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[trurkowski]

I dun did a new orchestral track!

http://soundcloud.com/trurkowski/sets/lambaste-comparison/

Lemme hear your opinions!  

[StevenOBrien]

Not bad! :D Feels like it could be a little bit longer, maybe have another entrance of the full orchestra after the piano/harpsichord duet.

This is just a personal preference, but I think at 0:23, I'd start this part out with just the cello alone, and then in the next repeat bring in the low brass, rather than have the low brass playing at the very beginning, just to add some variety. Have you done much study in orchestration?

If you're looking into composing orchestrally for games, I might recommend that you invest in better sample libraries over time.

Keep it up!
-Steve

[trurkowski]

Awesome, Thanks for the advice, and yes, I have studied orchestration before, but it wasn't too in depth. Most of my current knowledge is from listening and trying to re-create what I hear.

I'm very aware my libraries aren't up to standards, but I currently have no real source of income, so I have to work with what I've got. Its definitely one of the first things on my list

By the way, I did take the time to listen to some of your orchestrations and preludes. Really excellent stuff!

[Chris Polus]

Hey Tim, so funny how small the world is. I contacted you some time ago because of the demolition recording you did And here I find you again.

If one has an excellent ear and practices much in my experience people can produce almost identical results than studied people. It usually just takes longer. I haven't studied neither and I have a lot longer producing similar musical results than studied people just because I need to experiment where trained people know what works and what doesn't. But on the other hand I also heard tracks of studied people that might be flawless in composition but sounded super bad because they didn't know how to mix, how to use room reverb to their advantage, how to use proper articulations. So, everything is relative. As always

Speaking of reverb. I think your example is musically nice, but it lacks atmosphere. Everything sounds like recorded in a dry room and closely miked. All the instruments are pretty much loud and center. But as in sound, which you excellently know, it's the balance, the mix and the space that makes a recording come to live.

Try choosing a main instrument, like the piano. Make it less prominent, add more reverb so it sounds as if an orchestra was miked with a stereo microphone and not individual microphones near the instruments. Violins, celli, double basses are usually a little left in the panorama, as they are seated that way. Don't make them this loud, put them in the background, they'll support the sound just fine. Things like that make a big difference. A master of this craft in my opinion is Sean Beeson. Listen to his "epic" set.

http://soundcloud.com/sean-beeson/sets/epic/

Everything is done with sample libs, reverb and the mix. It's unbelievably beautiful. And you'll hear violins or flutes sometimes that are so faint because in the grand scheme of things they're not important but only color the result a bit. So they're not prominent, they're only little supporters of a general goal and sound. Follow Sean on SoundCloud and you'll have great examples every once in a while.

Chris

[trurkowski]

Hey Chris, glad you're on here too!

Seans epic songs are AMAZING! I'm going to see if I can do some of that in my mix. I'm definitely trying too hard to have everything heard, and I need to focus on breaking up my instrumentation better (just in general)

[trurkowski]

I made major improvements to the mix in general (and made a few instrumental changes)

http://soundcloud.com/trurkowski/lambaste-2nd-mix

This one's only going to be up for a few days then I'll replace my original with the new mix

Thanks for the feedback again!

  

[Chris Polus]

Hey Tim

WOW! It's a difference like day and night. Very good job on that new mix, it's definitely a biiig improvement! It has so much more ambience now.

For my taste, the piano is too much panned right now, and the cellos in the beginning too much left. I'd take the panning down a liiitle bit. The brass section feels too much in the back now. Really far away. Maybe too much.

But I'm impressed with the first huge step forward your mix took. Great work. What is your impression? You like it better?

[rofklaw]

Hey man,

First of all let me say there are a lot of good musical ideas here. You sort of have a natural way of building and releasing tension, and developing ostinato (repeating patterns). I genuinely enjoyed your piece.

Chris had a lot of good things to say when it came to mixing your tracks. I agree with most of what he said, but I would like to add a few things. I worked as a studio engineer for a couple years, so this is generally based on what I experienced.

A good way to give the piano "space" without panning it really hard in one direction is to separate it into two channels. Whenever I mic'd a real piano, I always had one microphone on the treble side and one on the bass. I would usually hard pan them accordingly. This eliminated the weirdness of having a piano all in one ear while still giving it a unique space.

While we are on the point of micing, Cello/Bass/Viola are usually on the Right (audience perspective) and Violins on the Left. This however is an American invention. In Europe, you tend to have half the violins, cello, and bass on the right (audience perspective, again) and the other half of the violins and viola on the left. Here is a reference for the setup of your typical American Orchestra: http://www.rpo.org/s_7/s_8/p_6/Orchestra_Set-Up/

Reverb is always a good way to give a sound more presence. I use it all the time. However, you have to make sure to use it in moderation. Too much reverb can cause a song to get muddy. I think that might be part of the problem with your horns in your second take. Again, reverb is fundamentally a good thing, just don't use it like Paula Dean uses butter.

Otherwise great job. Looking forward to hearing your next mix!

[Chris Polus]

Great feedback rofklaw.
So you really have the piano's treble hard panned on one side and the bass hard panned on the other side? I assume there's some kind of natural bleeding over to the other mic? Or how would you set this up? Very interesting to hear from a real recording engineer.

[trurkowski]

Awesome, Rofklaw thanks for the extra feedback! I'm going to do another mix tonight.

Also, the reverb is definitely the culprit in making the horns seem too distant and muddy. I'll try to find a good middle ground!

Also, it seems very strange to have a piano's treble and bass hard panned so I'm going to give it a whirl but I think the main issue is most likely going to be the fact that my piano is mostly bass until the duet.

Getting the piano will probably be my main focus for the next mix.

Also to answer Chris

I was extremely satisfied with my second mix, but if going back and revisiting will make it even better; I have no problems doing just that.

[JudahRoydes]

If panning the piano treble and bass hard left and right sounds a little strange you could try pulling them a bit closer to center. May be ten percent. Then sum both channels to a mono track and keep the mono track centered.  I would have the panned tracks quitter than the mono channel.

[rofklaw]

Chris

There are a few ways to set this up. The two most common ways were like this:
1.) If the piano was open or if we were recording it alone, we would usually put two condenser microphones 4-5 inches away from the strings themselves. One near the treble strings and one near the bass strings.

2.) If the piano was closed we had special hemispherical microphones called PZMs. They could be affixed to the inside of the piano lid. This was excellent to use during ensemble performances because there was almost no bleed.

And yes if hard panning isn't your cup of tea you can always just soft pan. The guy who taught me how to work studio equipment would always say "Mixing is an art" and he is right. You have to use your critical ear to decide what sounds best for the song.

[Chris Polus]

"Mixing is an art" and he is right. You have to use your critical ear to decide what sounds best for the song.

When you start out this is actually one of the worst things you can hear, lol. I know when I started music production and had no clue. I looked on the internet for THE RECIPE or any tutorial that could show me how to approach THE WAY of composing a song. Surely there must be the way of composing and mixing and everything. But everybody does it differently. There's no right, no wrong. Yeah now that I know that of course I built up my own arsenal and I hear a lot more what's going on as I can separate sounds I hear. In the beginning there was just information overflow. It's really nice to see how far you've come. I'm still far from pro level but I feel I really learned lots of things along the way, built my own techniques, have gear I like, some I don't like, things I hear and like, things I hear and don't like, and things I obviously don't hear. When I listen to microphones or different mic pres and switch back and forth, I often don't hear that much of a difference. But one always needs something to level up, right?

In the meantime: mixing is an art. Use your ears, not the level meters 

[trurkowski]

Hey Guys, I updated the track!

There is much less reverb on the horns and I brought them up in the mix a little bit. With the piano I duplicated the track and put a high pass on one panned right and a low pass on the other panned left (not hard panned) The filters were both set to meet at around 500-600 hz at 6dB/octave.

I like the outcome.

I also changed panning around a little, changed my horns to have much less verb and room tone.


Here's all three mixes in a set http://soundcloud.com/trurkowski/sets/lambaste-comparison/

[Chris Polus]

Nice improvement with the horns. I quite like it. I also hear how you separated the Piano left/right. For me it's a little too much but this is my personal opinion.

The cellos at 0:24 still sound a little too dry for me. They play very cautious but I can very much hear their attack and release. At this distance, at this volume I think I should only be hearing a vague fabric of the cellos. Again, personal opinion Try to put most of the instruments in the same "room" by adjusting the reverb settings similarly, only varying them a little bit to get the desired effect. Now I don't know your settings of course, I can only judge based on what I hear.

Overall nice volume and mix, brass are much better, more present, more "in the same room". Only thing I think is that brass, when they have that kind of a staccato, they should be much louder than the piano. So maybe the volume of brass vs. piano could be adjusted. I don't think brass can produce this kind of forceful tone while being soft in volume

But it's a huge difference between your first mix and this one! Quite a nice ambience. And as you can hear, much of the "cheap sounding" samples is gone as it dissolves in the reverb of the room and suddenly doesn't sound that bad after all. Good work!

[trurkowski]

Last mix, I'll definitely use what I learned here on my other tracks, I seriously need to remix that fake RPG trailer music.

Thanks for all of the feedback everybody! This is something thats just gonna take practice for me to consistently get right!

I really wish I had better horns for something like this They tend to be what I struggle with the most.

http://soundcloud.com/trurkowski/sets/lambaste-comparison/

[Chris Polus]

Thanks for all of the feedback everybody! This is something thats just gonna take practice for me to consistently get right!

Yep, the only thing that works for me, too. Practice, practice, practice...

 

cheers

[trurkowski]

Cheers!