My sister in law has been working on a Christmas video project all month, I offered to write a background soundtrack for it. It ended up being a medley of traditional Christmas carols and hymns, some well known and some obscure.
There is some great music with orchestra and band and a lot of shitty music with that combination. The success doesn't seem to be much of a question of genre, when I think of Snarky Puppy or Nightwish (which is kind of a semi-cringy guilty pleasure for me, but nonethless the cheese factor, the orchestrations work with the band, while some of it is just a "keys/synth substite" orchestration), which I think to both a pretty good job. The Snarky Puppy is a bit dearer to my heart, because the band and orchestration seems to more intertwined then just putting orchestra on a band (which is something a lot of metal/prog acts are guilty of).
Well anyway, any tips on how to bring these two worlds together, orchestration and mixing wise? Some instruments that shouldn't play too deep like Contrabass? Or should I make some radical cuts in some section, so everything gets space? I actully just wanna coperate just an electric guitar into the mix, but I feel like even choosing with type of amp (sim) is pretty crucial to it working out sonicly.
I feel like both type of ensembles are very rich sounding on their own usally so natuarlly it's hard making space for both of them.
Well any tips would be appreciated as well as examples of Bands/artists, that pulled it of well.
Moved in just a few days ago so this is very much a work in progress, but here's a pic of my new man ca... er, I mean home studio. The DIY sound absorbers aren't finished, I just put them up here and there to figure out where they help the most -- and I'm going to need a lot of help in a tiny space like this. Anyway, just wanted to share this with you.
I was asked by a friend recently to come up with an orchestral score for a short film he's making. My DAW is FL Studio 12. I wanted to write a more contextual score as it's a short film (~4 minutes) and has a linear progression in tension. In order to accomplish this, I wanted to use FL's Fruity Video Player.
Here comes my problem: I've come to realize that the Fruity Video Player is bad. Really bad. It does not play audio for me, it does not sync with the score, and I can't get the framerate of the video to speed up any.
I have a temporary workaround for this (by writing down the specific times for hits and writing around that) but I need a more permanent solution. Anyone who is more experienced writing scores, any ideas would be awesome.
Here's a weird issue I ran into a couple of days ago. I guess maybe I should be posting this on the Plogue forums but I just wanted to check whether anyone here has encountered it first.
In a nutshell it seems that ARIA player 1.872 will not run on my system anymore. At all. Loading it in REAPER (4.78) it promptly crashes the DAW. The standalone version also crashes immediately. Rolling back to 1.846 it does work again, but I'm 100% sure 1.872 has worked in the past -- I even have a couple of projects as well as a REAPER track template that complains when I load them with 1.846: "this was made with version 1.872, please upgrade!" or something along those lines.
My first thought was that there might be some dependency (like for instance some version of the MS Visual C++ redistributables) that either 1) has updated itself and now has issues with ARIA, or b) that I migt have accidentally uninstalled. But I haven't been able to find any mention of what dependencies ARIA has anywhere, nor anyone else having this exact problem.
So this is really weird. Anyone here ever encountered this or something similar?
Does anyone have tips for good resources regarding writing melody? Most of what I've found is about pop music, which is probably worth a look, but not really what I'm looking for in particular. I would prefer it if the autor of said resources also has composed some good melodies, they don't have to be famous. Far too often in the realm of teaching I feel like people wanna teach things and then they don't have much to show that they internalized that knowlegde.
I found studying orchestration didn't make me use the tools I learned as much getting a clearer understanding of what I wanna achieve with orchestration and I'm hoping for the same thing regarding melody.
In the midst of the Black Friday Sales I decided to go for East Wests Hollywood Brass Diamond. It's a pretty good sounding libary but reaaaally annyoing regarding everything else. The problem that I'm dealing with right now makes music making borderline impossible.
If usally just load one instance of play, since it's so heavy on CPU and whatnot and I usally already know what I wanna hear, so I render single tracks and then meld the whole brass section together. Despite this efforts to keep the performance as steady as possible, I get a lot of terrible artifacts when rendering, take a listen: https://instaud.io/1v9M
It's relativly quit, but it still bugs me. Especially since I have trouble locating the source of the problem. At first I thought it was the CPU; I had trouble with dropouts while rendering in Reaper full-speed offline, as fast as possible and my CPU was run to 100%. Then I changed the rendering mode to 1xOffline, which made the cpu only go to 30% and the dropouts were gone too. I don't get the same problem with Kontakt. I also don't get these noises, while playing it via the PLAY vst in Reaper.
Diskload and Ram look also pretty okay while rendering and nothing out of the ordinary happens. Still, these shitty noises. I tried ajdusting the buffer, I tried changing the driver, I tried all the four reaper rending modes. Nothing really changed that much. Does anyone have any clues on what could be up? I'm thinking of trying it out with a different DAW, and I heard having the samples of EA Brass on a different harddrive then I'm rendering to might help. I will give this a try when I got one handy.
Does anyone have different tips for that? I would be very thankful.
Don't think this one was posted yet. It's pretty much the closest thing to a step-by-step SFZ 2.0 guide I've found. I, for one, learned a lot I didn't know before.
I've been working on some songs for the last two months on and off, that I wanna wrap up with one more song and have a little EP. Here is what i got so far https://soundcloud.com/iktorraus/sets/ep-wip
The generell directions is less orchestral and more ambienty with orchestral elements (especially God of Sleep is more on the orchestral side of things). Let me know what you think of the songs and if you got any criticism in making them better.
You will have to pardon my frequent posts but I have been writing some music lately! Here is another track of mine, this time it is about adaptive, loop based music. It was submitted in Scorbit's game scoring contest.
Though it didn't make it in the finals I think I got quite an amount of experience by contemplating this.