Leaderboard

I appreciate the feed back, Eladar. I've long since stopped working on this, but it's good to have more of an idea of how to make instruments sound more alive. Thanks, and good luck with your piece going to the Board!

Liking this new draft, Souperion. I like the harp at the lower registers during the early sections better, and another new detail I'm fond of is the extra harp part that's harmonizing with the original one at 1:08 now. It's a small change, but to my ear it sounds much richer than before, to the point where I wish it would go on a little longer. The more touches like this you can include in your tracks the better - interesting harmonies and counterpoint can do a ton of work in elevating your arrangements and stirring emotion in your listeners. Listening to version 2 and 3 back to back, I have to say the velocity and note placement changes are pretty subtle and aren't making a huge difference for me. I notice them here and there though and what you've done does help. To expand a bit on what I said before about humanization - there's a lot of other elements to it besides velocity/timing of individual notes. As an example, if you're crafting a MIDI-driven distorted guitar performance, pitch bends at the starts of certain phrases for emphasis and satisfying vibrato on the tail end of your sustained lead notes can be really impacting. A thing that's helped me a lot with learning how to humanize MIDI stuff well is to look up a bunch of Youtube videos of people playing the instrument in question live. Listen and watch real closely to the many techniques they use to vary up their performances, and you might be surprised how much you end up noticing that you never did before. It comes to my mind now that I wish there were places you could add glides or vibrato on your leads for interest but to be honest, this might not be the right piece for it. Your flute lead is pretty synthy and might not lend well to such flourishes. Keep all this in mind for future pieces though; it's good stuff to think about when you're still writing your parts and deciding on instrumentation. The vibraphone sounds good sample-wise and I wouldn't say it's out of place, but I'm also not sure it's bringing everything to the table that it could be. For instance from 1:17 to 1:48 it sounds to me like it's often mimicking the non-sustained higher string notes pretty closely and I find that I want the strings/vibraphone to be better-differentiated in their roles. I can't say I'm noticing much delay on the vibraphone either, I think that may be getting lost in the mix. Some EQ work to create more space to hear the nuances or simply exaggerating the delay effect might help if you want it to be more apparent. Finally, something Rozovian mentioned to me recently on my Volcanic Glass thread might be helpful to you. It's not necessarily productive to spend too much time refining a single piece. I'm going to be wrapping up Volcanic Glass as soon as I can and submitting it so I can get a judge panel review and see what I learn from that. The reality right now on the OCR WIP forums is that official evaluator reviews are very rare due to lack of staffing/time, so you might consider wrapping this up and submitting it soon now that it's been a few months. In the meantime you could start another piece and put everything you've learned while working on this one into practice from the beginning. Just some food for thought. Best of luck!

I somewhat agree with the above poast, listening to it again. About the mids and highs point. The strategy I've used with the last few pieces I've made is not to EQ, but use both a low-pass and high-pass filter on midrange and treble instruments. It's an effective way to completely cut unwanted frequencies. Otherwise, not bad at all.

Staff isn't doing much to this board, sadly. But I've got some time. I'm technically not staff anymore, so this isn't technically an ocr evaluation. Around 1:40 you've got an interesting mixing situation. The bass is nice and clean, though it could probably stand to have a little more lows. The mids and highs are a bleeding mess. Use EQ to carve some space in the accompaniment so they don't compete with the leads. It's difficult to say which frequencies are best to carve in, but probably somewhere in thethe 1kHz-4kHz area. That should make the mix overall more clear. I quite like the instrumentation, except the bass. It's a bit dry, a bit raw, it doesn't quite blend in. Maybe eq shaping, tweaking the filter or its envelope, something like that would help. Maybe giving it a touch more lows (carefully) and cutting some low mids Or using a different patch altogether. Maybe something silly like a filtered reverb on it would work, difficult to tell. Or it might sort itself out once the mixing in the mids and highs is done. In any case it's not a big deal, though still worth looking into. The tuning difference isn't a big deal. It's gonna bother some people, be interesting to others, and others still aren't gonna notice it at all. There are always things you can do to improve it, but I don't think it's cost-effective to make a lot of changes at this point. I think it's best to just try to correct the mixing, adjust levels slightly after that in case the leads are needlessly loud, maybe do something about the bass, and then sub it. It's pretty good already. And I don't think it's cost-effective to spend too much time on the same track (I know from experience).