Dark Castle

[Francesco Pirrone]

Hi everyone,

sorry I am not really active on this platorm as I used to be.

I wanted to share with you one of the tracks from my upcoming album:

Francesco Pirrone - Dark Castle

I composed this tracks a few years ago (probably four or five) and I was happy with the simple melody/idea but not so much with the sound, there were several issues with the mix at the time....the organ sounded harsh, the strings were dry and the percussion was too roomy, washy, it really lacked the focus.

I wanted to give it justice and put it in the album, so I recently mixed it from scratch: I didn't change one single sound....it's the good ole special edition, which never fails to amaze me if I have to be honest.....strings sounded bad before only because they were lacking the right eq, stereo placement and reverb level.

Having this mastered at JLM New York did help because they added a little extra texture and stereo width, controlled lows and all that.

Please let me know what you think.

Francesco

[winknotes_282]

I think this sounds really good.  The brass at the end are a tad "overblown" sounding for my taste but the mix and mastering sound really very good. 

I never thought I'd be asking questions about mixing and mastering but wondered for mixing if you leave your tracks as midi or create stems/audio tracks and mix those? 

I find myself needing a recording as the output of a big project is why I'm asking.  Never been concerned about anything other than the printed output before so I'm a bit lost although it's somehow kind of fun. 

EDIT: Was there a target volume (LUFs) you were shooting for in mastering or just what sounded best?  Forgive the naive question but again I've never even given these things a thought. 

[Francesco Pirrone]

@Another User said:

EDIT: Was there a target volume (LUFs) you were shooting for in mastering or just what sounded best?  Forgive the naive question but again I've never even given these things a thought. 

 

Personally I just use reference tracks and trust my ears rather than LUFS, I have references that I like the sound of so I use them to set a listening level on my monitoring system and then master the music so that it's in the same ballpark, sometimes slightly louder, sometimes slightly quieter*.

Dark Castle was mastered by Justin Colletti at JLM, you might find his Sonic Scoop podcasts on YouTube, and I gave him two reference tracks:

Descent Into Mystery from Danny Elfman
DDay from Christian Kardeis

He used them as a gauge for loudness so that my album would sit somewhere in between.


*I find myself liking the quieter versions of pretty much everything these days if you ask me: when I started I was obsessed with loudness because it looked hard to achieve and I thought it was part of being 'competitive', obviously if you hear Two Steps From Hell they make very loud stuff and it stands out a lot initially......but then that type of audio becomes tiring to listen to....at least to an extent.....I want to be able to hear the nuances, the transients and I don't feel the need to bring up the room so much at the mastering stage.....beside all limiters, even the more transparent ones tend to introduce some kind of harshness when you push them and I can hear that a lot with the strings so I don't go for that anymore when I am mastering orchestral music, obviously if I am doing heavy metal I still do.... 😆 so I found that older reference material, such as Jurarric Park 1993, Batman 1989, sounds crispy and detailed and it has beautiful stereo work going on and it would be only a tad too quiet for a 2021 release so I use that as a starting point and then I try not too exceed the DDay level, I never get close to Two Steps From Hell in terms of volume because it wouldn't do any good to my music. Sometimes I push it a little harder like on this one Quantum Rift but only because I think it'd fit the style.

I hope that helps.

All the best

Francesco

[winknotes_282]

Yes thank you for the thoughtful and thorough reply.  One point you made about pushing too much is something I noticed as well and had to find that balance between a healthy volume but not too distorted.  

I'm assuming that if I use Mir generating stems will still retain that stage position and EQ which I'm hesitant to adjust.  I would certainly adjust balance if it's a small tweak but if I find myself adjusting levels too much it means my orchestration doesn't work.  So for these reasons I've stuck with midi, at least for this project.  I may be doing another one similar later and will experiment with stems for that one.  

Thanks again and the piece really sounds great.  

[Francesco Pirrone]

You are most welcome and thank you for your nice comments about my music.

Concerning the audio stems VS MIDI, it's just about what you find more convenient.

I can talk about these things literally forever and never get tired, which is why I try to make blog posts like this whenever possible: Orchestral Mixing, these are mostly general considerations on one of the possible strategies for mixing sample based orchestral music. I found that this approach tends to work on most projects.

Please feel free to drop me a DM if you find anything interesting about the article that you'd like to discuss. 😊

Francesco

[Jos Wylin]

Quite impressive with the string ostinato and the 'threatening' organ. It reminds me a bit of the musical score from 'The Phantom of the Opera": same atmosphere, same instrumentation...

Jos

[Francesco Pirrone]

@Jos Wylin said:

Quite impressive with the string ostinato and the 'threatening' organ. It reminds me a bit of the musical score from 'The Phantom of the Opera": same atmosphere, same instrumentation...

Jos

Thank you very much Jos for your kind words, I appreciate it. 😃

Francesco