New Orchestral piece. Need some perspective, please.

by **FMiguelez** » Mon May 21, 2012 8:23 am

mhschmieder wrote:...And I'm not done yet! But I too need perspective now, so may post it here, if I can take the time to figure out how.

Thank you for all the info, Schmieder

I'll check out the piano settings you shared ASA get to the studio.

As for uploading your piece, Dropbox rocks! It's free (unless you go premium) and really easy to use.
And I'll be more than happy to listen to your music

by **mhschmieder** » Mon May 21, 2012 3:04 pm

Thanks -- I was up until 330am trying to finalize surgical snips of parts, but at least I am not worried about having over-deleted yet. :-)

I think this is the last time, however, that I will go "overboard" with layering just due to earlier works having been criticized as too naive.

by **cbergm7210** » Sat May 26, 2012 7:23 am

Great writing, brother. Really.

All your parts are there (first hard part) just some more engineering is needed to get it in the pocket (second hard part). Keep workin' it...you'll get it, my friend!

Do yourself a favor and go on iTunes and buy the song by David Foster called Just Out Of Reach. Put it on a muted track in DP and keep soloing it and referencing it while mixing. Best $.99 you'll ever spend. It's my go to reference mix for piano and symphony.

by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sat May 26, 2012 9:05 am

I think we've reached the point in this thread where more energy has been expended in writing about the segment than actually went into writing the work. IOW, the point of 'diminishing returns,'

by **FMiguelez** » Sat May 26, 2012 3:09 pm

cbergm7210 wrote:Great writing, brother. Really.

All your parts are there (first hard part) just some more engineering is needed to get it in the pocket (second hard part). Keep workin' it...you'll get it, my friend!

Do yourself a favor and go on iTunes and buy the song by David Foster called Just Out Of Reach. Put it on a muted track in DP and keep soloing it and referencing it while mixing. Best $.99 you'll ever spend. It's my go to reference mix for piano and symphony.

Thanks for the suggestion, bro.
I just purchased it and I'm looking forward to listening to it in the studio on Monday (my laptop's speakers don't make it justice).

by **FMiguelez** » Sat May 26, 2012 3:10 pm

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I think we've reached the point in this thread where more energy has been expended in writing about the segment than actually went into writing the work. IOW, the point of 'diminishing returns,'

EXCUSE ME?!?!?

How would you know how much energy was expended in writing "the segment", in the first place????

Writing a response here, even a detailed one, takes no longer than a few minutes, so I find your comment not only un-constructive, but even insulting.

I'm surprised (not in a good way) you, of all people, had to write that. Why would you do so? To what end?

The reason I started this thread was to get comments and constructive criticism, so I can improve my mixing skills.
Instead of suggesting to people to stop writing in my thread, and if you got bored of it, simply press the link at the bottom-left of the page, the one that reads UNSUBSCRIBE TOPIC, so you won't be bothered with this anymore.

by **James Steele** » Sat May 26, 2012 3:31 pm

Fernando... I don't think MLC meant any sort of insult.

by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Sat May 26, 2012 5:39 pm

Of course I didn't mean to insult you, FM. I was thinking along the lines of Aaron Copeland's famous quote:

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I am of the mindset that "if it sounds good, it is good." You are the one who needs to figure out what is not working and you have some great observations. I gave my opinion as have others, but again, there is a point of diminishing returns. Opinions work only so well, or to quote another great musician:

You cannot teach creativity.

You only have my respect, bro. I just assume everyone's skin is as thick as mine. :sorry:

by **James Steele** » Sat May 26, 2012 9:38 pm

Somehow the phrase "dancing about architecture" popped into my brain. Not sure it relates, but I sort of knew what you meant there, MLC.

by **mhschmieder** » Wed May 30, 2012 12:35 pm

FM, a LOT of things come up when I Google for Dropbox hosting services. Can you point me to the main site for signing up and posting? I finished mixing and mastering preliminary versions of fifteen of my eighteen movements of my suite early this morning, am heading to Boston for almost a week tonight, and would like to post them and then link them in this sub-forum upon my return (realistically, about two weeks from now).

BTW, in the process of mixing my own, I was very conscious of lessons learned from your own experience, and made a major change in how I go about mixing this weekend. It's step one, as step two is going to involve buying Beat Kaufmann's highly affordable tutorials and templates for orchestral mixing in VE Pro. I'm not yet using VE Pro, but the changes I made to my DP-oriented mixing now have my mind prepared for the next step.

Basically, I stopped using bus sends for submixing (double monitoring was always a problem when making critical mix decisions) and now use cascading aux tracks via the busses instead. Beat recommends taking this one step further and eliminating bus sends altogether, within VE Pro, as he feels anyway that one should adjust the reverb pre-delays and other settings individually for three to four different "stage depths" and conceptualize the mix that way.

Did you make use of VE Pro or any of Beat's lessons for this mix? You mention it represents a new way of working. Just curious.

I will say that even this baby step that I took towards Beat's way, made a huge difference, but I was also cursing as I had to set things up from scratch for each of fifteen different compositions within the overall DP project. The overall process took from 30-45 minutes per sequence, followed by fairly rushed mix decisions as I had to do all of this in less than two days.

Considering the commonality amongst the projects, and how muting auxes as a way of "soloing" a specific aux subgroup at a time (I tried defeating "solo exempt" in DP but didn't like the side effects), I can see how Beat's approach will save time, avoid errors, and keep one's focus on the creative end of things. I had always feared I would need multiple computers to take that approach, but my impression is that muting the auxes keeps the memory and/or CPU usage down, while also allowing one a more realistic hierarchy of contexts during mixing (and with fewer mouse clicks to switch contexts).

I don't mean for this to go OT, but it's precisely because you presented this piece as the first using a new working process that I am curious about whether we are headed down the same path.

by **FMiguelez** » Wed May 30, 2012 2:11 pm

Hey, Schmieder.

I'm in a bit of a hurry now, but I can address some of the things you mentioned now (hopefully later I can give you a more decent response).

For Dropbox, go here. I suggest you watch the intro video about it and get a free account. For uploading your stuff you would use the Public folder:
https://www.dropbox.com/

As for the changes I talked about, some were regarding the use of reverbs (convolution instead of regular reverb), but my BIGGEST and best change I did was in the way I was approaching VSL by avoiding the use of redundant Aux tracks for maximum efficiency and speed, especially when making changes.

You can read about it in this other thread I wrote. I describe in detail my old and new process. Something tells me you might like it ( let me know what you think about it):
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=50004

I'll come back here later to discuss with you any more details about the approach, etc.

Looking forward to listen to your piece too

by **mhschmieder** » Wed May 30, 2012 4:01 pm

Cool; I'm obviously in no rush as I'll be off the net from a few hours from now for almost a week, and then am slammed with corporate and wedding gigs with my jazz combo for the entire week of my return from Boston.

I missed that earlier post, and will soak it in. So many ways to do things, but in the end, time is money (and also the avoidance of repetitive tasks keeps the creative pulse going), so I am sure I will learn something from your change of tactics.