(this is a mail i got from one of the Composers of Tomb Raider)

From: "Peter Connelly (Core Design Ltd.)" 

The JV1080s are the heart of our music setup. The JV90 being the mother
keyboard. At the momemt I'm using the Orchestral expansion board quite a
lot and find it fantastic. If you use the right type of sound for the
right sequence, and spend ample time programming it to sound as if it
were played by a real player (plenty of controllers), the results can be
extremely convincing. But sometimes time is against you. I tend to edit
the sounds a lot to make them fit in just right, or I'll turn off
uneccessary tones on some patches to economise on polyphony. It's not so
bad when you have a few units, though. Sometimes I'll use the JV90
solely for polyphony-eating parts, big pianos, harp runs, etc. At the
moment, for the orchetral pieces I'm doing I have a standard setup on
the JVs, which places the instruments of an orchestra in their relevant
panned positions. And during each piece I may make some adjustments,
depending on what sounds I use for that piece. For example, if a track
has a flute and a harp which I usually pan towards the left, I will try
to make them more stereo as it will sound weird during a game if the
music is playing to the left. In bigger pieces I try to let the
instruments talk to each other so I get a nice even spread across the
stereo field. I use the effects a lot on the JV and rarely use the extra
outs. When a track is complete I put the lot through an external effects
unit to make it sound as all the instruments are playing in the same
space. I've tried linking the units together so they can share
polyphony, but for my needs this is too time consuming and limiting,
because the same part on each unit has to have the same sound. What I do
is use it as a seperate unit giving it its own MIDI IN/OUT using the
MusicQuest 8PORT/SE. This way I can have 32 seperate instruments playing
together rather than 16.

Boards installed :

		4x Orchestral (1 in each unit, Martin has a JV1080 too)
		Vintage
		Session
		Bass and Drums
		World
		Techno
		2 x Vocals
		Voice exp (JV90)

From: "Peter Connelly (Core Design Ltd.)"

I would use various sources for doing sound FX (which is part of my =
work
criteria), including the JV1080. A lot of the time you would probably
not be able to tell it is a JV as I sometimes tend to treat the =
captured
waveform heavily in SoundForge. We have a lot of CDs here with FX on
them, which we use as raw material.

There is one project I worked on with a company called Alien Leisure
that used 99% of the JV, including the soundtracks. It is an arcade
Poker game (not yet released) with a big jackpot (=A31000 the last time =
I
heard), but you will only really see this game in Casinos and similar
establishments. I can't really say much about it yet, though.

I have programmed a few sounds from scratch on the JV also.

The main reason I take a preset and adjust it is due to time =
restraints.
Re-programming a preset doesn't always mean I just tweak envelopes, =
etc.
Sometimes I change the waves, filters, FX, etc. It's better for me this
way as it saves a lot of time.

Controllers : I use the most common ones, Pan, Mod, Sus, Vol, Effect
depth, All notes off, program change, etc. There is not many times I
need to use the others, except if I need to control res, filter, etc. I
use them ones a lot on my AN1x.
Breath Control : Never had much use for it, yet.

The soundtracks on Tomb raider are mainly JVs (with expansion boards,
especially the Orchestral)

Regards,

Peter Connelly