03-19-2017, 08:54 PM
Your piece is very nice. You seem to have a pretty good grip on composing. I found the choir a little too loud maybe? The piano dissonance bothered me at first. I thought it was a botched sample tbh, until I noticed that it was intentional.
I thought your harp/glockenspiel notes could use some humanizing, they sound a little mechanical still tempo-wise.
Regarding fatness, I assume you mean bass. Are you using the double bass to its full potential there? It goes very, very low. Like Paul said, totally double the cellos an octave down or whatever. Doubling your harmonies throughout the spectrum (choosing fitting instruments) is definitely very common.
Other instruments that add boom on the low end are the contrabassoon and sometimes the tuba, depends on the key how low it will go. Don't overlook timpani and if you really need hard hits, taiko drums.
People often expect a lot of bass content nowadays to the point where they will feel a mix sounds bad without it. This is something I personally had to get used to, I think video games and car subwoofers and modern cinema have a lot to do with it.
The other way to add fatness is to add more instruments, in layers, for a fuller instrumentation. Brass can be very nice. Low horns and trombones would be a starting point.
I use compression and limiting in various places in my mix now. On the mix bus, I have a soft gain riding compressor (opto style) that reaches 3dB of gain reduction on medium-loud parts. In silent parts, it hovers around 1db of GR (that's almost nothing). What this does is it brings up the quiet parts a little more in the mix and evens it all out just a tad. This is *not* a loudness war kind of thing. Just a smooth gain rider.
On the mastering chain I use the Limiter 6 plugin, with the compressor gain riding at perhaps 1db GR and the dry signal mixed in halfway, just to feed the peak limiter. The limiter itself only ticks momentarily on the absolute loudest spikes to maybe 3db GR. Those are often in places where you wouldn't suspect them. The effect is that your piece's internal dynamics don't change a lot, but you can make it louder wthout clipping because those extreme short spikes are no longer there. Used well, a limiter can be practically inaudible.
This kind of compression leaves your dynamics 95% intact and just makes the piece sound better. This was what I used on my Goddess theme. It also has to do with people's expectations after 20 years of loudness war. If your audience is classic music fans, you can probably ignore all that, but for a general audience, they just kinda expect it I believe.
In general, btw, I suggest solving frequency problems with orchestration first, EQ second. I would use EQ only to add a little shine to a snare drum or things like that. And perhaps a little tweaking in the master with a shelving EQ.
If that was a lot of technical lingo, my apologies :-)
Your workflow doesn't sound wrong to me.
I thought your harp/glockenspiel notes could use some humanizing, they sound a little mechanical still tempo-wise.
Regarding fatness, I assume you mean bass. Are you using the double bass to its full potential there? It goes very, very low. Like Paul said, totally double the cellos an octave down or whatever. Doubling your harmonies throughout the spectrum (choosing fitting instruments) is definitely very common.
Other instruments that add boom on the low end are the contrabassoon and sometimes the tuba, depends on the key how low it will go. Don't overlook timpani and if you really need hard hits, taiko drums.
People often expect a lot of bass content nowadays to the point where they will feel a mix sounds bad without it. This is something I personally had to get used to, I think video games and car subwoofers and modern cinema have a lot to do with it.
The other way to add fatness is to add more instruments, in layers, for a fuller instrumentation. Brass can be very nice. Low horns and trombones would be a starting point.
I use compression and limiting in various places in my mix now. On the mix bus, I have a soft gain riding compressor (opto style) that reaches 3dB of gain reduction on medium-loud parts. In silent parts, it hovers around 1db of GR (that's almost nothing). What this does is it brings up the quiet parts a little more in the mix and evens it all out just a tad. This is *not* a loudness war kind of thing. Just a smooth gain rider.
On the mastering chain I use the Limiter 6 plugin, with the compressor gain riding at perhaps 1db GR and the dry signal mixed in halfway, just to feed the peak limiter. The limiter itself only ticks momentarily on the absolute loudest spikes to maybe 3db GR. Those are often in places where you wouldn't suspect them. The effect is that your piece's internal dynamics don't change a lot, but you can make it louder wthout clipping because those extreme short spikes are no longer there. Used well, a limiter can be practically inaudible.
This kind of compression leaves your dynamics 95% intact and just makes the piece sound better. This was what I used on my Goddess theme. It also has to do with people's expectations after 20 years of loudness war. If your audience is classic music fans, you can probably ignore all that, but for a general audience, they just kinda expect it I believe.
In general, btw, I suggest solving frequency problems with orchestration first, EQ second. I would use EQ only to add a little shine to a snare drum or things like that. And perhaps a little tweaking in the master with a shelving EQ.
If that was a lot of technical lingo, my apologies :-)
Your workflow doesn't sound wrong to me.