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  • NFFTY Film Festival Winner Scored with VSL

    Bruce 2: Senior Year recently took first place in the "Just for Laughs" category at the NFFTY 2013 Film Festival in Seattle.  It was scored entirely with VSL samples.

    If you would like to see the film (20 min) here is a link:    


    If you would like to hear the isolated cues they are on my website:    stevengentrymusic.com

    I think VSL is a very versatile and realistic sounding set of samples and tools and has been a real pleasure to work with.


  • Thanks for sharing!

    I enjoyed watching it and the music was both fun and effective. If you'll welcome any feedback, I think the mix could have been improved a bit to bring things out a bit but otherwise it sounded great on all other accounts.

    -Sean


  • Hi Sean,

    Yes, please.  I would very much welcome any suggestions you have.

    Steve Gentry


  • Steve,

    There are two things I obsess over: Finding the right EQ for an instrument, then ducking the right instrument(s) when I want to hear more or less of certain voices. I'm fairly guilty of only focusing on these two things most of the time, lol. It's hard to tell without actually looking at everything myself. My ears want tot ell me it's a 'too much mid-low range in most instruments overall' and that it's simply a matter of eq'ing it. I could be wrong. I'd be interested to know how you have things generally setup. Are you using your own eq settings? what EQ? Vienna Suite presets, etc?

    What I do:

    I don't really care for VSL's eq so I use a number of others. I actually like a fairly cheep EQ called IIEQPro. I'm probably crazy, but I like it. anyway, what I do:

    George Yohng's W1 Limiter. Free and decent, imo. Yay!

    Some tape saturation, warmth plugins, etc. (this is not as often, and subtle anyway)

    I duck when I feel is necessary as said before.

    I use different instruments. Now that I own some non-VSL stuff I'm very happy. I love VSL. But sometimes having a mixture of libraries is the best way to get more depth to the sound. I'm actually preferring recording to sampling now anyway, despite almost no opportunities to. I've even started sampling a few instruments myself, both as a playable sampled instrument and just recordings to use, etc. Having the variety helps a lot. Granted, that mostly helps with the performance, not so much the sound. But I threw it in there cause all this sums up pretty much everything I do for the sound I'm happy with.

    Back to you now:

    Please don't take this as sounding too critical. I'm only wording it the way I know how. I keep listening to "The Abduction" from 26-38 seconds. The music is great, but it sounds a bit like the 'wall of sound' principle, but without anything on top of it. It's all kind of 'just wall-ish' to me. Personally I keep wanting the violins, cellos, horns, and trumpets brought out more to be more distinct, etc. Unless it's an eq thing, I'm not sure without looking at it.

    Hopefully that helps. If not, I'm sorry.

    -Sean

    P.S. Again, the music is great. :)


  • Steve,

    If you don't kill me for adding something of my own on your post, I want to show you something. This example is not the most comparible in terms of style. But hopefully it will make my point.

    https://soundcloud.com/iscorefilm/demo-reel-02-clock-theme-v4

    If you listen from 20 - 28 seconds, you'll hear the melody and the cellos primarily. When I say 'bring it out', etc. that's what I meant. I don't know if I was making much sense or not. Tired Sean = not much sense making.

    Either way, hopefully that helps.

    -Sean

    P.S. There are some missing parts on that example, so ignore that the music doesn't really develope. That example is missing some stuff.


  • Hi Sean,

    Thanks so much for taking the time to respond in a detailed manner.  What you say makes perfect sense.  I listened to your example and really like the clarity and crispness that you get.  While some of that clarity can be attributed to your orchestrational technique, I'm guessing much of the crispness and transparency is due to the audio processing that you mention in your earlier post.  I also listened to the other cues on your soundcloud page and they do sound very good.

    Audio processing is a big mystery to me.  While I've tried to do as much reading and study as I can on the subject, my fear has been that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.  In the past I have attempted to make improvements via EQ, compression, limiting, etc. but never been much impressed with my results.  So, last year I purchased MIR and for the most part let it do the work on everything since 2012.  I think it gives me much better results than what I was getting in previous years (in terms of transparency and overall sound quality), but I can see (hear) that there is room for more improvement.

    I'm considering getting Vienna Suite (and I will look into the other tools you mentioned) to treat a few problems that I've noticed.  One is some annoying muddiness in the low strings.  I ran an analyzer and saw a buldge around 200 Hz, so I put an EQ notch there (using Logic's EQ) and it seems to clear up the sound a bit, but I'm guessing things like that could be handled more effectively in other ways.

    But I think you pointed out another weakness in parts of my cues where the principal lines are not allowed to emerge clearly, and that could be due to less than optimal orchestration.  For example, I've never been completely happy with the last half of the end title.  It is four-part writing at that point, and I actually wanted the horns to cut through a bit better out of the middle but never quite got there.  I added an exciter which helps but don't really want the horns to get any more edge than they already have.  Perhaps I need to duck the other parts a bit more.  But what I'm really looking for is that transparency that allows all the parts to be imaged clearly onto a soundstage, and all the parts are audible.  I think MIR is helping, but I'm sure it is still not quite what I could get if I had Shawn Murphy or Dan Wallin mixing a live session for me.

    [:)]

    Thanks again for the suggestions.  I appreciate the time you spent to write these messages.  It is a facinating topic, and I want to get better at it so it is great that people like you on this forum are willing to share their knowledge and ideas.

    Steve


  • PaulP Paul moved this topic from Orchestration & Composition on