Hello all. It’s been quite a minute since I’ve posted any new music; real life keeps getting in the way. I’m currently writing an album of dark orchestral music tentatively titled, “A Revenant Symphony and Other Dark Tales” where all the music will have a dark fantasy/mystery type of theme. This is the first completed track.
The piece is mainly written in B harmonic minor with a modualtion to G harmonic minor and focuses on a very simple melodic motif. Tempo is 75-80 bpm. Concert orchestra instrumentation, but only one each of the woodwinds (plus contrabassoon) an only three horns for the brass.
I’ve been messing with Studio One’s new Dolby Atmos spatial audio mixing feature and have used it on this track. While I don’t actually have a surround sound system, I can tell quite clearly with just stereo headphones that it gives the mix extra space and dimension.
Nice spooky tune! I especially like where the harpsichord comes in near the end. A lot of Elfman energy.
How does that spacial audio mixing feature work? Like, what kinds of controls does it have? The stereo field mix sounds quite good. When you use that feature, does it actually prep it for surround, so if you did get a surround system this piece would already be in surround?
Hey Mike! Thaks for the listen and yes, Elfman was a bit of a muse for these tracks, especially his score for the Wednesday series. I was also very inspired by Kenichiro Suehiro’s score for the Shadows House anime; excellent work by him.
As far as the Dolby Atmos feature in Studio One, I’m still playing around with it, so I can’t give too much info on it yet, but you simply add it into the song set up info and it shows a 3D “room” with a listener at the center. From there you can adjust the different speaker levels to what you want, left, right, mid (I think overhead) so it allows you to mix “in 3D.” You can choose to have the audio output rendered as binaural, stereo or Dolby 5.1 (not sure if there’s 7.1) and all this will show up as a kind of second master bus in your mixer pane. It should all be rendered and ready to output in surround.
For now, I’ve only really just added it to the in it’s preset mix, as I still need to shore up my mixing skills on individual tracks, but it does give the whole mix a nice polish, like if all the individual instrument tracks suddenly became slightly more separated, making the orchestration a bit clearer. This on top of using Orchestral Tool’s Berlin Orchestra, which sampled all the instruments individually in seating position.
Like, instead of 4 horns in unison, like most libraries, it’s recored as horn I, II, II, IV and can be orchestrated that way–like a real orchestra, so I can hear them already in slightly different places in the stereo field.
Thanks for the kind words Dori! I think the master needs to be a bit louder, but overall, I’m excited to keep working on this project and some others I have lined up. Thanks for taking a listen!
The prologue, which began with a dark and quiet introduction, evoked a phantom superstate that may have existed in prehistoric times.
The low strings group in particular created an eerie atmosphere, but the chorus and occasional woodwinds melodies were well balanced, and the treatment of the harpsichord and percussion instruments was outstanding.
I was reminded of the history of a deeply saddened nation, and at the same time, though it is a totally strange feeling for me personally, I sensed a kind of mystique and elegance of a fantasy world.