Mahra's Theme

Short theme featuring string orchestra with piano obbligato.

Audio: http://soundcloud.com/danielbarkleymusic/mahras-theme

(Don't try the YC audio player - I attached a blank file.)

Mahra's Theme

A nice work, Dan! nice to see you again!

I won't talk about the production values, since it appears that you didn't try too hard, or simply don't have access to better sample libraries, so there's no point... Mixing is good though, and the reverb also works quite well.

The piece is working quite nicely, for what it is. Beautiful, and a little sad perhaps, with a sprinkle of fairy tale?... (loved the pizz in the end!).

Isn't this, btw, rather incidental music in style? Does it belong in this forum?

Hey Nick,

Thanks for the comments :)

Yea it should be in instrumental. I was half-asleep when I uploaded this, so it ended up here by mistake!

Please do talk about production values. This one was indeed done quickly, but in future for other projects I need to know as much as possible, so feel free to comment about that stuff.

(Obviously the piano sound wasn't the problem, as it was real piano :-p )

Thanks for your words!

i liked it daniel. simple and to the point with the right emotion all the way, well done, if this would be a background for a scene the production quality would be neglegible if emotion is so well put out.

if you'd like to make it better, maybe fade in and out of the violins, if you have modwheel sample it will sound even real if you imagine you're a violin player that bows this.

its actually hard to maintain the same emotion and compose it over a large time frame, since its usually a very singular moment, so the smaller the time frame the easier to compose-its the polishing after the moment is gone, that makes it high production, usually performance-wise.

Daniel,

Lovely piece you have here. Composition is awesome. You capture such a great emotional mood in this piece.

The strings are in dire need of dynamics, as the legato lines aren't working too hot. Try to fade out and in between some notes, add more or less vibrato at the climaxes (considering what your going for), tone it down at the softer sections. Try to mimic piece's you hear: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHXUnfJIoyo#t=1m08s

Listen to the dynamics and try to capture the same thing with your piece. It will take some time to tweak everything, but the product at the end would sound much better, considering also how great a composition it is.

The piano sounds fantastic. Nice verb on it and the accompaniment is also really nice!

Great work!

Wow, nice piece. :)

I agree with the production comments. A tad more fade in and out on violins, better legato between notes. The piano also seems to step on the violins a bit when it enters. Perhaps a split second of time between violin and piano would do it. Like a fermata/release kinda thing.

Thanks for listening and commenting guys.

Re the strings, believe me, I was using as much mod wheel as possible - I think I just overlayed too many patches which resulted in that somewhat chunky, slightly synthy sound.

Re the legato, I relied on PLAY's legato script (was mainly using EW strings). I think it's actualy a nice, understated, fairly neat legato, but you may be getting mixed up with the string accompaniment (i.e. not the melody) dropping off the chords before the end of some chords (which is intentional).

another good work i hear from u !!!!!!

bravo !!