Mural OST - Drifting

[BlazingDragon]

Mural OST - Drifting

http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/486325

An animation student recently messaged me asking if I could rearrange a piece of mine called Drifting for a short film he is developing.

While I've had a number of pieces used in videos and flash games, this is the first time that I've went the opposite direction and set music to film. It was a lot more difficult than I imagined, because synching the music to the visual cues created all kinds of headaches with timing.

I had to take a nearly five minute piece and boil it down to two figuring out which parts were relevant to the short film and which were extraneous. In the film there is a significant visual cue where the entire mood changes, and I was desperately trying to get the music to fit up to that point. I had a sixteen bar phrase preceding it but ending up several seconds short. Slowing down the tempo to compensate sounded ridiculous forcing me to recompose much of the piece. I had to change the harmonic rhythm to get something like an 18 bar phrase. All of this was challenging but also an enormous amount of fun. I can't wait to score more films now.

The video might be submitted to film festivals, so I can't link to it for a few months. Also, I improvised the piano part at the beginning and end, but everything in the middle is sequenced with mouse/keyboard.

Constructive criticisms or other thoughts?

[Chee Zeee]

my only complaint is that it seems overly compressed. about a minute in is the change of mood, but it's almost the same volume as everything before it, the bass drum and the cymbals should be ear rapingly overpoweringly loud. a piano playing softly is very very very very quiet in a large concert hall, a piano playing loudly is rather quite (somewhere between a section of violas and the 2nd violins perhaps). The percussions would easily be 1.5x as loud if this piece were to be performed. I don't 'feel' the music as much as hear it. That being said, what I am hearing is sonic bliss, definitely have skillz to pay da billz. Good piano as well man, this cat is jelly.

[BlazingDragon]

my only complaint is that it seems overly compressed. about a minute in is the change of mood, but it's almost the same volume as everything before it, the bass drum and the cymbals should be ear rapingly overpoweringly loud. a piano playing softly is very very very very quiet in a large concert hall, a piano playing loudly is rather quite (somewhere between a section of violas and the 2nd violins perhaps). The percussions would easily be 1.5x as loud if this piece were to be performed. I don't 'feel' the music as much as hear it. That being said, what I am hearing is sonic bliss, definitely have skillz to pay da billz. Good piano as well man, this cat is jelly.

Thank you for the helpful advice. I have a decent grasp of music theory and composition but know next to nothing about mastering. The mood change did feel less satisfying after compression but I couldn't put my finger on why. Is it probably better to not even compress orchestral music in most cases?