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  4. "film trailer" music - please feed me back

  • "film trailer" music - please feed me back

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    With an amazing amout of luck, I might be able to sell this (the requirement was dramatic music, film trailer style):

    http://www.bogside.at/2008-11-01-03.mp3

    ...but of course only if it sounds decent. Any comments (composition, orchestration, mix) are hugely appreciated, especially on how to improve the cello realism when they're plaing alone. Also, even though I'm using three stage depths, some of the instruments STILL sound like they had friggin' RealVerb on them. And near the end, you can clearly hear where VI randomly skips midi events for no reason at all - I mentioned this in another thread but haven't found any solution yet except to solo the individual track and bounce it to .wav.

    Finally, since this is  my first piece offered up for criticism, be gentle with me :-) Nah just kidding. Be brutally honest, except for pointing out the john williams-isms - the guys who might buy this won't care about that. :-)
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    Musically it's a lot of fun and occasionally maybe a little bit strident. Sometimes almost Teutonic. :))

    It takes a lot of good skill to write stuff like this so well done. I'm not sure how it would be as trailer music though.

    Mix wise I think it can get a little 2 dimensional at times and would definitely 'sound' a little better if it had more room to breathe. Very good musically and I certainly would be very happy if I'd done that.
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     Thanks a lot for the input; positive critique means a lot to me coming from you guys here. :-)

    I hope by "teutonic" you don't mean ponderous :-) I've yet to find a nicotine patch against that nasty habit of march-ing all over intense stuff. :-P

  • R
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    Well it's bloody brilliant. Would be much appreciative if you were to give a description of your composing process, as in how do you work, at computer or on paper or etc etc and how long it takes you to compose such a piece etc. Very good job.

    On the PRODUCTION side though something about the reverbs was a bit too synthetic to me but I'm no expert.
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     Why thanks :-) - Well, since I pretty much suck horribly at composing on paper, I do everything in Cubase. I will write ideas down if they come to me when I'm not near the computer, though.

    It took me about 5 days net time to get this thing finished, but from start to end it was a week. I'm slow at this thing for two reasons, firstly, because no matter how much routine at music I seem to have, there's always at least one point in every piece I do where I have to overcome the most profound writer's block. And then I'll sit there for an entire afternoon, maybe even two, fiddling around with chord progressions and going "Nah - nah - nah" until I get frustrated and go get drunk. Then the next day I'll have the solution in 5 minutes. And secondly because I work on getting the right articulations for a particular phrase or line like a bastard. I can literally sit for 25 minutes just tweaking a single violin run because one note sticking out in the middle drives me crazy. :-P

    I've just recently sort of figured out a process that seems to work for me: At first I'll go and do all the stuff that springs to my mind immediately, which could be a melody line, an ornamental run, percussion break or some chords, so that it sounds like a skeleton version of the thing. And then I go back and orchestrate the whole thing properly. I'm still rather new to VI, but I hope I'll be able to radically shorten the time it takes me to do stuff. From what I've read, there are people who can produce a fully orchestrated five minute theme in two days, which I find simply astonishing :-)

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    Jesus your workflow sounds frighteningly close to my own, ESPECIALLY the part about writer's block and spending an entire afternoon on a single phrase then going off to get piss drunk. LOL!

    But yea there are people that can do all that as you said, one of them is right here called Mike Verta. If you haven't seen what he does yet then go here and learn!

    http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/19166.aspx

    http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/20011.aspx
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     Yeah, I read both that star trek theme thread and one or two others - Mike's stuff is great, and sadly the best I can hop for is that one day I can make a software orchestra sound real enough that I never have to go near a real one, because I couldn't write for a real orchestra to save my life :-)

    Glad to see that I'm not the only one with the occasional severe writer's block, though. Sometimes "misery is company" is all you have to cling to :-)

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    Yep. It really does sound like a "cliche", but I have found that it does prove true, the adage that you can't "think" about the melody/theme etc, and the harder you try to sit there and THINK and WILL the melody to come to you, the harder it is to get any ideas. Many famous composers have said the same thing and from experience I can see that it's true, all my best material and melodies and such just happen to come out of no where when I'm NOT trying to force it out. But when I get into that bog where I'm sitting there staring at the screen trying to force a melody out, then I'll end up sitting there all afternoon.

    The past 2 weeks my best ideas came in the shower when I was really giddy and just humming and singing along a bunch of random stuff and then these great ideas just pop into my head and I rush out to write them down etc.

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     The shower is a brilliant place for "randomly" popping up ideas. The problem is to remember them long enough to be able to write them down afterwards, what with the hair washing and all that. :-)

    I like to think I have accumulated a certain repertoire of phrases, chord changes etc. over the years, that make coming up with stuff easier when you're out of fresh ideas, and that help putting the ideas you have into perspective faster. But for some reason all that never seems to work when I'm doing a new piece and it ALWAYS feels as though I'm doing this for the first time. So it's either much, much routine that matters, or I'm just plain too stupid.

    But I really do think the key to it all is that moment between lathering and rinsing, when the magical interval/chord change comes out of nowhere - now just to retain it past the hair drying... :-P

  • PaulP Paul moved this topic from Orchestration & Composition on