First attempt at tavern music

Hell yeah, I like it.

I didn't find the recorder grating, but I like recorder.

 

Good job! As soon as I get my damned studio finished I'd like to do more challenges like this. I didn't find the recorder grating, especially since this type of folky (Irish?) music tends to be performed by small ensembles with a large focus on monophonic melody.

 

Re: out of period chords. I think if this was written for some cheesy, kevin costner, robin hood: prince of theives, 'period' film then the occasional modern sounding chord changes would be totally fine and would fit the idiom.

 

hey Duncan, the track is cool!
The composition itself is fine, no out of period chords imo.
I hear something not flowing well with the rythm pattern chosen for comping section: sounds a bit too "smart". The flute sound has some articulations at the beginning of the phrase that throughs the timing out a bit.
other than this it is cool. You might consider changing a bit the pallet for the B section to add dimension.
Cheeers
nico

 

Really loved that chord at 0.30 and 0.46 !! At that time after what you did before, that chord there is so pleasant...

@Tom Welsh I undarstand why you think about Robin Hood(Michael Kamen) but hearing this "tavern" track I feel more it's for a videogame, kind of medieval and "tavern" as the title.
Robin Hood to me it's a different sound big orchestra, big film melody and orchestration.
Instead this track here I think it's just what was written for.

As @Nico Bellisario said I feel something a bit out of time too but only in the flute melody, not in the percussions. Maybe I feel that because since I had that timing problems too (for many reasons, included my personal mistakes playing) now I've probably becomed too much sensitive to that.
Anyway these are all musician's and composer's considerations, because I don't know if a normal person could heare some "mistakes" in your track.

An advice for everyone: always let some other people listening your music, like someone trusted in your family who is not a musicians but always gives you right advices. Not everyone but only those few people or even one only. Morricone too always asked his wife Maria to listen his music before deliver(as he said in the recent documentary by Tornatore), and she was not musician but always understand something special and was able to give the right advice, if needed.

 

sure, we are composers, not performers, we should only write notes on paper (or directly in the DAW piano roll or sheet music software). Think if Ennio Morricone or John Williams had to do all this mess with quantising and so... I think they would have lost so much time and couldn't concentrate their efforts on what really counts: composition, orchestration and personal music taste.

As I said on my last piece "Crazy people adventure" I had so many prolems with quantising and adjust single notes that even if I wrote that piece in few hours I spent an entire week adjusting it... I didn't know about negative delay and so my tracks even recorded with click were all different from click (even if quantised), and between them, so I had to adjust not only single notes that were out of time but also each track with the others..
Instead of losing all that time I could have done better mixing or sounds, or write much more pieces.
So now I learned to do things differently.

Now I prefer semi-quantise(or quantise only parts that have problems). Or even better quantise 100% or some less, but with the right negative delay already set on each track.
(I discovered that each library vst has a different negative delay, and each articulations even on the same library has a different negative delay). With that set will be all more even and we can focus only on music.
There is a post on VIControl with all the negative delays for each vst library so you don't have to mess with it yourself.

I know that quantising is a bit less natural sounding but if it's at least decent and good I prefer that than wasting many days for adjusting it.
Lot of working composers do that, and the mockups are quite good.