A few links gathered from around the web. This week we have a couple of useful tutorials in sound mixing and MIDI orchestration. Although written with games, films or album release, these techniques are equally applicable for theatrical work. I’ve also linked to an excellent post by composer John Adams on taking your compositions into the real world for the first time.
The art of orchestration is a very complex and interesting one. I think that today it can be divided into “classical orchestration” and “MIDI orchestration”. The latter is created with the help of software and samples – check my previous tutorials and quick tips.
Now I think that one rule can be applied to orchestration – when done properly in a classical way, MIDI orchestration becomes piece of cake. Lots of problems will be solved when a nice classical orchestration has been made.
via A Guide to Producing an Epic Orchestral Track.
Home recordings are infamous for having noise. Background noise from outside and indoor noises from the air conditioning and people shuffling around in the next room. Home recording studios are usually never sound isolated enough. Even though you might have a great sounding room, with acoustic treatment carefully placed all over, you’re still going to run into sound isolation issues.
The biggest issue is noise, and in the following tutorial I’ll run through a couple of ways you can minimize the amount of annoying hiss and noise from your home recordings.
via How to Minimize Noise In Your Mixes.
Advice to composers: Try not to panic if you can’t recognize that noise coming from the stage as something you wrote.