# New Midi Mockup - Adventures on Earth from "E.T." by John Williams



## MichaelM (Dec 10, 2017)

Hi everyone,
Here is my midi mockup of _Adventures on Earth from "E.T."_, by John Williams that I recently completed. (I know, not another E.T. mockup!) 

A note on my tempos: The second half I tried to stay more true to the original MCA soundtrack recording. The first half tempos are more in line with the concert arrangement that is usually performed. I used the Boston Pops recording as my baseline.

Thanks by the way to @JBacal for his excellent _Adventures on Earth_ midi mockup. Truly served as some inspiration for me.

Thanks for listening!


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## patrick76 (Dec 10, 2017)

In my opinion we can never have too many E.T. mockups. 10:25! My god you have great patience! Sounds great. Congratulations on a massive project. So....the obligatory.... which libraries and plugins did you use for this?


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## MichaelM (Dec 11, 2017)

patrick76 said:


> In my opinion we can never have too many E.T. mockups. 10:25! My god you have great patience! Sounds great. Congratulations on a massive project. So....the obligatory.... which libraries and plugins did you use for this?



Thanks for the kind words @patrick76! 

For libraries, the core is Spitfire Symphonic Strings, CineBrass, CineWinds, and Spitfire Percussion. My DAW is Sonar. 

Not much in the way of post-processing. I used some Random Hall from Lexicon for some additional reverb. As the project went on, I dialed the reverb back. Hardly fed my Strings/percussion into it since they have it pretty well baked in the tree mic samples. For EQ I just using a little bit of a high-pass filter, and a small cut around 1kHZ - 2kHZ range.

This was an interesting project for me as I had no intention of doing the whole piece. I started the project around the 4:18 mark with the sole intention of just wanting to mock up a few minutes of the sentimental music, because what John Williams wrote there is so beautiful. However, it kind of got its grip on me, and I decided to finish that to the end. Of course once I got to the end I wasn't satisfied that I was starting from the middle! So I decided to go back to measure 1 and complete the first 4 minutes.


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## Gerald (Dec 11, 2017)

Great work!!!!


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## DR BOOWHO (Dec 11, 2017)

You finished the whole thing I had a feeling you would as you would never have been satisfied Really Great job!!


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## MichaelM (Dec 11, 2017)

Gerald said:


> Great work!!!!


Thanks Gerald! 



DR BOOWHO said:


> You finished the whole thing I had a feeling you would as you would never have been satisfied Really Great job!!


Yeah I know, you were right! Couldn't leave it incomplete, especially when the score is sitting in front of you. I appreciate the kind words. The mockups by you and @JBacal got a lot of plays from me last month!


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## Grim_Universe (Dec 14, 2017)

How I missed it! Great job, you are the man of patience


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## MichaelM (Dec 15, 2017)

Grim_Universe said:


> How I missed it! Great job, you are the man of patience


Thanks @Grim_Universe, appreciate the comment!


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## Maxfabian (Dec 15, 2017)

Wow!! Sounds amazing! Well done


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## TintoL (Dec 15, 2017)

Man... the strings sound awesome.... great job...


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## I like music (Dec 15, 2017)

Looking forward to listening to this. I also started mocking it up, and I can barely read music. It is taking absolutely _ages_, and I can't imagine I'll ever finish it.

Some of the stuff in there is way out of the league of sample libraries (or perhaps beyond libraries + patience + the mock-up skill that I possess). Haven't heard yours yet, but saving it for tomorrow. All I can say is, I feel your pain in mocking it up...


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## Paul T McGraw (Dec 17, 2017)

@MichaelM sounds really good. I love the mockup of this by @JBacal and now he has competition. I see you previously answered the what libraries question. 

I am amazed you did so well with Cinebrass and Cinewinds. But you pulled it off.

I hope this gets a lot of plays. Thanks for posting.


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## milesito (Dec 17, 2017)

MichaelM said:


> Thanks @Grim_Universe, appreciate the comment!





MichaelM said:


> Thanks for the kind words @patrick76!
> 
> For libraries, the core is Spitfire Symphonic Strings, CineBrass, CineWinds, and Spitfire Percussion. My DAW is Sonar.
> 
> ...



Great mock up MichaelM. What mic positions did you use for each library?


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## MichaelM (Dec 17, 2017)

milesito said:


> Great mock up MichaelM. What mic positions did you use for each library?



Thanks for the listen @milesito! 
For the mic positions, the Spitfire strings were all set to the default tree mics. I didn't use any of the the close or the ambient mics. For Cinebrass and Cinewinds, I used the default Dennis Sands full mix mics. I would have liked to experiment with different mics, and I did started to about half way through, but I realized I would have had to adjust a lot of my expression/modulation controllers that I had already done. Also my system has 24GB of RAM, so loading up just 1 mic position helped me save on RAM and have it available for other patches/articulations. 
In a few sections, like at the 5:33 area, where I was really trying to achieve a lush string sound, I used the Spitfire tuning/transpose trick to help thicken up the sound.



Paul T McGraw said:


> @MichaelM sounds really good. I love the mockup of this by @JBacal and now he has competition. I see you previously answered the what libraries question.
> 
> I am amazed you did so well with Cinebrass and Cinewinds. But you pulled it off.
> 
> I hope this gets a lot of plays. Thanks for posting.



Thanks @Paul T McGraw for the nice words! Jay's mockup is spectacular! I can't tell you how many times I listened to his while working on mine. 
I should mention I only worked with Cinebrass Core on this, so every now and then there was a call for an articulation that Cinebrass didn't have. For example, muted trumpets. I ended up using muted trumpets from ProjectSam's Orchestral Brass Classic. I would also fatten up the Brass at the double fortissimo sections by layering in horns/trumpets/trombone articulations from OBC and dropping it under Cinebrass. Because OBC is low on system resources I found it to be great to use in situations like that. 
Thanks again for the listen.


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