Hector Berlioz / Symphonie Fantastique, Un Bal - UPDATE!

[GoranTch]

UPDATE: you can listen to new, "purer" version of the movement here (this one could be more to Beat's taste ;-)

The venue is, as before, ORF Sendesaal. Please note that this production is still made with legacy MIR, not MIR Pro.

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Here are two masters of the just finished demo-production of Valse from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique:

http://www.digital-orchestra-production.com/en/demos/vf/index.html

The venue used is ORF Sendesaal.

Comments and criticisms are, as always, very welcome 😊

[Beat Kaufmann]

Hallo Goran ;-)

Congratulation: You have done a big work with the Berlioz. Thousands of mouse clicks and "mini jobs" are behind this piece of music.

Nevertheless, the mix (Abmischung) is very muddy. Maybe it is MIR or the selection of the microphones within MIR.

All the musicians seem to be in one big pot...

In your case I would try to "rescue" these musicians by adjusting the dry/wet ratio more to dry so that all the instruments come closer to us.

For giving an example what I mean: Compare the sound (mix) of the youtube recordings with yours.

Once more: Nothing against your effort and the music you've produced, it's just the mix (MIR-sound) which doesn't correspond to my taste.

Beat

[GoranTch]

@Beat Kaufmann said:

Hallo Goran 😉

Congratulation: You have done a big work with the Berlioz. Thousands of mouse clicks and "mini jobs" are behind this piece of music.

Nevertheless, the mix (Abmischung) is very muddy. Maybe it is MIR or the selection of the microphones within MIR.

All the musicians seem to be in one big pot...

In your case I would try to "rescue" these musicians by adjusting the dry/wet ratio more to dry so that all the instruments come closer to us.

For giving an example what I mean: Compare the sound (mix) of the youtube recordings with yours.

Once more: Nothing against your effort and the music you've produced, it's just the mix (MIR-sound) which doesn't correspond to my taste.

Beat

Hi Beat,

thank you very much for your comments. You will of course know that producing a piece of this size and instrumentational refinment would have to be achieved with massive mouse-abuse combined with a severe headache or two [:)].

Although I can understand your remarks considering the mix, I beg to differ on this point. The recordings you have posted (can't see the third one as it is under GEMA-protection in Germany) are before everything else much more up-front then mine (in my opinion too close for what should be the case for a CD-recording (Dutoit being a notable exception)). They do display a significantly smaller amount of reverb diffusion, especially around the strings, although the Dutoit recording is actually somwhere in between my "wetter" mix and the first two Youtube-recordings in this regard. I suppose this is matter of taste, but I still don't percieve my mixes to be significantly "muddier" then those posted - these are just muddy in different sorts of ways (the woods in the Barenboim recording are one case in point, but there are many others through all of them, especially in louder sections). The spatial disposition of the instruments seems to me (at least on my speakers and headphones) to be clearly recognizable.

I have worked with two reference recordings (Cleveland & Boulez; Montreal & Dutoit, both relatively recent) and have actually strived to achieve a spatial positioning somwhere in between the two: Boulez is very up-front and very dry, whereas Dutoit is even a bit further away then my "wetter" mix, comparably diffuse but with a far longer and, especially in tuttis, much stronger reverberation.

There is actually another aspect of the mix which (probably) won't be to everybody's taste: the quite "edgy", nasal quality of the strings - my intention was to make the overall sound a bit "sharp" this time around.

However, you have now tempted me to do a mix more in the Boulez style - I'll probably post one within a week or so 😉

Thanks again,

Goran

[Beat Kaufmann]

Hi again, Goran

Don't do anything before others gave their comments.

You know:

1. How a piece of music shall sound is a matter of taste... and

2. I'm a friend of "dry" and "close - but in contrast to far".

In other words: It could be that I'm not the right person for giving a feedback here. 

Thanks for the additional information with your 2nd post, Goran.

All the best

Beat

[GoranTch]

@Beat Kaufmann said:

Hi again, Goran

Don't do anything befor others gave their comments.

You know:

1. How piece of music shall sound is a matter of taste... and

2. I'm a friend of "dry" and "close - but in contrast to far".

In other words: It could be that I'm not the right person for giving a feedback here. 

Thanks for the additional information with your 2nd post, Goran.

All the best

Beat

Your comments are always welcome.

Although I myself in general actually tend more to "drier" then to "wetter" mixing in concert music, I must admit to being very susceptible to the power of habit in this regard - f.e. the Dutoit recording I have always seems to me to be quite balanced, and I don't pay attention to the reverberation when listening to it alone, but then, if I listen to it in a direct comparison with the Boulez recording (or even my production), it always strikes me as being literally saturated with reverberation. Somehow, I don't really think about that when simply listening to it without direct comparison.

[j.dodd5_30106]

Hello Goran, a very nice demo, I wish I could get my stuff to sound like yours.

Best wishes John Dodd, Richmond North Yorkshire.

[mcelvogue]

Hi Goran,

      first of all I share in other congratulations of this excellent creation. For me I just listened to the "Cleveland & Boulez" recording after checking the links that Beat provided to understand the differences in the mixes. I think that your mix in terms of separation etc does not sound that far off. What I am hearing in your version however is that when the first violins begin their melody (I think around bar 18/19 from the published score I'm looking at http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/24830), their seems to be a lag between the cello/bass and the melody of the first violins which for me is throwing my ears a little. I don't think it is the reverb but rather the placement of the crotchet's where the cello and bass leads at the start of each bar during the introduction of this first melodic line. I don't know if this is by design as I have also heard Orchestra's lag deliberately in parts of a score for effect but I think during this section I find it a bit distracting, especially as it doesn't seem to happen elsewhere to this extent  within the score.

Overall, I like the character you have introduced into the mix and again I would like to congratulate you on not only this fine piece but on the others on the website. I am in means an expert and I hope you don't mind this opinion. I wish I could produce anything as professional and realistic as what you have created here but I'm still a long, long way off and really do appreciate the mammoth effort to produce this work as beautiful as it sounds.

Regards,

      Tom

[GoranTch]

@j.dodd5_30106 said:

Hello Goran, a very nice demo, I wish I could get my stuff to sound like yours.

Best wishes John Dodd, Richmond North Yorkshire.

Hi John,

thank you. If we get a VSL training centre going one day, that could become much easier then it seems now 😉

[GoranTch]

Hi Tom,

thank you for your comment, that's true, there is a bit of a lag, I personally don't find it disturbing at this spot, as it gives a bit of an additional "drive forward" to the theme in the violins.

You can check a new, much drier and "purer" version here, and compare it with a somewhat "purist" recording at the top of the chart.

Best regards

Goran

[mcelvogue]

Hi Goran,

   I've just listened to your new versions and also the Roger Norrington version. All in all, I have to say that I am really impressed by the quality of what you have acheived. My remarks regarding the "lag" which I found distracting at first are not really such a problem any more. I have since listened to numerous versions of this piece including the Liszt arrangement to understand more how the piece has been interepreted by different conductors/orchestras/musicians. I think you have done an amazing job with this and again I congratulate you on your production.

Without wanting to be inappropriate, would you be willing/able to reveal how much time went into this. I only ask out of curiosity and if it is not something you wish to disclose I completely understand, but upon listening further to what you have done, it would be very helpful to me to understand how much time goes into completing a piece of this quality for an expert like yourself.

Regards,

      Tom

[gerdkaeding]

@goran_tsch said:

Hi Tom,

thank you for your comment, that's true, there is a bit of a lag, I personally don't find it disturbing at this spot, as it gives a bit of an additional "drive forward" to the theme in the violins.

You can check a new, much drier and "purer" version here, and compare it with a somewhat "purist" recording at the top of the chart.

Best regards

Goran

Hi Goran ,

I've just stumbled across this by accident, because I was actually searching for "MIR PRO" user demos .

You really did a great job on this , Goran. Fantastic . I've listened to your other (wet) Mixes and this (dry) Mix ,

and I really really  like the "Sweetened Strings" Mix .  Both your MIDI work and the sound  are fantastique.

Just to get it right : this is still MIR legacy  +  ORF Sendesaal venue + VSL samples exclusively  , correct ?

Best wishes

from Berlin to ... errrr ... Berlin

Gerd

[GoranTch]

@Another User said:

Best wishes

from Berlin to ... errrr ... Berlin

Best wishes back... to Berlin... 😉

(I somehow can't send you a message here, you can contact me at c_w_gluck@yahoo.de)

[GoranTch]

Hi Tom,

thanks again, I am happy to hear this production took you on a small Symphonie fantastique-Odyssey, as this work truly stands up to its title.

The time I would need now for a thoroughly polished version is much, much less then what one would imagine it would have to be when listening to the piece. Only two years ago I wouldn't have thought that completing such a production in the time I completed it in was even remotely possible. This is a very important factor to understand - it is not just your skills which improve with (meaningful) practice, after you have achieved a certain critical point your speed increases dramatically as well.

In other words, one shouldn't believe it takes weeks to complete this. It doesn't. You'll need weeks for the first (or even the second) polished production you do, but after you have amassed a critical amount of experience, the amount of time you need for a similar project will collapse dramatically.

This is (of course) much more true of the sound aspect, as you can save once polished setups and use them again any time you want, with just little additional tweaking if you want to adjust something to the new project. However, setting up the sound aspect took me a very, very long time at first, as I had to learn a lot through trial and error method (I have no proper training in audio engineering). The amount of time needed to make a completely new sound setup is for me much smaller today, but it would still consume a decent portion of worktime on a production for which a new sound setup has to be built from scratch.

[mcelvogue]

Hi Goran,

   thanks for the response. Whilst I have purchased some of the special editions my demo license for the Vienna Suite expired back in November and I had put a huge effort into trying to create a template project/sound which would reduce my setup time. Thankfully, the templates and tutorials from Beat Kaufmann helped considerably in shortening this "learning time" but I still managed to run out of time before the demo ran out and also before finding a setup which I was totally happy with (there's just so much to learn).

I hadn't realised before your last post that this was also produced solely from the VSL Special Edition libraries which encourages me again as I had thought to myself that I was going to need to spend a huge amount of money to get the full DVD products in order to acheive a sound which I was happy with. Within this recording you have produced however I have again been proved wrong as you seem to be getting a wonderful sound with only the Special Edition libraries. It's one of those occasions when I am delighted to be wrong!

Anyway, thanks for the enlightenment and best of luck with your future productions.

Regards,

      Tom