Remember - Liberty

[swinkler]

Hello all,

I haven't posted anything in a while for various reasons. This piece is a slow second movement of three I've been working on lately. This particular movement as well as the first movement was written at the encouragement and suggestion of etLux.

The main reason for posting this piece however is to hopefully solicit comments on the audio rendering of the piece. I started another thread in the General Comments section about mixing or editing your mixes without reverb. I'm really trying to make an attempt to better learn and use the tools at my disposal and thought I'd start with this one. The forces are a bit smaller than the other two movements and the music is very simple which lends itself to learning. I played all the parts in (I love auto legato) and mixed to the best of my ability. I think I used all the techniques discussed in the aforementioned thread.

Remember - Life

Remember - Liberty

Steve Winkler

[serenitymusician]

Hey Steve,

I have to say I liked what I heard. Really nice orchestration. One thing I kept finding myself wanting to hear was some vibrato in the trumpet part, especially when compared to the other solos. Just a suggestion. Otherwise, very nice work.

Gary A.

[serenitymusician]

Bump!

I'm bumping this up for you, Steve. More people need to comment on your piece!

Gary A.

[brsmith]

Steve,

Enjoyed your piece. Great job. Good musical spacing.

brsmith

[swinkler]

Thank you guys. I appreciate the bump and the suggestions. I did add some vibrato and it makes a big difference. I haven't uploaded it yet but will soon. I had to crack open the GPO4 manual and the Reaper manual to accomplish this, but this whole process is a learning one for me.

Steve

[FLWrd]

Copland, Quiet City? Great chords, good melody that escapes attempts to capture it, and a very musical flow. WRT mixing: the trumpet could be a bit softer at certain points. Now it also dominates when the focus seems to be on other instruments.

Great piece, I've downloaded it.

[sd cisco]

Steve;
Yup! Great stuff, and I enjoyed it a lot. Loved loved the deep chords with the brass and the tension/release. And your casting and directing of the winds really adds an amazing, dramatic texture to the work.
Outstanding and a pleasure to listen, thank you for sharing!!

Best regards,
sd cisco

[RichR]

The piece is well constructed and I enjoyed listening. It does have an ethereal quality of "remembering" to it with the shimmering background of strings and the little melodic comments by the winds (nice writing!).

As to your comment on audio rendering of your piece, to my ears it is balanced and the reverb in the piece seems fitting to the title of the piece. In other words, it has a little more reverb in the overall sound to give it that distant (remembering) quality. My biggest suggestion is in the wind instruments. To make them sound a little more realistic, especially on some of the long notes, try making them get louder in the middle of the note and then taper back to the end of the note. This gives each note direction. Also, on a long note, wind players will be running out of air and the note will die off at the end. Mentally singing the instruments line and making space where you breath is a good way to get a wind players phrasing to sound real. This is work that would probably be easiest done using Sonar or Cubase or the like in "piano roll" view so that you could edit note lengths and Mod Wheel data. It can be done live and with the Mod Wheel but you would have to think like a singer or wind player to move the Mod Wheel and separate the notes where breaths occur.

I hope I haven't overly stated the points I have made here because I don't want to take away from a piece that sounds so nice as it is. I don't think you have to worry about your decisions in rendering. I think you have made some excellent choices in this piece.

[swinkler]

Copland, Quiet City? Great chords, good melody that escapes attempts to capture it, and a very musical flow. WRT mixing: the trumpet could be a bit softer at certain points. Now it also dominates when the focus seems to be on other instruments.

Quiet City is definitely an influence for this piece. Thanks for the comments on mixing as well. I did add some reverb and brought down the level in a couple spots. Thanks again for listening.

Yup! Great stuff, and I enjoyed it a lot. Loved loved the deep chords with the brass and the tension/release. And your casting and directing of the winds really adds an amazing, dramatic texture to the work.
Outstanding and a pleasure to listen, thank you for sharing!!

Thanks so much for listening and for commenting.

My biggest suggestion is in the wind instruments. To make them sound a little more realistic, especially on some of the long notes, try making them get louder in the middle of the note and then taper back to the end of the note.

I appreciate this comment. This is especially hard with this piece because the lines are long and sustained. I'll go back over it and examine some of that again. I'm working on rendering the other two movements and generally speaking they don't present this exact challenge. I started using Reaper more seriously in the last 3 or 4 weeks and haven't delved into the PRV too much although I suspect I will shortly

Thanks again for listening and commenting. It helps me out a great deal.

Steve Winkler

[Skysaw]

There's some very fine writing here. I definitely hear the Copeland influence.

I also agree with Rich about adding some fine-tuning to shape the dynamics of the wind passages. The trumpet in particular could use more variation. Trumpet solos are one of the hardest things I've found to get to sound convincing in GPO, but you're well on your way here. Which sample did you use? It has a nice rich tone in that setting, and warmed with just the right touch of reverb.