Soaring Above the Clouds

Hi everyone!

This piece is probably my greatest achievement, since it's the first one I recorded with a big live orchestra (40 musicians!). Not much to say here; I composed this piece during 3 very intense nights on the Christopher Young Scoring Program organized in Madrid this summer. The ending is maybe a little lazy (I had no time to refine it further) and some things did not work out as I intended when I was writing the music to paper. However, the result was quite nice, and the musicians really pulled out a great performance out of the 20 minutes they had.

Here's the music I kind of "mixed" (mostly raw tracks) and the pdf of the score.

The only question I might have is: do you guys think the quality of the audio can be greatly improved with a professional mix, or should I not worry about it too much?

Enjoy! Any critique is very appreciated, since this is basically my first work with a real orchestra.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ex4kzr7m323sfjw/Soaring Above the Clouds - Full Score.pdf?dl=0

 

Thank you all very much!

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Let me address this: I think that the biggest let-down was the finale; it came out way clumsier than I anticipated, and I think it's mostly because I doubled the melody way too many times in unison instead of improving the texture. The result was that the melody was screamed almost in a painful way, and that the trumpets were almost completely buried (which is a big red flag in most situations). I think my orchestration in the first half was better than my second half (except some obvious mistakes, like the "forte" dynamic at 36 of the countermelody against the "mf" of the melody on the trumpets). I decided that I would double instruments way more than I would naturally, just because I was scared that the sound would be too thin compared to a 80/90-piece orchestra. It was probably a good call though, the sound came out okay.
Another big issue I find on this piece is that the forward momentum is not as present as I was hoping for; although that's composition-related, not orchestration-related. And to be fair I would have probably not done it differently this time around, because I didn't know how good the players were, so I guess my main priority was to keep it simple.

B) I will probably leave it and move on, I really value the idea of being able to write clean orchestration before muddying the water with samples and synthesizers. It really feels like cheating and I think I'll learn way more doing things this way.

Just a little insecurity check. I have all the sections mic'd up plus 6-8 ambient/room/other general microphones, but I didn't really do much (just a couple of EQs/compressors here and there). It sounds fine to me but I'm way too biased to have any objectivity about it.

I would really love if you could expand on this and give me examples (maybe from my score?) when you have more time. I think I get what you're saying, but a couple of examples here and there might lead me to the right direction.

I guess this is the hardest part, and the thing I struggle the most with. But I'm confident that, if I continue to put in the work, I'll improve on this. I don't think there's any quick fix for this besides studying more and more!

Thank you very much for the feedback.

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Yeah I did drop the ball a little bit with the rhythm part. Some parts sound a little unsatisfying/empty without the percussive elements, or any kind of motion.

You caught me!
At that exact point in the piece I basically ran out of time, and I was like "I know I have to wrap it up and I know that this works!". Also, I didn't specify it here, but I was rescoring a movie scene, so my music was locked into the structure of the picture. It might have been bad planning on my part, but I only had time to go back into the main theme and finish in that amount of time. However if I treat it as a standalone piece, I could try and think of different ways to go back to the main theme. I'll definitely check your chord progression out tonight!

Nitpicking is exactly why I'm posting music on this forum! I really really appreciate any kind of criticism.

Thank you so much!

 

Neither
it was part of the Christopher Young masterclass that took place in Madrid 3 weeks ago. All things considered (great classes, getting to really know Christopher, the orchestral recording, ...), it was a real bargain. I didn't have a mixing guy (did it myself) and the room was a theater, which produced a very interesting outcome sound-wise.

I've heard that they're gonna organize it again next summer in Spain, only they're expanding the orchestra to 65 players. I'll definitely try to attend again next year, it was really great.

 

I was afraid that everyone had a fun part except the second percussionist, I didn't wanna have him sitting through the entire piece only to have 2 hits. Found out afterwards that the 2 percussionist divided the single percussion line among themselves anyway. It was a stupid/naive mistake on my part. I'm adding now some cymbals in post. It was a shame we didn't have any other percussion available except marimba, would have loved some other colors.

It seems extremely obvious now in retrospect that I have some big consistency problems in dynamics, and I thank you for pointing them out. If you didn't maybe I would have easily glossed over them.

Thank god for that I hope they enjoyed it.

I feel like the rehearsal letter C is hard to fuck up, it's pretty simple in its intention I know what you mean on the "weakly orchestrated" parts though, and I feel like this piece has a lot of good intentions paired with weak execution. Although, I do think that it's only matter of studying/transcribing more.

Thank you so much again for your time, I'm learning a lot. It's very humbling to see how far down the rabbit hole you can go. It's amazing how much complexity you can achieve with the same 15-20 instruments (lifetimes worth of study!).

Thank you very much Paul! I agree 100%, I've got invaluable feedback and that's why I love this forum! Regarding orchestration, it really is all about chops. I can have the best idea in the world, but without the words I can't go far!

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We talked about the piece and its problems, but I wanted to take a second just to describe how wonderful the experience felt. Something magical happened when I heard the beginning for the first time: I had this thing I wanted to try, where you put the motion+harmony on the violins in the middle register and you play the melody with the french horns; it's pretty much everywhere, and I learned it transcribing parts of The Race, Rey's Theme, [...]. It's one of those counterintuitive things that should not work (the instruments are all playing in overlapping ranges), but that works wonderfully. I remember Mike telling the story about the first time he heard "the Hollywood sound" on one of his compositions; well - I knew that the technique would work just fine, but hearing it performed with my music made me go nuts. I really had this incredible feeling that I knew what I was doing (in the smallest way possible - at least for a couple of bars!). And I guess it was also all mixed with the experience of having your music played bit a giant group of experienced musicians, which does feel great.

I'm sure you have similar stories - I wanted to share this because I know you'll be able to empathize with this kind of experience. The ones among you that recorded with a live orchestra know what I mean; and for the others: you definitely have to try it! A life-changing experience!