Gwog's Appearance

Deep in the forests our heroes stand ready, facing an unknown terror that gurgles in the darkness of a small cave. Then suddenly, out jumps the horrifying creature - a small dopey creature with buck teeth and butterfly wings known only as Gwog. Scored and recorded in Finale 2007 with Finale GPO.

Gwog's Appearance

Cool themes! But the stuff around the themes is missing I think.

Sounds very cartoon-ish, but as I said a bit more things going on in the music would have been very nice! Something to hold the theme together which jumps from one instrument to an other.

Armin

I'm not missing anything from this. It's great!

Sounds pretty good :) Good job!

Hey Murr!

Great to see you posting again. I really enjoyed this track. It's well written and orchestrated, it's lively and interesting to listen to, you have a strong thematic, and you establish and manipulate a mood very well.

In terms of critiques, I would have liked a bit more development of the thematic material, but that's not necessarily practical within a single track. I also wonder how serious the mood is meant to be...as Armin pointed out to you, it sounds rather cartoony, so if you were intending it for a darker game then you have some serious revising of the presentation to do. In terms of your skills, I think that it's high time you left the comforts of producing in your notation software...you need to get a sequencing package of some sort (be it Cubase, Logic, Sonar, etc) and actually jump into the art of sequencing and producing your music. You have the writing skill, but your production values are holding you back at this point and it's a pity because you're not going to get work unless you can compete.

You can write in Finale, but then bring the MIDI into a sequencer where you have FAR more control over the MIDI information and things like panning, instrument placement, etc etc. The end result will be FAR more polished, and far more realistic, even with your current samples. Just something to consider.

Otherwise though, great little track, thanks for sharing it and I hope you stick around and share some thoughts on others' work too! :)

@ Armin: Thanks for listening. Are you referring to the transitions between parts? Or does the orchestration sound too thin? I do feel that maybe each section in the music feels a bit too brief. It kinda got away from me a bit in terms of timing, etc. I feel like this is something that would be remedied were I actually composing to video, but I think I could stand to build some musical "endurance" too. Anyway, thanks for commenting!

@AntiA: Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.

@JijGaat: Thank you!

@Marius: Hey thanks for listening! It's good to have some time to post again (or even write for that matter! :P). I can agree with you about building the thematic material a bit. Like I told Armin, I tend to blaze through each section while I'm writing and even though I don't have a problem with how they transition, I think they could stand to be drawn out a bit longer too. I actually was going for something cartoonish and bouncy - the idea being that Gwog is something akin to Jar Jar Binks. Kind of a stupid sidekick character that our main characters think is a scary monster until they actually see and meet him. I guess my description is sort of misleading. :P

Concerning production, I usually do export a midi into Cubase and produce from there. However, I think my disc drives are slowly starting to crap out on me because I'm having a horrible time installing most of my programs (after having recently reformatted and reinstalled my OS). Finale with the bundled GPO is pretty much what works for me right now, and I wanted to get this song out.

Anyway, thanks for commenting, and I'll definitely be listening around as I get time. :)

This just goes to show that even though GPO doesn't cost an arm and a leg, it can be made to sound great. Gary puts out a great product for the price.

When you export into Cubase, do you strip away all of the cc data that Finale adds or do you work around/with it all?

Nice little piece.

Ron

Thanks Ron. I normally try to work around the cc data and tweak it to suit my needs in Cubase. I tried to export into Cubase this time but I couldn't get the Finale bundled GPO to work as a regular VST plugin outside Finale and it's all I have right now (as a result of my technical problems mentioned above). So with this piece I didn't even edit in Cubase. Just straight Finale. I did try to do a little mastering on the exported audio file, but I'm definitely not a mixing/mastering expert and I know that it wasn't an ideal setup at all. Thanks again for commenting. :)

Hahah! This reminds me of so much heheh. I liked your use of tonality and the colour flourishes with the orchestra were REALLY enjoyable. So much fun!! ^^

Fantastic mood and tension!

i agree with marius about the production, but the arrangement and everything is great.

Thanks Kevin and coax! Glad you enjoyed it. :)

cool a fellow Finale user. i'm with 2009 now, waiting to upgrade to 2010.

but kudos on your bassoon writing, rarely hear that in music anymore nowadays

Well this is a great piece, very comical and cute. But as the others pointed out, you can definitely hear the lack of a DAW in this one.