Lord of the Castle

Okk..I've already posted this piece in the orchestral works,but since its more like a soundtrack a movie them and since I hadnt got much comments I post here too ,maybe somebody didnt hear it yet...

So the short story is that a guy found me to use some of my old music in his little flash game...I decided to write for him a completly new main theme

You can hear it and see the score here:

http://norby18.freeweb.hu

You can try the beta version of the game hear:

http://www.vidroid.com/files/games/VDLordoftheCastle.swf

Useful comments appreciated...:thumbsup:

(I didnt change back the bass clef to alto in the score as I explained in the other thread..for more information see there...I didnt want to write down everything again)

I expected more comments than this...why are you so unintrested??

Not uninterested... just don't know how to comment xD

Useful comments appreciated :S My comments are the farthest from useful xP

But I liked it :P

Norbert

You have a fine grasp of music techniques and your music is composed well.

There is more to this site though then just music. The members here read what people write in their posts and in other's posts. When they read what you may say in threads and find it to be less than encouraging, they are not inclined to comment in your threads after that.

There are so many different styles of music and tastes vary wildly, so when you say you don't like a piece (or many pieces) of mine, I just brush it off and continue on my musical path. But others here may read your comments and brush you off instead. That is just the nature of sites like these.

Whether you are right or wrong in your assessment of other's music has very little bearing on whether or not people here will seek out your music to critique. How you say it does matter.

A lot of people don't understand my music and I am fine with that. I do and I am the only one that matters in that regard.

We have a core group in this section of YC that has gone out of their way to try to comment on each other's works. We try to be as helpful as possible and most here will take the time to seek out the music of those that commented in their threads.

Take all of that as you wish. I do hope you will be a contributing member here in incidental music. This piece along with many of your others fit in this category very well.

Ron

Absolutely fair enough Ron! I totally agree and I apologize from everyone for my harshn comments, but its not good if nobody pay attention to negative commnets...its not a good way to develop...but yeah I could express my dont liking in some other ways...:thumbsup:

And when I ask for useful comments I ment dont just writre I like it , I dont like it..write down why...I used the word useful cause I dont want such comments like Beethovenguy wrote: I meant in the descreption that my piece 95% finished, and he offended me how I know that much exactly...this is guys not a useful comment...

I don't think there is any right or wrong though.

I mean yeah maybe you can judge a piece for orchestra based on musical theory, but the emotional content is still subjective and up to the listener (and artist.)

The best thing an artist can do is to become super confident in what he creates, and know inside that the music pleases him. Anyone else can have their opinion without it hurting the artists opinion.

Music making is in the end about perfecting your own internal views of whats right and wrong about music. It's about manifesting your inner thoughts and emotions, follow them and don't let others cloud your judgement!

You either agree with a criticism or you don't.

Anyway about this piece. I think it's very nice dynamically, but the melodies didn't really hook me, I won't remember this tune next time.

I would focus on making a memorable unique theme - that's the hardest part too.

I always struggle to be my music memorable in somewhat. I understand you but I think its memorable enough (at least for me hehe). Anyway I wrote it without any inspiration in a week so it was a great challange...always hard to write something without inspiration...Thanks for your comment. ;)

Hey Norby - It's hard to say anything really constructive to a finished piece so I suppose we can only say what we do and don't like :-)

Your piece is well orchestrated and put together. I think the reason why this piece isn't as memorable as it could be is because there it is very busy. Your main melody/theme gets bounced around the different sections really quickly and then seems to get abandoned without it really being developed. I think to be memorable a melody or theme just has to be quite simple...the excitement comes from the harmony/rhythm and development of the musical idea.

:-)

I agree with that...a good theme is simple and great...and memorable :cool:

your trills reminds me of warcraft 2 themes..good stuff there! composed very nicely, i dont really understand the development since i dont know whats the music for, it sounded partly action and partly on a stature.

good production values, i would put more effort to what the director/producer of the game wants the music to be, if he is more into content or just give him high quality samples with generic "castle" music.

i liked the game! too bad nothing happens after you kill all the people in the "castles"

I was having a look at your scoresheet and apart from the things that were said in the thread already there are several issues concering orchestration that you might want to think about:

Bar 1: You start in mf to mp but your mp3 clearly does not, you might want to readjust it to forte or louder :)

Bar 4-5: Why no low brass there? Piccolo: Lowest register which will hardly be heard at all and will not sound nice anyway, that part you've written for it there won't be heard at all

Bar 7: That tempo change won't work with a real orchestra, absolutely no preparation time you would never get the first few notes in the new tempo together, why no low strings taking over the downwards movements at the end of 8 just like the trombone?

Bar 9: Trombones, never write the lower Trombones over the higher ones, unless you have to, The flutes won't have any chance standing against the rest of the orchestra in 9/10 to present the melody. They need doubling

18: accent on 1 only flutes and low strings? why not fill up the middle?

26: Bass trombone: it's getting too low there to play these precise accents you want there, below Bb it's loosing pretty much of control

27: 3 trumpet over 1st/2nd, see above, not very trombone-like figure in the trombones

29: Why not double the flutes with the picc?

37: why force the trombones that high? those figures would be way more appropriate for horns

61: dynamics strings/brass? I don't really think pp string tremolos will work out against the brass in f

Hope that helps

All the best

Robin

In fact the game should have been released yesterday...I write know the ingame music...almost finished...but I was a bit...

This is a really neat and energetic piece... I liked it, and would agree with the above warcraft comparison. It has a bit of a fantasy-epic feel, I hope thats what you were going for. For one thing I would throw in a male choir doing some shouts in an off beat, it would add even more momentum :D but thats just me, ignore that ;)

- Good idea with the male choir phantom! I glad that you like it :)

The J:

The producer of the game wanted some kind of War-like music..a kind of march

So I'VE PUT A LOT OF EFFORT TO DO THAT WAR-LIKE EPIC THING!

Anyway I'm glad that you liked it too :)

Norby, it doesn't have to do much with timbre. Doubling flutes with piccolo is not a timbral decision but a matter balance and gesture.

You want to sound like film music here so you have to ride that horse. This is by far no impressionistic piece where you have to deal with those issues like timbral decisions in detail. What you've written here is a filmmusic-style tune which lives from mass of sound. Just as you mentioned "War-like epic thing". Those cues live from a decent tutti effect and dynamical range.

The things I mentioned above are more of a gestural issue than of a timbral issue. If you're composing a gesture like in 7/8 the downgoing movement which clearly aims for a target and you don't orchestrate it appropriately, it won't be very convincing. You're working with an orchestra there, not with a bunch of instruments which happen to play together, so apart from your "timbral decision" you should very much take attention to how you're working out musical gestures in your score. Just have a look at scoresheets from the masters of the past as well as current film composers and you won't find a single score that works the way, you're argueing for here :)

No arguing..No offense but you asked me...I answered

Thanks for your comment again.:thumbsup:

True, but in all honesty, I don't think such nuances in timbre will come out very strongly in your score, since you have so many instruments playing so often, especially in the low register. The more "colours you mix" at once, the more uniform and muddy the sound is likely to get. This is even more pronounced when there are no hierarchies of elements. So the question of balance is indeed also one of timbre: By leaving out more instruments in certain passages while doubling others, certain colours will come out more strongly. The thinner your textures are, the more your detailed timbral decisions will come through, the thicker they are, the more you have to lay your focus on dynamical balance to let your ideas still be heard, which I think is what Robin was pointing out with the difference between an impressionist piece and a "film music style tune". When you only have four single instruments playing in a considerate fashion, having a piccolo play a line in its low register may be a very fine timbral effect. When you have 15 different instruments playing wild stuff, all with their respective colours, it's probably a pointless difference to giving the same notes to a normal flute.

Of course, I'm arguing from the perspective of having it performed with a real orchestra there. With EWQL some things may work fine that wouldn't work otherwise. But it's a bit pointless to give much "orchestration" advise based on samples, since there it's more a technical problem of how you are able to work with your programs.

P.S. I strongly recommend against having double basses and trombones play in unison, which you often do. Of all bass instruments, those two mix least well and you generally won't get a homogenous sound like this.

"I strongly recommend against having double basses and trombones play in unison, which OFTEN do"

??? Nope:) If you see the score you can see that thay play most of times divisi....

No, I meant that a trombone doubles the contrabass, such as in measure 27, 31 onwards, etc. Furthermore in the very same passage (31 onwards), the voice leading between the tba/b-tbn group and the vc/cb group is a bit unclear. You constantly switch between doubling and playing distinct lines, all in the same register. Maybe those are partially also small mistakes (for example: Is that really supposed to be a G in the Cello in the beginning of measure 32?), but generally this will lead to a rather muddy bass, that may kind of sound like two independant bass lines with lots of parallel unisons, which usually isn't very desirable from a voice-leading standpoint. I'd try to be very clear about where you want two instruments to double each other, where they play independant voices, and where they play chords. Of course, in practice those things aren't strictly separated and it's perfectly normal to let one such thing turn into another and mix them up, but it should be a very considerate decision, if it isn't to sound somewhat arbitrary. Because if you jump too often between unisons/octaves and two distinct pitches, certain notes will stand out a lot more than others, while creating harmonical gaps at the same time, which interrupts the polyphonic lines and makes the texture as a whole less clearly readable/transparent. The same applies of course not just to this passage but to several other ones as well.

Of course I -wasn't- trying to say that that you're using the trombones all in unison, or the contrabasses. Sorry for that unclarity.

There's of course nothing wrong with several trombones playing the same line, and even less so when the basses do it. (Actually, I'd tend to write much fewer divisi passages for the double basses personally.) I'd also not be afraid of writing the basses down to the low C. You seem to be avoiding this, which is of course reasonable if you know only basses down to E are available, but every larger orchestra today is very likely to have at least one or two basses with a C string. And the ones that don't have one will probably just play it an octave higher on their own. Of course, the optimal choice would be to simply ask any orchestra that plays the piece what kind of double basses they have.

"Is that really supposed to be a G in the Cello in the beginning of measure 32?"

Hoops...yeah I was wrote it for accidently, thanks for noticing me..its an Ab

Dont afraid guys anyway..I 've downloaded nearly 40 books on harmony, counterpoint, voice leading, orchestration..and more so I will improve soon...

You give me good ideas, keep it up! :thumbsup:

Any more comments would be aprreciated guys...

The game is launched. You can try it here if you want:

Siege Master | Armor Games