Soundtrack piece I wrote

[Ericlingus]

I decided to write in a major key for once in my life. What do you think? It's a soundtrack piece and not metal at all but I figured I'd share it anyways. I am having trouble getting the drums to be audible on small crappy speakers like on phones or tablets. Does anyone have any advice on that? Also, how do you guys go about mixing string samples?

 

[Machinated]

regarding strings.....

a lot of it is down to writing parts in the correct range of the instrument, and splitting the parts up accordingly. most sample sets have a sweet spot for each instrument in terms of what range they sound nicest in. also if too many instruments come in at EXACTLY the same time it can sound pretty fake. EQ should only be to correct any harshness or unwanted resonances rather than anything too creative. panning wise I'd stick to those orchestral charts.

small speakers won't really play much from about 500hz down so really got to make sure theres enough going on in the higher frequencies. distortion (varying amounts) to add higher harmonics can help a lot, but its always going to be dependant on the piece.

I'm certainly no expert but have been doing it a bit more recently. Here's some of the compositions I've worked on, the first too are very "string"-y.

https://soundcloud.com/sokanomusic/sets/sokano-film-tv-compositions

 

[Ericlingus]

cool they sound good. What do you use for your orchestral and electronic sounds? As far as panning goes; my sample set (IK miroslav philharmonik) automatically pans them so I just leave it all to the sample libraries discretion. I always tend to add pad sounds under the string sounds which obviously doesn't do any favors for the realism but I'm not too concerned about that all the time. It's nice to know how to make them sound real if I need to though.

 

[Machinated]

my assistant runs them through LA strings. he studied film composition at uni so is a bit more clued up on it than me, I've just picked up bits and pieces off him. LA strings sounds great but needs some EQ to clean it up.

my favourite software synth is ES2, can do pretty much anything with it despite it being quite old. u-he makes great stuff, even their free stuff is awesome.

 

[Ericlingus]

what kind of eq do you do on them?

 

[Machinated]

notches around 2-3k mostly. sometimes there can be ugly resonances lower down, just a case for listening to anything that pokes out. then hpf whatever I don't need out. sometimes a high shelf, I'll reference against a comparable film score to decide.

also sometimes you'll find multiband compression is a better way of treating them, you can allow the initial attack of the high end through before pulling it down. same if the low mids get a bit ugly on certain notes, you can set the compression to only trigger on those parts and depending on the attack you can give the illusion that frequency is still there.