A little musical intermission...

[Taron]

Pilou, check this out:
Jean Nouvel and long lost twin brother...

Yes, the hidden freaking twin brother!

Oh, thank you my friends! Very nice of you, really!

Pilou> For me too

Taron> You don´t know how I am glad that you took your time and commented my pieces! BIG THANK YOU again! Critics is needed and be sure I will try to reflect your comments for my further melodies!
Time goes by so fast and all my songs on soundclound are about 8 years old and older. Nowadays I only have time to catch some of my ideas.. But I can remember how I felt when I "composed" new songs - it was great time - better than I feel during painting. I hope I can complete something new in the near future

Thank you for the link too! Yes. Dullaby is that one! I read on soundclick you though it isn´t so good to release. It is good and it is good that you upload that song. I really like it. It contains catchy base melody and nice transitions - mainly in the middle of your song.

Have you heard about the Cinematic Strings library? It sounds very good for my ears. http://www.cinematicstrings.com/
Check the sample songs (by the way they sound and are programmed very professional). . Unfortunately I cannot tell you more details because I didn´t buy it. As you mentioned, music is not my job so I don´t want to pay bigger amount of money for the music software. But think about this library, you are the right person who is able to exploit full potential of the good samples, me not for now. Maybe in the future when I try to implement your kind advices! By the way they are very useful for me!!

That's funny, like Lemivision i was a "piccolo" musician too ! Old story...
Well I had an ear on Taron's work :
"Promise of a sunrise" : that's serious stuff man, It's incredibly realistic orchestration with a lot of nuances, and a very "filmatic" composition. However I regret that the oboe starting a beautiful melody at 1.00 seems to fade away to be overtaken by other instruments (mainly a flute i think): the melody would deserve to last longer and sustained by the same instrument. Just my humble opinion.
"One of those trips" : very nice composition, again suited for a movie I think. Sexy and expressive muted trumpet sound ! the melody sounds like a classic when heard for the second time a couple of days later, that's a good sign
"Sculptrissima" : very impressive work, i like the timing aspect too: you are not slaved to the metronomic "tick" commonly used in home studio music.
All your songs have a pristine sound with rich arrangements and great sense of details, including in the background. It is incredible to hear so many layers yet keeping transparency, you are really mastering your mixing. And what about the drums and percussions, wow... Kudos Taron.
Regards,
GBoGBo.

[Taron]

UUuhh, thank you, Gbo! That's very sweet! I'm still hyper-critical with my mixes (after the fact), not really being comfortable, yet, with what I'm doing. After more than 2 decades I should somehow get a hang of it, but without proper focus it's just not possible to make the final leap, so to say. I don't think I'll ever stop exploring in hopes to one day truly mastering mix as well.

Currently I'm really only doodling, which "promise of a sunrise" illustrates. It's basically a bunch of ideas tumbling over itself, but I did really enjoy making it. It will take some time before I even get to consider making a "whole song" again. Secretly I'm really hoping to get my brains rolling again to focus on Verve instead, of course, but this intermission seems to be important to me. It's kind of like a little reset to flush my system a little. However, I almost wished I would've been hot on doing synth music instead... it would've prevented me from stuffing up my disks with countless gigabytes of orchestral sounds... arrrggghhhhh... today I'm playing around with choirs, but man...

I have two SSD drives (256Gb each) in my HP600, but I have a third one at 1 TB, yet, I don't have another slot in this dumb tower!?!? So annoying. Now I don't quite know what I need to hook it up?! A bay doubler? If anyone of you has any idea, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Do you have DVD in your tower? Maybe you can replace it by your third disc.. I am in the similar situation with my office laptop. There is only one slot for hdd and I would like to install a new disc. Currently DVD looks useless for me, all installers come from the web..

..Choirs.. Yes, it is a big challenge It is not easy to avoid of the synthetic artefacts. If I can ask, how do you solve this problem, Taron?

Regarding mix stuff.. Uff, it looks it is the most difficult problem to solve (for me). You suggested many of good hints to avoid muddy sounds and I would like to focus on them for the future. In music the rules of mathematics are not fully valid good sounds together without any modification <> good mix as a default

It is always good to have a break and do something different. After that you will see things in a different light. And music seems to me as a very good break!

I wanted to ask you. Sometimes I have very vivid dreams and hear very nice music (seems for me, haha and in the morning I am not able to reproduce it. Do you know similar situations?

GBoGBo> Hey, don't hesitate and provide us with yout music results

[Taron]

Hm, that's a nice question! I think, it reveals to you your potential more than anything specific. The more you gain control over everything, the clearer your visions will translate into your music. Dreams reveal to us aspects of our existence that are otherwise hard to access, but present nonetheless. Oh, and I've had that, too, more than once, I think.

I once made a curious exercise while having been in an alpha state, closely around falling asleep or waking up, you know. In this exercise I attempted to hear in my mind more than one voice, accumulating a whole orchestra with choirs at once. It took me a moment but eventually I saw- in my minds eye- a vast forest landscape with low rolling hills and above them I started to hear and fully control a whole choir with some orchestral support. I couldn't hold it for very long, but it was quite amazing. With some proper meditation, I'm sure this could become fairly normal to accomplish, though.

With choirs, well, I'm afraid that you just need to have proper material, decent samples, you know. Otherwise you'd have to rely on choirs just supporting your arrangement in the background and only subtle.

As for the mix, once you are aware of the concept to keep frequencies separated for each member of your orchestration, you will automatically come to cleaner mixes. Even when you want to go unisono, with various groups playing the same melody, you will try to pick instruments that don't overlay badly, but saturate different parts of the spectrum. Sometimes there, too, octave shifts can help keeping it neat.
It's always good to have a nice analyzer displaying to you the frequency band levels in real time. It helps you to dial in proper values for the EQ of each instrument.
But there's so much more to all of this, the deeper you go.
Currently as I'm playing around with orchestration, I'm not too concerned with the mix, as I rely on the natural recordings of the samples for all groups. If I use different libraries, I'll see that I balance out the volumes, though. But I haven't really gotten to that, yet.

As for music and mathematics, well...the field of mathematics is vast and music appears to take advantage of great many disciplines math offers. I haven't spent too much time with those explorations, though, so ... it's just something I can imagine. The big trouble is that we have to bring everything into the range of general perception for a human. We respond to different frequencies in different ways. There alone are a set of dimensions worth considering. From alluring sounds to alarming sounds to internal sounds and rhythms, they all play different roles and come in their own parts of the spectrum. Some of which align to specific intervals across the spectrum...eh...worth countless contemplations and observations!
It's easy to get carried away, of course... but for now I'd just focus on detecting problems in your mix and solving them, but otherwise just flow freely. The more you become conscious of, the stronger your intuition will point you to the right sounds with the right notes!

GBoGBo> Hey, don't hesitate and provide us with yout music results

Well, I hesitated a bit
https://soundcloud.com/gbogbo-1
Just uploaded but made 15 years ago ! "Valiant Dream" is instrumental, the others are experimental collage with spoken voices.
rgds,
GBoGBo

[Taron]

Wow...so confident and careful, almost like stalking prey somehow, "Valiant Dream" has some 80s charm in it, but virtuous control, like an elegant juggling act.
Sorry it took me a moment to check it out, but this moment is now! Well... I'll resume after my good morning smoke!
GREAT ALREADY! Can't wait to listen to the rest!!!

Ok...grooving out to the rest right now! ... yeah, I totally understand the 15 years, but I'd give it at least 5 to 10 more, hehehe, wild! Jazz and kinda hiphop/acid/disco crossover. Totally hilarious here and there. You should've called "You make the best": "The Cheapest", hahaha!

Eh...there's only so much speech samples I can take in one sitting, but it sure is fun.
"Valiant Dream" and "Reveille toi" are by far my favorites and musically all the tracks have a great deal more joy in them than the samples allow to enjoy here and there. "Je veux la..." sounds a little bit like porn music of sorts?! ...it is kinda sexy!

You should most certainly pick it back up again and do more tracks. If you focus on your music and most infectious rhythms, you'll make plenty of new gems!

Wow GBoGBo, I am listening your songs now too. Great! It takes time to hear all but I can say now you are talented! Bossa nova style in Reveille toi, yummy. You are very creative and have very good feeling for timing.