Hi There,
I am a newcomer here! Recently, got rejected by Audiojungle and I am here to simply Improve.
You Are a Community of Great Composers! I would really appreciate if you help me to step up my game, give advice, tips, maybe some good resources that could help me at this stage of my compositional journey.
The style I am going for is a bit mixture of epic, cinematic, possibly corporate. Still trying to find my niche.
Please, don’t be easy on me - critique if you can! All for the purpose of getting better.
You’ve got some great ideas here. Here are a few suggestions:
This track needs a glue. Right now the instrumentation is sparse. Apart from percussion, we have piano, horns and delayed strings. They are cool, but there’s a lot of empty space. Sustained strings or a pad (if you’re going the hybrid route) would hold everything together and anchor the track more firmly. A bass (contrabass or synth, playing a riff that matches the strings or piano or just sustaining) wouldn’t hurt either.
There are timing issues with several notes. Do you quantize your stuff? You don’t need to hard quantize everything but a tighter timing is definitely needed (most DAW’s have options for soft quantizing. Cubase calls it iterative quantize, for example). Also watch out for overlapping notes (like the horns around 0:29). They scream “sample!” more than anything else.
Look for ways to blend instruments into eachother. I’m talking about blending them in time (horizontal) and not blending in the mix (vertical). In other words, every entrance and exit an instrument makes should have a meaning and purpose. Like a good conversation, the horns may pick up from the note where the piano ended a phrase, or they could even “talk” together for a while. Right now each instrument is segmented. Their phrases (sentences) are cool, but disconnected. They are not “talking” to each other.