David Vanacore uses Lexicon to get close to reality

Vanacore works from a personal studio in his home; it is intricately wired to provide a number of different ambience spaces all routed back to the control room/living room. He notes that often he has to create the sense of large orchestral spaces using only keyboard-based instrumentation, and must ensure that his underscores complement each show’s musical signatures. “A good recent example of that is The Contender. Composer Hans Zimmer scored the theme using a strong emphasis on French horns — a very Gladiator type of sound,” Vanacore explains. “I have to thread my scoring in and out of his theme. Sometimes I’ll subtly replace the real French horns with synthesizer ones. That’s when I realized what the 960L is really capable of. It gets me incredibly close to the sound that Hans achieved using eight actual French horns in a large studio. Viewers never hear the shift from the real ones to the synthesizers, because the Lexicon’s sound is as real as it gets. All the dimensions of a large orchestra are in that system.”

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