Greeting Card

[Fabio Biolcati]

Hi All.

After a month of hard work I eventually finished my first work rendered with VSL — Special Edition, and I wish to share it with you.

I wrote Greeting Card to thank our nephew's grandmother for the present she sent us last Christmas, a picture of a pond with a swan surrounded by little ducks.

Technically speaking, MuseScore, Notion and Reaper were involved in writing, scoring and production.
IK CSR Hall, Eventide 2016 Stereo Room and ReaVerb (Bricasti M7 Amsterdam Hall IR) provided spatial environment.

Hope you'll enjoy. Comments and feedback are welcome, as usual.

[Jos Wylin]

Hi Fabio,

This is a very nice greeting card. I wish I'd receive some of that kind...

As a musical project (the first with VSL SE), it is absolutely succeeded. As a composition it is more than just 'interesting'. It reveals a lot of calmness and expression, just like one would expect when seeing a lovely view of swimming swans and ducklings on a quiet pond. Lovely view. Lovely music as well. It might be well working after a day of hard labour or stress... Maybe that's not what you intended, but consider it a bonus.

The acoustics and ambience sound well, although a little too generous with reverb. The mix is OK, but I have the impression that the clarinet sounds more like a solo in comparison with the oboe which is far in the back.

As a whole, a fine work and promising for further compositions with our beloved VSL.

Max

[Fabio Biolcati]

Thank you for your kind words and feedback, Max.

I shall update the mix shortly, as I noticed that oboe has disappeared from the stage due to my fault (one of many).
Also clarinet level has new balance. In fact the solo statements (cello is the third) are ntended to be more "first parts" than true soloists. I succeeded more with the cello than with the winds. I'll try again, but it seems to me the updated mix (available this afternoon 14,30 GMT+1 on) is a big step in this direction.

As for reverb, I learned that the better you are at mixing the less you feed reverb in — at least in classical-acoustic music. I surprised myself at lowering the wet signal to -16dB in the master channel!

Sorry for the audio being so quite; I took the wrong approach linking Velocity X-fade and Expression to same CC when exporting from Notion. I split and reworked envelopes afterwards but the risk to destroy the mix halted me to go even further.
Lesson learned.

A Greeting Card for you is under evaluation. 😃

[jasensmith]

Hello Fabio, Is this the remixed current version? If so it didn't sound too bad to me especially if this was done with the Special Edition. I thought it sounded pretty decent.

[Fabio Biolcati]

@jasensmith said:

Hello Fabio,

Is this the remixed current version? If so it didn't sound too bad to me especially if this was done with the Special Edition. I thought it sounded pretty decent.

Yes, I constantly updated it almost day by day last week.
I was caught in an enhancement galore due to the tight deadline for delivering the song
and the lot of crass mistakes I've introduced while mixing and rendering.
Now it sounds almost good to me and it will rest untouched and stable for weeks.

I'm working offline with a wider range of articulations than the few Notion5 printed in the original midi file.
I'm diggin' into fortepiano and sforzando at the moment: what a thrill!

Thank you for listening and commenting.