Sounds great, first 1:04 is especially nice. When you say your strings are custom, is this unique samples you've created or just heavily tweaked samples from OT or another library? If heavily tweaked, do you mind elaborating?
The stuff thats "Custom" is built from ground up. So it's all unique samples, yes. legatos and all. Was quite a undertaking back when we (there was few friends involved as well on the project) did the whole thing.
great as usual, Henri
really curious to know more about that
Your tracks are always great. This is such a contrast from the last piece I remember from you, that scifi/horror cue!
The woodwind interjections in the section at 0:41 are very fun!
I'm not sure if it's an orchestration or performance issue, but at 1:35 and towards the end I was kind of expecting/wanting to hear the trumpet doubled with strings unison or winds 8va. It's not necessary for volume, just the unmixed trumpet color seemed to get used a lot and that would add variety.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by this? Does this mean some kind of sidechained dynamic EQ/compression?
Ok here comes the technical thesis, so bear with me xD
What this means is that I have individual mic position treatments on each individual instrument run trough a bussing system that allows me to match in detail between libraries. This lets me for example match the berlin woods room mics to the room mics of my reference samples (In this case the custom base library that I use) and then treat the spots to the reference as well (keeping in mind that you have to repect the individual recording style for each instrument at hand, but still the ambience and overall tone, recording aesthetic style and color on close mics can be very different from library to library, so I'm matching those all individually.) After that I run everything trough a bussing system that lets me heat up the close mics on quieter passages if i wish, so that I get a little bit more presence and good attack definition on the parts that need it (this helps also on getting stuff like the very beginning of a marcato attack strike trough a dense orchestration), but still controlling the dynamics so that when things get loud I'm not getting any of that harsh constant spot sound that usually sounds like crap on loud dynamics, but instead the balance shifts to more ambient sound. After that each group (brass, str, woods, perc) is multiband processed to make sure that the tonal balances behave as they should in the real world. As in doubling celli and bass doesnt build up in this crazy low mid buildup as tends to happen on samples, but really doesnt in real recordings. After that the same summing and multibanding process is done to the combined stems to combat any kind of buildups on that level. This will make sure that when the instruments are playing in more sparse setting the cellos for example have all the nice warmth and low end that they should have, but when the bassoons join in to double those guys blend as they should and not just stack up. this gets increasingly important as the orcehstration gets thicker. you want the low end to stay controlled and transparent regardless of what kind of material you throw at it, and i like it to happen interactively, so that i dont have to go change things while im writing, or after. It's kinda set and forget for the most part. It's still work in progress but the blending you get is quite something. Also forces you to think more in orcehestration and balance since no individual track/articulation has a individual volume control. You have to actually balance as you would for real performance, adjust articulation to get definition and so on. Things like the articulation matter in real world. Cellos doing legato counter point aint gonna cut trough in a tutti fortissimo passage and you need to think what kind of articulation you use on those guys if you want it to sound in the big shceme of things. All of this is happening behind the scenes, busses and multiband processing nested inside busses and processing, and doesn't need much attention once I've set it up. Sort of a hardcore top down situation where you're pushing programming into a polished and finished mix, using every trick imaginable to make things transparent and punchy, and keeping fingers crossed everything keeps working as it should.. Infact now that NoamL mentioned sidechaining... I think doing what I'm doing with multiband on the busses might work with a sum sidechain that feeds back to multiband on individual instuments. That way you'd still get all the control in the individual tracks but the buildup issues would be dealt with as usual. but yeah that would be a heavy modification (also would need like a slave just to do all the mix processing lol as bussing things down to small number of buckets saves so much cpu cycles if you do it right) so I guess would need to build it from scratch. but yeah that would definitely allow for better stemming if thats something one wants to do. But yeah very cool idea! Thanks I'll steal it xD
TL:DR: I use the separate mic positions for individually matching libraries to a reference library (you could do this inside the kontakt patch (you need to rebuild the instruments to support the internal bussing, as most dont support it off the box), use kontakt internal mixer to buss things, or just shoot everything to your daw mixer and work there, Í'm using a combination of all here), and run everything trough a nested bussing system of multiband dynamic processing to control any unnatural frequency buildup on the different stages of summing towards the master channel. Leading to a nice balanced mix on any (or maybe just most) orcehstrations I throw at it.
Regarding the exposed trp passages, yeah you're probably right, would have been a welcome change in the color maybe. The trumpets are perfectly capable of carrying the melody on their own tho so I was like what the hell, they really dont need any support to do it and it sounds good enough here (usually doesnt lol... damn trumpet samples). They are actually doubled/harmonized with winds at times but as the balance goes on this specific mix you really can't hear most of the winds whe the brass and strings are going full steam. You'd notice if I took them out tho! Tons of drive, air, warmth and texture there. You hear a bit of what they contribute when the winds do trills at the end of a unisono phrase or such as your ear picks up the movement a bit better.