Sorry your browser is not supported!

Hi, long time since I last visited... been busy with starting a new education (taking a bachelor's in game design, who would have thought ).

I was thinking of having this song uploaded to the GC store, it's a pretty generic epic movie soundtrack-style song which I imagine would fit well as a opening theme for RPG's and action games alike. Perhaps it would even do for the strategy genre, who knows.
Anyway, I've been working myself blind (or rather deaf?) with this over the past week and am starting to only see it's flaws. Therefore I want to ask you what your opinions are on the track. Is it well mixed, could it be made better in some way, etc.

I have a few points I've noticed myself that may need improvements, but a couple of friends claim to hardly notice it at all. I'm writing them down in the following snippet which I ask you to read only after you've listened through the song, so that you can tell me whether it was anything you thought of when not listening explicitly for it.


The link: download Heroes (Demo version)


Thanks for your time, any input is greatly appreciated
 
Keep on composing,
Rudolpho

Sounds quite nice!

I can see great potential in your composing skills! However, it is your mixdown that is much too plain, I guess.


I took a look at your song and edited a bit, I hope you don't feel bad about it. It's just to show you how much you can get out of your great composition with a more useful mixdown.

Here are two effects I've added (in this order):






I'm showing you via pics beacuse I can't describe it well in English. Anyway, I additionally normalized the track in-between and afterwards, and the outcome gives your track that missing piece of 'epic' in my view :

Heroes Demo Edit


The effects may be a little overdone, but finally, I can't edit the single tracks as you will be able to, and also, it didn't invest much time.

Again, I really hope you don't feel bad I edited you track (I know I probably would if done with rude words), I think your composing is excellent, and all credit goes to you!!

I wished to show you a direction of how to get even more out of YOUR skill!

I could never have composed anything like this, by the way.

Keep it up

Thank you very much for your kind words and the elaborate suggestions
I agree that it might do well with some reverb to create that "huge" feeling, however I've been worried that doing so might result in a smear between the sounds, reducing the clearness and overall quality of the track (here it is I who don't know the correct english term; in Swedish we call it "grötigt" if anybody can translate that, but I guess the "smear" part is decently descriptive of the effect). Originally, I did make pretty decent use of channel-based impulse reverbs, but those dissappeared from my project when my sampler decided to crash. I have since not re-implemented them, but it would be easy enough to use. Here is an old recording of how it sounded back then, which is pretty good. What I'm worried about is the ending getting all cluttered up with elongated sounds. I will definitively give it a try though.
(Also, the sound quality of that recording isn't the best and it's only the first half of the song).

Secondly, on the equalisation part, you make an interresting suggestion. I will definitively look into it, although maybe not boosting the bass by 24dB
It is just on the edge in loudness already as is. Lowering other stuff will supposedly be just as fine a way of enhancing those frequencies though, I guess, so that's what I'll try

Finally, I'm not quite sure about what the in-between normalisation would accomplish, more than (possibly) lowering the sound quality a bit (seeing as all it is in fact doing is multiplying the original waveform data)? Or am I missing something here?


Again, thank you very much for your efforts!
And no need to worry, I have no problem with you editing the song


Cheers,
Rudolpho

Yeah, I agree the clearness gets lost by the reverb effect quite quickly if overdone. That's why you have to put it to single channels/tracks only, but I'm sure you know, so why I'm telling you?

Anyway, you can hear already in my edited version that the strings sound much more powerful this way, but the single notes sometimes move into another becuase the reverb is too long. Possibly you'll have to re-arrange that part or live with it, but I personally feel without that huge feeling as you describe it, this soundtrack is loosing all it's potential power.

Good luck with it, I can't wait to hear the final song (email me when you're done, I'd really appreciate it! ).