Orchestra-ish, anyway. A small piece I completed some 5 days ago, and a thought occured just now to share it here and perhaps receive some meaningful feedback (comments from non musician friends are hardly ever useful :D). So here it goes. Think fantasy, video game-ish, adventure, RPG, perhaps film music etc. and tell me what you think. Any feedback will do (on production, composition, orchestration or whatever you fancy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwb1uQ_bEo
(I'm providing both YouTube link and mp3 version for two reasons: first, the upload to YT went as uncompressed AVI @ 16 bit, 96000 Hz, and frankly, I have no idea whether the quality is worse or better than in the mp3; second, I did some magic work to the picture in the YT vid and it looks plain awesome - thought I should share that, too)
Replies
Through the headphones this sounds balanced enough, mixing-wise. BUT, I want it to be wider. Felt like there was almost no panning at all, like sound is cluttering in the centre. Do adress that. Also your harp sounds a bit thin, if that makes any sense at all.
It has nice pacing, nice breaks, and would fit in perfectly for any fantasy game. With minor modifications it could be turned to a calmer, kind of "medieval bard music" thing. You may want to explore that possibility more, see what else you can make of it.
Now on the material itself. It's not that it's "bad", or "not enough", but I am getting the impression that the melody is almost "standard", if there was a universal fantasy theme, that would be it :P . To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing at all, I would gladly have this over many game soundtracks, and that is propably your goal as well. But let's say I wouldn't use this particular piece as the memorable music to represent my game or movie. Then again, most games and movies nowdays don't have memorable music anyway.
Spiros Makris said:
As much as I laugh at the idea at times, this was actually the plan here, sort of :D Perhaps it isn't memorable enough, but I wanted it to be very hummable. Duh. This sounds stupid, but you know what I mean.
As for panning, I'm not sure... I often try to force myself to use more space and end up using 25% left/right tops anyway. Probably because I work almost exclusively on speakers, where minor spacing is more than enough... or perhaps it's the classical listener syndrome - you aren't actually supposed to hear the 1st violin on your LEFT when you're a part of the stage, right? Anyway, will look into it. Sometime. I might just be able to manage that eventually.
Thanks for comments, everyone else. Bob - I have no idea where the trombones come from. They just felt cool there, so I kept them. They're in octaves, yes. Saul - I spoke to Elrond, I will be sending them a pack of tracks rather than a single one every now and then, so hearing me on the radio (snap!) isn't gonna happen in the near future. A few months, maybe.
No, but you *will* hear it on your left when in the audience :P
But the matter is not the exact placement of instruments but rather, space. Compare with a classical recording of an orchestra on your speakers and you'll listen the difference. ofc headphones suffer from the "inside my head" syndrome, but stil I think you can do better. Try something that sounds "extreme" on your speakers and share it with us (any compressed mp3 will propably do here).
Greg Brus said:
For some unknown reason ASIO give me a slightly different sound when I force the project and driver rate to 96 kHz. I decided it's better, so I stick to it (although it does eat my RAM like mad). No idea what the matter is, really.
As for the drum, you're totally right. It should probably be another, medium-sized drum doing the slow fill, while big boom only hits on downbeats. I'm experimenting a lot with drums lately and there's a ton I still need to learn, it seems.
By the way! Fun fact: apparently YouTube doesn't accept videos with audio @ 24 bit. Gave me quite a headache when I tried to upload this one several times during the day and got an error every time.
Absolutely superb, in almost every way. You nearly blew out my sub with that wonderful tympani. I took the liberty to use SoundForge to widen the stereo image, and also separated the the panning, just a tad. It sounds incredible. I also tested it on a automobile sound system. It couldn't be more impressive. The arrangement was captive, and soothing. Great job.
I had left the inputs on my interface turned up, from a previous project, forgot to set them back at their normal position, clicked on your link, put it on pause, left the room to go get another cocktail. Apparently my cat stepped on my keyboard and started the audio. Yeah, it was kind of exciting for a couple of minutes.
Well done, Greg. As a flutist who also plays African drums, I was hooked immediately!