AngelCityOutlaw

Nice. Congrats on the album I have subscribed

I am a firm believer that the Alain Mayrand video up top is the single best video on orchestration on the internet right now, no joke.

I started getting serious about music beginning with heavy metal music over 20 years ago, which Black Sabbath pioneered. Without Ozzy Osbourne, I'd not be a composer today. RIP Prince of Darkness

So a few things: Firstly, this isn't really very similar to the style of John Williams at all. But of course, John Williams is an absolute master; he'd already been composing 40 years before his first film score. Writing a piece in his style is no small feat. As for your mix issues, I'm not really hearing a problem with the overall levels on my end atm, but there are definite balance issues. Some of these are due to musescore/musesounds which right now are notoriously unbalanced and have limited ways of fixing that, but some can't be. What you could do is put the tracks in logic and automate volume to help them out and send them in to a new reverb. However, some of the other issues are related to orchestration and sample limitations. For example, you have, as a lot of modern composers do, all these big block chords with a melody over them. Bar 20 is a good example. Firstly, you have the trombones and celesta eating up a ton of the frequency spectrum by playing these huge chords, but then you ALSO have the trumpets coming in three-part harmony AND a String Melody in three octaves with the cellos taking the lowest octave. And everything there is playing mezzo piano. That's a recipe for mud, even in a live context I'm afraid. Then, in bar 22 onward, you still have trombone footballs, but now they are accompanied by absolutely massive harp chords. While that is happening, you have different things happening between bassoons + horns, violins, etc. Another issue is that the bass is entirely footballs in the piece, which does not give it any breathing room and becomes rather exhausting to the ear. "Melody + Chords" style Chord pads that have become popular in film music are actually generally considered bad practice not only because they're boring to play, but because the strings, low brass, and choir are basically the only ones good at playing them and these are large ensembles that take up tons of room in the frequency spectrum and stereo field. So you see beginners give this big, five-voice string harmony with a lonely oboe melody on top and then wonder why it's so hard to make the melody stand out even if the strings are at Piano. It's because the oboe is totally surrounded and your ear will focus on whatever line is thickest (the chords). If try to thicken the woodwind line, you're now competing for space with the strings. However, unlike samples, live orchestras have almost infinite dynamic range, and not only that, but they can stay at one dynamic range and still have a lot of modulation in the sound, which is something samples can't do. So chord pads with samples tend to just sound bad. With these pads mocked up with samples, you're always going to fighting the fact that your chords seem like they just can't play quietly enough, and if they can, the timbre is bad because you can't modulate the sound without screwing up the dynamics. TL;DR: You can fix some issues by loading it into a DAW, but the main problem is the writing/orchestration and samples suck at chord pads.

Pop instrumentation can be quite literally anything, but is most commonly based around a "band" rhythm section. Drumkit, bass guitar, and usually some chordal instrument like a keyboard guitar. Drums are very simple in most pop tunes. The simple "four on the floor" pattern is in almost every song. Kick drum on beat 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4.

Nice

What are you working on at the moment? What do you still want to compose?

Frankly, I would not take anything Arnie said seriously and would toss his book in the trash, where his "music" belongs as well. Perhaps set fire to it. It is also blatantly false when he says that "No beginner is capable of envisaging a composition in its entirety". Of course they can. Even laypeople can. They are capable of "envisaging" it, but that is different from "realizing" it entirely. The truth is that even if you plan out a structure or form from the get go, pieces tend to undergo metamorphosis as you actually work on them. The music reveals things to you that may not have come to you while you "envisaged" it and every piece is different. On some, you might have thought of a form you want beforehand and you wind up following it exactly. On others, you might realize partway through that actually, it would better if this "B" section didn't repeat after all and you have a better idea. And yes, it can even unfurl like a tapestry on a one-note-to-the-next basis. As an example, on my last album, some pieces I had a very clear picture of how they would be laid out before I even sat down to work on them. But on others, I did not. On one track I wrote, all I knew for certain was that I wanted it to start with some soft horns, and end with a big march that fades out into percussion similar to "The Flag Parade" by John Williams. I wound up having to change the ending because the company I wrote the album for required every track to end on a hit, but everything between the intro and ending was up in the air. It wound being the most popular and best-selling piece on the album — and is also my favorite piece on it.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately. I was studying the film scores and other orchestral recordings of the '90s in particular and trying to figure out, aside from things like tape, what made them sound the way they do. In researching it, I found that in the way it was recorded, mostly owing to technology of the time, is that the stereo field actually has a strong center. I don't think one gets the best results by trying to pan the orchestra precisely to where they would sit in real life, because it creates an image that is just too wide for a stereo recording. Which is a 2 dimensional thing, unlike the 3D sound you would experience if you were actually seated in a hall. It's like bass. As you mentioned, the low strings being off center feels wrong on a recording. I usually use a mono summing plugin to put the basses right in the middle. That's not "realistic", but it's what works for a recording. What you can do, is pan the orchestra basically according to its seating, but then use a mono plugin to slightly reduce the overall stere field by around 15% or so. You can still tell that the instruments are panned, but they all have more of a center image than they do "out of the box".

It kind of depends for me on exactly what it is. In many instances, I like hearing a performance come back from live players and the little nuances that make their interpretation unique. However, I will say that it can be frustrating working with musicians with pop and jazz backgrounds. They're not so used to part-writing and often don't read sheet music. Their music is often much more chord + melody based and improvisational, so they often think that the pitches I've written are merely guidelines when they are in fact deliberately chosen because of how they will work vertically, as a unit, with other lines that occur at the same time, and they struggle to understand why them changing the melody the way they have messes up the piece.

I'm not sure I get what you are referring to?

I have continuously had a problem where it fails to recognize that I have the libraries installed, so I have to open their stupid MuseHub program for it to rediscover them. The last time this happened about a month ago, the MuseHub site claimed I did not even have an account, so I suspected that now I may just lose access to the libraries I'd purchased. I emailed their tech support and got the most useless person in the world on the other side who I'm convinced wasn't even reading what I sent to him and was just throwing out pre-conditioned responses. Eventually, I took a gamble by going "Creating Account" and thankfully, it still had my information so that I could use the libraries until the next time it happens... Anyway, I really like the long articulations in the Berlin Strings and Winds and I've been using them on my upcoming album. They are a much cheaper alternative to the Kontakt libraries of course, but they too are woefully imbalanced. I have to crank the violas up in the mixer and turn the violins 1 down. Brass instruments do have some great sounds, but are rendered unusable by imbalances between articulations. It's unfortunate that Musescore 4 has been fumbled so badly and they seem to just not care about improving what seem to me fairly simple things to fix. If their customer service is an indicator, it seems that apathy is to blame.

Thanks Mark

Well, you may only need some timpani and bass drums there which is at least not a ton of percussion