I'm a bit disappointed with those samples, too. A lot of the orchestral stuff does indeed sound synth'y.
And I'm not sure I understand this sentence from the production update that mastadge posted:
"Last I spoke with him a few days ago he has 52 minutes of music scored so far. Once that is all complete, it gets turned into digital material and then from there he brings in the orchestra for live recording."
What is this "digital material"? Is it a synth mock-up of the entire score, which was then supposed to be converted to orchestrations for a full, live orchestra? Or is it material that was always going to end up in the actual soundrack, with some sections augmented with live musicians? From the samples, it sounds like the latter.
Probably the latter. It sounds like there's a real piano in there and probably a couple of woodwind soloists as well. It's just hard to really hear them when the synth strings are so overwhelming. If an orchestra wasn't in the budget (and it wouldn't have been if $100,000 was all they had to work with for the entire project), there were other options they could have explored, like using a reduced string section or even a string quartet. It would have made for a more intimate sound but there's no way they were going to get the epic sound which was probably asked for with just samples.
Hopefully the director is happy with what he got. As a fan of Jones, I'm disappointed.
Got a free promo copy from BSX for a recent sale foul-up, and it's a really lovely score. You can tell there's some synth strings in it, but it's not too bad, and there's some gorgeous melodic writing.
