Thank you so much for the feedback. Great suggestion on using the volume to adjust attack time. I hadn’t thought of that and am not sure how to adjust attack in BBC orchestra otherwise 👍🏽
Mixing is definitely something I’m still new to. It’s definitely it’s own skill and my ears aren’t properly trained to it yet. Thanks for the suggestions though, helps give some direction to experiment and learn!
Ah! You're using the same VST I was using! :P
You can adjust the attack with the "expressiveness" slider. That's one of the most important adjustments in there. The default is Fortissimo, so if you're not adjusting that slider, you're getting a really loud, harsh sound on everything, like the orchestra is at full blast. Then they also have the circular wheel which I think just adds the reverb of the room back into the mix, which is what I used instead of manually creating my own reverb.
I used a midi controller rather than scoring anything for mine - this really helps to humanize the whole mix. To get smooth transitions, I had a slower attack on the violins, and then I played in such a way that they overlapped each other.
This is gold! I hadn’t realised that about the expression slider, it sounded like it was just affecting volume so I ignored it, but I guess It’s kind of affecting Gain..? and velocity in a way, that makes it more useful!
I have a midi keyboard but mostly use it to hear chords and notes rather than play them (I have limited finger position and music theory knowledge). I’m in the early stages of learning keyboard/theory though so I played with recording from it last night and really liked the result! felt so much more natural, the playing but also the playback (and way more intuitive than manually adjusting velocity in the DAW). I can imagine how it would help with giving things space in a mix.
Thanks for the taking the time on the advice and feedback, I really appreciate it and it’s already helped 👍🏽.
I did have a question about reverb though. With this kind of mix would you have reverb on each instrument trying to mimic it’s position in the room? Or would you touch up the reverb on them just relative to each other?
I think the BBC built in reverb already properly places the instruments in the room.
I need to do more work on it. I have a lot of experimenting to do.
I want to test out delay times, like have a nearer thing be drier, but give it just a few milisecond longer delay than something farther away, i.e. if it's close to you, you'll hear it faster and the reverb will take longer to reach you, but then the ratio of the dry sound to the wet sound is also higher.
Then you can also think about distance to each ear drum.
I've got a lot of work to do on this once I realized that if I put everything at the same dryness/wetness (i.e. just putting a bunch of tracks under a reverb) then it's not going to sound as natural.
