A look behind the curtain at my latest upload, a cover of "The Red Means I Love You", a song by @MaddsBuckley . My pop stuff tends to be a bit more chaotic than my orchestral pieces. Weirdly I find it much, much easier to get the orchestra sounding 'realistic' as you tend to be hiding everything in the mix, compressing and EQing the poop out of it, and the 'room' sound is not as important.
The track was organised and arranged in Reaper (used for recording guitar, bass, vocals, etc.). I would write the orchestral parts in @FL_STUDIO and then print the stems as WAVs and bring them into Reaper for arranging/mixing/mastering.
Mainly Spitfire Audio and private sample libraries for the orchestral bits. Mixing and mastering is a mixture of @meldaproduction's suite, @iZotopeOfficial's Ozone (mastering) / Nectar (vocals) and various other plugins I've relied on for years.
Guitar and bass parts were played in using my Hils HN3 (love this guitar, not my best sounding, but still great and feels so nice to play) and my HNB5. @NativeInstruments Guitar Rig and @NeuralDSP's Morgan Amps suite used with them. Drums were my noobish skills on an electric kit to record some loops and then a bit of mangling.
Technique-wise I just sat down, starting with the symphonic strings part as the core, and wrote the guitar track around that. I was recording vocals while working on the instrumental, which is my poor excuse for the incredibly chaotic comping process you can see in the pictures. Vocals had a compressor and then basic Nectar bits (delay, EQ, reverb saturation).
I don't think there was any other black magic behind the sound, but feel free to pop any questions in the comments and I can try to answer them.
The Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra
A look behind the curtain at my latest upload, a cover of "The Red Means I Love You", a song by @MaddsBuckley . My pop stuff tends to be a bit more chaotic than my orchestral pieces. Weirdly I find it much, much easier to get the orchestra sounding 'realistic' as you tend to be hiding everything in the mix, compressing and EQing the poop out of it, and the 'room' sound is not as important.
The track was organised and arranged in Reaper (used for recording guitar, bass, vocals, etc.). I would write the orchestral parts in @FL_STUDIO and then print the stems as WAVs and bring them into Reaper for arranging/mixing/mastering.
Mainly Spitfire Audio and private sample libraries for the orchestral bits. Mixing and mastering is a mixture of @meldaproduction's suite, @iZotopeOfficial's Ozone (mastering) / Nectar (vocals) and various other plugins I've relied on for years.
Guitar and bass parts were played in using my Hils HN3 (love this guitar, not my best sounding, but still great and feels so nice to play) and my HNB5. @NativeInstruments Guitar Rig and @NeuralDSP's Morgan Amps suite used with them. Drums were my noobish skills on an electric kit to record some loops and then a bit of mangling.
Technique-wise I just sat down, starting with the symphonic strings part as the core, and wrote the guitar track around that. I was recording vocals while working on the instrumental, which is my poor excuse for the incredibly chaotic comping process you can see in the pictures. Vocals had a compressor and then basic Nectar bits (delay, EQ, reverb saturation).
I don't think there was any other black magic behind the sound, but feel free to pop any questions in the comments and I can try to answer them.
2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 261