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Hello MusicLibraryReport community!
Thank you for all the info I found here.
I have been working with a number of royalty free libraries so far, and always try to make my music sound better, what do you think about my last trailer type track? Does it deserve the attention of libraries higher than RF sites? In case it still does not, I would appreciate your piece of advice on what should be improved, please critique.Thank you for listening.
Victoria
ImmortalIn my humble opinion, Victoria, it does!
Very nice track!
The thing is that, in order to enter higher end libraries, you need to have a bunch of tracks of this quality, to show it is just not a one off.
Hey Vicky,
I like it a lot. For high end licensing (trailers), the production of the 1st act is good enough (the synth coming in at about :45 is a bit dated). The strings in the 2nd and 3rd acts, and the brass in the 3rd acts sound like good samples, but the mixing / placement needs a bit of work to be up to the level of trailers. That said, it’s more than good enough for TV and certainly better than most RF tracks in this genre 🙂One thing to watch out for – the 1st act, to me, sounds quite a lot like: Thomas Bergersen’s Final Frontier which is a very well known track. I realize you can’t copyright ‘piano and descending diatonic chords’ but the overall instrumentation, harmonic rhythm and style is quite similar. Maybe too similar? I know that at the high end of trailer licensing, companies are more cautious not to be seen ripping off well known tracks. Even if there’s a low chance of a lawsuit, it’s just not something these companies want to be known for.
If I may ask, what did you mean by “placement”: “but the mixing / placement needs a bit of work to be up to the level of trailers”?
It’s more of an art than science, so it’s hard for me to articulate this properly (and also because I’m no expert on this either!)
One important thing I learned to do was always listen to great work by guys like Thomas Bergersen after I’m done with a piece. It’s humbling and also useful to hear the differences in my production.
There are things we can do in orchestral mixes, even if it’s all samples, to simulate a real orchestra on a stage. Think about how an orchestra sits, with the brass at the back, violins mostly to the left etc. Then think about how you can make things sound close and far away – it’s a combination of the amount of reverb (and using additional reverb to ‘wrap up’ some instruments) – lots of reverb makes things sound a bit more distant, panning, and EQ. EQ is something you need to be careful with as it’s easy to take out some of the fidelity of the samples, but tweaking the amount of low end can also simulate how close or far an instrument is. EQ is also important for assigning frequencies for sections, for example, there are a lot of orchestral instruments competing for attention in the low mids (cellos, basses, trombones, low horns, the decay of drums etc), let alone piano or hybrid sounds like synths and guitars.
Something you can learn from the master Thomas Bergersen is that as incredible as his orchestral MIDI sounds (let alone his writing), his huge sound often comes from some neat tricks where he subtly blends synths in with the organic instruments. Even if a track is not supposed to have a ‘hybrid’ modern sound, the mix can sound more impactful with tricks like boosting the low strings with a sub bass, or a warm synth lead under the horns.
In addition to learning a lot from listening to music by experts in the field, VI Control is a great resource where other composers share their knowledge. Blakus is incredible at mockups – I recommend checking out his site and videos: http://blakus.com/category/tutorials
All that said, a lot of the big trailer music companies still send out their music to be mixed and mastered by a professional. Sometimes it’s a better use of our time and areas of expertise to hand off those responsibilities to someone else 🙂