@mverta said:

I'm sure you only come across like you've got an ax to grind due to some sort of internet thing.  

_Mike

Here come the axe - you_are_wasting_your_talent copying John Williams. The start of your piece is obviously Close Encounters - were you even alive when that film came out? Why are you bothering to waste time with an obvious talent for production techniques using samples - copying?

If I had your production skills and knowledge of orchestral music - I would seriously be out there at your age (30's?) trying to be original from minute one. You will never be John Williams - no one will - it's all been done already by JW so_forget_it. No one in the business gives ashit whether the influences in a piece of music include Benderbollocks or anyone else. They will just say - it sounds like JW - which is maybe what they'll want or not want. Probably mostly not these days.

Do something original. I won't comment on your work in future if that makes you happy. Makes no odds to me one way or the other. Be original.

John Williams isn't exactly original, if you know the repertoire.  I'm curious who you think has managed to redefine this style of music in the last 100 years?

In any case - and this will probably bother you to no end - 95% of work comes to me BECAUSE of my sound, not in spite of it.  I find it interesting you keep mentioning CE3K, because I honestly have never seen that film end-to-end (it feels really boring to me) and I don't own the score in any form.  There are a few JW scores I was just never motivated to seek out, that's one of them, 1941 is another, I hated Catch Me if You Can, and if memory serves, Seven Years in Tibet was a giant WTF for me.  But I'm so curious now I have to go get it.

I'm also very curious to hear your original music.  Which I'm assuming has no Williams in it, and thus none of his influences.  I'm not 100% sure what that leaves behind, but I'm dying to hear it!

_Mike

Believe me - you're 10 time better than I am. I play Bach on the harpsichord for fun. I don't make the kind of money I like to make from music - I'm really a trader most of the time with private clients money - and my own. Music is an interest and I like listening to other people's music a great deal more than any of mine.

It bothers me in the sense that this is a typical inditement of filmscore music today - derivative. Your music SOUNDS great - apart from some brass which stinks on ice (soundwise). I suspect I have slightly better monitors than you do. It however pleases me to learn that you are making money from doing this music because someone wants it and you obviously enjoy doing this 'style'.

Yes - funnily enough I agree with you on Close Encounters - boring and twee a lot of the time.

Heheheh

Monitors-wise, I primarily use B&W 800D's.

_Mike

Close Encounters is probably the most underestimated of Williams' scores, probably because it is one of his most cinematic (in that the music is not as prominent an effect as in Star Wars, Jaws, ET, etc.). I did enjoy the Stravinskyesque "Catch me if you can" - in how effective Williams was with reduced instrumentation and rhythmic effects. Apparently he enjoyed it too, a break from his usual blaring brass armies and whirling strings.

@mverta said:

I'm also very curious to hear your original music.  Which I'm assuming has no Williams in it, and thus none of his influences.  I'm not 100% sure what that leaves behind, but I'm dying to hear it!

Well his music is right there in the VSL demos.  It doesn't have any John Williams whatsoever, as the insufferable Limey Robbins was around in music before John Williams was known for film scoring.  Like me.  Though my music probably sounds something like John Williams because I steal from the same composers he steals from.   Just joking.  I don't actually steal, though I cannot help being influenced. 

Now if you want to talk about stealing, don't even get me started on James Horner. There is an example of somebody consciously, calculatingly, deliberately and coldly lifting from every composer from Robert Schumann to Charles Ives.

John Williams: a lot of blaring and whirling.

Not an entirely fair characterization, but not entirely unfair, either.  :)  My favorite small-group score of his is Witches of Eastwick, hands-down.  Manuel de Falla-like in its effectiveness with a small ensemble.

And yes, Horner's theivery is shameless and well-documented.  Not that it seems to matter; in the short term anyway.

_Mike

Don't forget who Charles Ives influenced strongly either.

I'm out of here because I have to practice my archery at least twice a week and don't have anymore time.

Paul, you never said which monitors you are using... :)

Henrik

Awesome music Mike.  I read one of your older threads on the star trek mockup and was wondering if your still using the same reverb settings?  It seems like everyone is always raving about Todd AO but you seem to be using other scoring stages and using different ones for each section.  I was wondering if you could tell me in more detail how you set your reverb for Captial City for each section?

Actually I keep playing with that stuff.  This time around, everything you hear is within Todd-AO.  The idea of using different rooms came about because the samples themselves are often from different rooms, requiring compensatory reverbs to try and unify them.  Some changes in my samples seemed to make using purely Todd-AO a viable option for the time being.

_Mike

Thanks Mike,

Can you perhaps Tell me in which IR Meter your using for each section?  And are you using the speaker position placement for any sections?

I'm not using speaker placement.  As for each IR, for the mix, we re-created the setup at a different studio and built it from scratch, so I'm not 100% sure what we ended up using.  I think it was the wide 15' for Horns and Tpt/Tbn, but one of them may have been the 18'.  I think we used one of the narrow mic profiles for woods, but again I'm not looking at it.  Here at home, my setup was pulled apart and all reverbs disabled so I could have the extreme track count necessary for recording the stems, and I haven't re-done it yet.

_Mike

Something I've been meaning to try; think I'll give it a run today:  In a real session, there's tons of bleed between sections.  So I'm wondering about setting up a series of reverb returns - each for a different usual mic placement, and feeding each section to every single return, just in varying amounts depending on distance from the source section, like a real room does.  Hmmm...

_Mike

There are couple pieces here, which are you referring to?

_Mike

Ah yes, that's possible I suppose, what with having to start over with raw tracks at the mix.  My setups are usually the result of weeks of tweaking, but there were logistical problems with outputing from my system.  For example, it had to be true 5.1.  Programming-wise it was never going to be great - I simply can't write and perform 84 minutes of this kind of music in 5 weeks at the level it deserves.  I'm not 100% sure I can turn out 84 minutes of this kind of music even ON PAPER in 5 weeks, come to think of it.

_Mike

Thank you, Tanuj.  In reality, this score was always to be virtual, and those are the performances heard in the soundtrack for the film.  Gratefully, they're in the mix with a billion laser blasts, explosions, yelling, fight sounds and an enormous shreiking monster, so it manages to pull it off in context.  But you're right, I tend to go for things which samples are just horrible at doing, because that's how I write and I can't stand to write around the shortcomings of samples.  If I did that, I think all I'd be left with are percussion pieces.

Great, great Music as usual Mike. Having heard all the pieces you've posted here and a couple more on your website i can honestly say that you have your own personal style and voice, so i disagree with those who label you as a "John Williams Clone" or something like that, i think there's an original voice behind those great melodies and wonderful orchestration.

Congratulations Mike

Mike, I'm late to the party but wow, what a party!  Your writing and production quality never cease to amaze me, "Battle with the Beast" is particularly impressive.  Your ability to extract such expressive life from these samples and blend them with such clarity is truly amazing.

Question: Obviously you must record expression as you play each line, but without hearing the other instruments (as players in a real orchestra do) its quite a challenge to get a cohesive balance - yet, you achieve such wonderful results.  How do you go about laying down tracks so that you get both expression and such a good instrumental balance?  In what order do you do this?

Thanks for sharing.

Greg

Thanks for the kind words, Greg (and Felipe!)-

The first thing I do with all my instruments (other than percussion) is enable velocity switching via modwheel, and reduce the velocity contribution of the keyboard pressure itself to a bare minimum.  This way, every note I have to play for woodwind, brass, or strings requires me to "bow or blow" with the modwheel.  There are thus never any truly sustained notes - they waiver and flux just a bit as my left hand can't remain 100% still - I'm not a robot.  Similarly, I had to develop a playing style where the modwheel was an absolutely constant part of the performance, and most notes begin with the modwheel all the way down - a quick attack usually means I've just got to get that modwheel to the top a.s.a.p.  It definitely helps with the overall sense of performance, because I'm burdened with getting the breath or the string bowing happening, much like the actual players.

Having done it this way for a bit, I'm sort of internally aware of where p-mp-mf-f-and-ff+ are with my left hand, and I know what my intended dynamic markings should be, so I usually lay the loudest things down first, and then I have a reference point for the support instruments.  One of the most important lessons I've learned from live sessions is that recordings seem to benefit greatly from at least a dynamic marking quieter than I'd use for live performance.  Some of that is due to the players and the idiom, but some of it is just because of the nature of recording - in a recording/mix environment, you can make ppp sound like fff if you push the faders up!  And ff, in my experience, usually records like fffff+ in a very non-musical, bleating kind of way, so I rarely mark higher than f in my scores.  Most cues live in mp-mf and stay more musical for it, with more dynamic range. 

All that is to say that I approach the samples the same way.  Most of the samples, I find, are a bit questionable at the pp and ff velocity ranges.  They tend to take on whatever the most unnatural qualities they have at those extremes.  So similarly, I try and perform the samples in those sweet-spot dynamic markings in between.  However, if I'm doing a particluarly bombastic cue, I tend to want to feel the volume and fullness in my room, so my tendency is to push the modwheel higher.  In this case, what I'll do is turn my monitor volume up, so it takes less actual volume for it to feel loud in my room, and thus not get all wall-of-sound-y with the pieces in general. 

I do my best to approximate real-world balances within my virtual orchestra, as we all do, of course, and it works well enough that I don't have to think along entirely different lines in terms of orchestration and dynamics.  So once I've set the principle instrument's part down, other things tend to fall into place.  What I spend my time doing is not adjusting balances, it's trying to get the human performances right in the first place.  At 3am, having played the same fucking oboe part 30 or 40 times trying to get it to feel tender or whatever, is usually the worst time to ask me what I think of virtual orchestras.  And there are a lot of those 3am moments in my workflow :)  And when you see the crazy modwheel data in my session, you realize right away that manual data editing would not only yield inferior results, but would take forever.  I tried to do a bit of that on this last film, and all it did was open up a can of worms.  Perfectly linear or parabolic velocity curves are not human, and don't sound like it.  And if you're going to draw a freehand modwheel curve with your mouse, why not use the modwheel itself, in performance, and get it right?  So that's what I do.

Best,

_Mike