I've been away for a while, but I've been working hard on my last piece for Orchestration. As mentioned in my previous post I decided to try remake the Ultra Instinct theme (Officially titled Clash of God) from the TV series Dragonball Super. It has turned out to be one of the biggest projects I have worked on in a while, attenuating to every detail of each orchestral instrument. (Scroll right to the bottom for the piece)
The project spanned around 40 tracks, with multiple single instruments having multiple channels to get the correct tone for singular notes
Project with multiple tracks of the same instrument. Here you can see the attention to detail spent on 7 of the 40 tracks. I used some help from Pejrolo and DeRosa's book to help me arrange for each section.
Most of the MIDI was drawn in, with the exception of the main melody. I am not the best piano player in the world but I took some inspiration for this piece from Sunset Boulevard with the piano.
The piece mainly follows what I did with task 4, but I decided early on the module to add an extra section. I shopped around for idea's, especially with Pete Thomas' webpage
The suggestion of playing around with the motif interested me, so the brass section in the early parts of the song included this, right until the middle section where most of the orchestra drops out. The idea of moving the melody to other sections also helped span this idea about.
The middle section is quite strange. However I felt that the last section needed to evoke emotion, and keep tension building. Though I haven't produced the song to the original version (at 2:11), I do believe I have created a convincing orchestra piece. I have also added my own originality to the piece with the drum kit, which I believe represents early music from the Dragonball series itself.
As with the previous tasks, I edited the MIDI notes to the exact timing of where each not should be. Velocities were changed throughout to help give it that realisitic feel as well as the pedal on the piano chaning throughout each little note. Some instruments of the orchestra even had new channels opened to have a specific sound at one part of even one note to get the correct sound. The Brass was a bit easier to notate, as the Native Instruments Session Horns allowed me to change the type of sound on the same channel which I found very useful. One thing I picked up from from Pedro and DeRosa's book was to add tape saturation to the brass to make them pop a little bit more. I even went as far as searching on how to mix orchestral music.
The Violins and Violas had the biggest treatment of them all. I had layered multiple sticcato and sustained notes on top of each other, and each section had their own variation of this. I think I may have went a little overboard and not got the correct sticcato sound I was after (The intense sharp hits of the main melody for tension, as this piece is used during times of tension.) There is a Round Robin option on Berlin Strings which allowed me to have different versions of the same note being played and helped massively.
Anyway, here is the piece, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it. If I were to do anything better, I would re-mix this piece as I feel the bass cannot be heard as well as the other frequiences. This could also be a case of how I composed it as they maintain long similar notes throughout. I would also try having different libraries on the piece to get a feel of not having the a too similar sound.