samples of real instruments though, so isn't that the same as the instrument samples, you would find in an orchestra library?

Hello Iron Pony

well, is it the same to use samples of real instruments compared to using virtual instruments compiled into a library.
Well that depends.

I started making music with computers in 95. During the early days, hard disc recording was still in its infancy, and only used by the top artists / studios (as it cost a fortune).

I started with an apple mac and a korg keyboard / synth workstation, doing everything with midi on the mac,
and only later on brought an Akai sampler for using samples on.

The early samplers were pretty much play back machines and didn't really have that many features apart from these basics. By 95 however, sampling tech had evolved a great extent to incorporate synthesis as part of the standard features that a sampler could use.

Sure, you could still use single hit or 1 shot samples, as you would if using the basic features of a sampler or sample / audio play back on a computer based DAW, however, single hits rarely would give you a realistic emulation of an orchestral instrument, as such instruments are very sophisticated in the way they are played and the variety of sounds that can be created by a skilled musician.

So, over the years, samplist experts started to develop virtual instruments that greater emulated the original instrument in terms of the variety of sounds and realism that the original instrument offers.

This i believe is no mean feat, especially where orchestral instruments are concerned, as to realistically emulate such instruments even when solo'ed as individual instruments would take considerable knowledge and skill in sound design, even when using a high price but high quality virtual instrument orchestral sample library.

Sure, nothing stopping you using midi or samples to get the rough idea,
and what you make may be brilliant in its own right

however if your objective is to create anything that sounds realistic
then much money needs to be spent (on buying high quality virtual instruments)
and a lot of learning on how to get the exact sounds out of the instruments as well as to
realise your composition will be required.

if interested in Orchestral Virtual Instruments
perhaps check out the following links

like i say, due to the complexity of the timbres, and the amount of work involved getting high quality realistic recordings of the instruments involved, these virtual instruments tend to be the most expensive on the market

but this is because they are often really professional and produce amazing results
personally i would buy in what you need, for example, if you want full orchestra, then
you will need virtual instruments that cover the full orchestra

if you just want cello, just get cello etc.

time and space sample retailer

Native instruments also presently have a series of orchestral virtual instruments on offer
native instruments

Sorry, i should have mentioned.

It is very hard to recreate a realistic sounding virtual instrument out of samples.
If you liken an instrument to be similar in many ways to the human voice,
imagine how many varieties of tones and sounds that a single example of a human voice.
Imagine trying to recreate that from one single audio sample.

Yes, quiet impossible.

People have made some forms of virtual human voice players, as found in Alexa etc.
But these are still in the early stages of development and still have a long way ahead to be able to
successfully emulate a human voice in all is variations.

This is the task that you will have when trying to recreate the various instruments found in an orchestra.
Not to dishearten you, as sure, perhaps you can still make great sounding music with what you are doing
and music is very subjective

however if you realistically want to emulate the various instruments of an orchestra then you really do need
to invest in the best virtual instrument library that you can find, ideally one that has been put together by an award
winning virtual instrument creator / producer / engineer / studio.

If you can't afford it at the mo, then sure, a midi synth can give you the basic idea
which will allow you to compose around even a simple GM sound set

if you can get it sounding good using a GM sound set, then it will sound brilliant when using
an expensive orchestral sound set from an award winning sample house

i think that orchestral instruments are perhaps one of the hardest sound sets to emulate
like the electric guitar, it really has a lot of variations involved, a lot harder to synthesise or emulate
with just a couple of samples.

These are sophisticated and complex instruments, that often involved a great deal of nuances, articulations, variations in volume, instrument reacting differently depending on how hard and even how you hit it.
Yes. something that rarely can be expressed in a single sample.

I would say that for almost all instruments (even the triangle sounds different depending on how hard you hit it)

single samples almost never will sound realistic

if that isn't a problem, then no problem. Just warning you rather than trying to dampen your hopes.
It is better to get a really good sounding orchestra at your fingertips than using just one or two samples and
then trying to make up for the lack of size with effects such as reverb or delay.

Orchestra's were and still are played in designed acoustic spaces designed to create a natural reverb that makes the orchestra sound even bigger, in a sympathetic manner. Very clever stuff too, designing acoustics, which is another complex subject. but i digress...

good luck.
perhaps if you wrote some music using a GM sound set Midi keyboard, once you have something that you think is really good, perhaps you could then try and find someone who owns the orchestral virtual instruments i mention, and get them to help you with realising your dream.

I can't say as to whether anyone will do this however.
Every one does what they do. I am afraid i do not own an top rate orchestral library.
So can't help you there. Sorry.

Oh yes, I want really good samples of real instruments, yes. I don't want to use a synthesizer.

But I am having trouble finding good samples of some instruments though. Like a harmonica for example. Is it possible to make a harmonica sound like this with samples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6BQKFs3-VM

I imagine decent harmonica sounds would be very hard to make, because of the odd playing technique of the instrument. My keyboard has a sample-based harmonica sound that's a bit bland but would do OK for "straight" harmonica, early Bob Dylan-style. Straight harmonica uses just the notes of the major scale that the reeds are tuned to, and sounds bright and cheerful.

Blues harmonica, like in your example, is another matter. In that style, half the notes are produced by "bending" the pitch of the reed down to a different note by forcefully sucking in air in a particular way. You hear the pitch wavering and gliding between notes, which I guess you could do with a pitch bend wheel on a keyboard. But the other problem is that the bent notes have a very different tone to the straight notes.

I don't know if anyone has yet come up with a sample-based harmonica sound for keyboard that can do the bent notes. I have seen sample libraries of recorded blues harmonica licks, but then you're stuck with using a pre-existing musical phrase.

Oh okay thanks. But are there samples of a harmonica out that that sound real, with the trilling and bends and everything, that can sound like how it sounds there? It was said before that I could create the trilling and bends, with clever editing, but can you and still make it sound natural?

I guess you could do that: take a recording of a harmonica lick, cut and paste the notes you want into a sound file, and do... er, something clever to hide the joins. Way beyond my editing abilities. But if you're keen on using harmonica in your score, it might be worth experimenting with.