# Greetings from Holland



## benyamind (Jun 13, 2018)

Hey what's going on everyone. I'm Benyamin, 28yrs old.

I love connecting to the world so I was looking for some more intriguing forums to join, so here I am.

I look for the most profound sounds in the world because I need goosebumps in my life. I love everything culturally inspired/world-ish/ethnic. But also futuristic western cinematic blends. Oldskool Hip Hop; yes. Breakbeats; yes. Jazz; yes. I rather state a thousand genres than say; uhm, I kinda love everything. But that's basically the same truth with a different nuance.

When I was a youngster I played the alto sax for a couple of years. Then I started to do poetry. That grew to MCing. That grew to electronic production (all sorts of genres), and now I'm here making cinematic/orchestral stuff and learning a bit of piano.

I love to learn from everyone and I hope I can teach a couple of bits to people as well. The greatest realization is to shatter your open-mindedness by realizing you are narrow-minded.

One Love

ps. If you're interested in what I do, I just posted a threat with some music;

https://vi-control.net/community/threads/sounds-of-gaea.72483/


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## GearNostalgia (Jun 13, 2018)

Welcome to the forum. I just joined myself to get some facts about what to buy and what bad companies to avoid. If you don't have it I think the sounds in Komplete11 would suit you. Stuff like India, UnaCorda and Kinetic Metal is a bit unusual, but still orchestral. And it is on sale now. Just upgraded myself and it is really nice.


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## Jaap (Jun 13, 2018)

Welcome Benyamin from a fellow Dutchie here. Nice and interesting introduction and love the track you posted in that other topic! Enjoy your stay here!


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## benyamind (Jun 14, 2018)

Hey Jaap. Cheers for the remarks! I've listened to your album oceanic while I was cleaning up and I love where you went. I'm especially intrigued by the production quality. Could you tell me a bit more about how you crafted it and what inspired you? I'd love some insights!


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## Jaap (Jun 14, 2018)

benyamind said:


> Hey Jaap. Cheers for the remarks! I've listened to your album oceanic while I was cleaning up and I love where you went. I'm especially intrigued by the production quality. Could you tell me a bit more about how you crafted it and what inspired you? I'd love some insights!



Hi Benyamin,

Thank you very much! Very nice to hear  Regarding Oceanic, I wanted to do a thematic album for my production music work and wrote a few tracks, pitched it to various publishers and signed this album with the Revolt Production Label from Sub Pub Music (album is licensed here: https://spmmusicgroup.sourceaudio.com/#!explorer?b=4589469)
The version on my website are my own mixes, actually still need to update the website haha. I created it completely in Cubase with a lots of different libraries like Cinematic Studio Strings, Hollywood Brass, Novo Modern Strings, Metropolis Ark 1 and 2 and so on, the list is pretty long! 
I combined that with my custom created sounds in variouis synths like Zebra 2, Omnisphere 2 and Serum. For the mixing and mastering on my side I used a variety of plugins, but mainly stuff from Vienna Suite, which I know is old, but I kinda like them and from the Slate Everything Bundle, combined with some other things from Fabfilter and the Cubase plugins themselves.


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## benyamind (Jun 15, 2018)

Cool! I love the field of sound and resonance. Very interesting to see how you managed the bass and low-mid ranges
with your instruments. You do use a lot of lows but they sit nicely. 

I'm a bit of a freak regarding mixes and this was a very pleasant experience. Do you compress and if so how far do you go with it? I'm still altering my methods a lot when it comes to orchestral mixing. I mean I have an extended background in electronic production but am kind of new to orchestral mixing in a sense. I notice that I like compression on the deeper drum hits/sequences and I experiment with compression in mastering, but I'm definitely holding back a lot with it. 

Thanks for the info regarding your software and plugins, always interesting to see what people work with!

Do you have any other projects to share? I'd love to listen! Your album already inspired a production session, love it when I get inspired by something!


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## Jaap (Jun 16, 2018)

Thanks, very nice to hear this feedback! I have a few more things on my soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jaap_visser
And a few new releases are coming up from various publishers around or just after the summer, but can't share those yet.
I use sidechain compression a lot on the percussion stuff and on some bass things that I want to stand out at certain points. I automate it often so that I don't have it on or always at the same strength throughout a piece. Furthermore I tend to think still as a classical composer (which is my background) so I tend to think in traditional orchestrating ways. This can be both a plus, but also a limitation.
On the mixing and later mastering I work with very low volume levels, so that I have enough headroom and dynamic range.


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## benyamind (Jun 16, 2018)

Aight cool, I'll have a listen to some more stuff later!

Regarding sidechain compression. Do you mean chaining perc to perc to minimize overlap? If so that's what I do occasionally to clear up the mix a bit. Especially if drums/percs have a lot of low-mids and lows. 

Regarding headroom and dynamic range. I completely agree. Especially for orchestral but for music in general this for me is the way to go. That's why I'm interested in your production quality because I noticed that the mixes aren't necessarily loud, but still rich/strong. 

I really started to notice that the most important aspect of mixing is simply volume management. Over time I started eq'ing less (besides standard clean-ups) and focusing on simple volume leveling more and more. I notice, especially for orchestral, this generates 'the best' results. I trust my ear but I do always have a spectrum analyzer on the master channel to see what's going on. If there are unpleasant peaks, my first go is to lower the volume of the sound in question. If it loses power, then I jump to the eq. Do you work in a similar way?


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## Jaap (Jun 18, 2018)

No I often sidechain the percussion at important points so it puts down the rest of mix a bit and makes the percussion stand out more, or the same with the bass or other effects.
And yes regarding the next thing about volume, I always lower the volume first, then check out the orchestration and see if I can fix things there and only then I move towards tools like EQ, I love to perserve the natural sound as much as possible and with natural I don't always mean realistic, but more the natural sound in how it all sounds together. And it is amazing how much result you can get by often adjusting the volume (and automating it).


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