I meant to post this song when I finished it a couple of months ago. I am behind in my blogging!
This is a piece of music that I wrote many years ago as part of my suite of "serious music". The other pieces in the suite that I have blogged about are located at these links:
2) Intermezzo
3) Searching (piano solo, blog post here)
4) Victory Theme (this piece)
5) Proclamation
6) unnamed piano solo (blog post here)
If I ever finish completely recording this suite, perhaps I will post a "playlist" link where they can be listened to, in order, without clicking all around the place. For tonight, I hope you enjoy listening to "Victory Theme":
Here is the obligatory image that I usually include in my blog posts:
Technical details of the recording:
This track was started in Cakewalk Sonar 8.5 many months ago (perhaps more than a year). After letting it bake for that long, I finally ported the MIDI file over to Apple Logic Studio on my iMac, and then re-assigned many of the same virtual instruments used on the PC:
1) Native Instruments Kontakt 4 (Piano, Electric Piano, Bass)
2) Toontrack Superior Drummer 2 (using the "N. Y. - Hit Factory" drum set).
3) IK Multimedia Philharmonik (Strings)
4) Spectrasonics Omnisphere (String Pad and Vocal Pad)
5) Arturia Analog Factory 2.5 (two lead synth parts)
High-end Plugin maker Waves have been running serious discounts on their "Renaissance" line of plugins. This is the company that makes plug-in bundles that cost thousands of dollars. Well, for a ridiculously paltry $38, I picked up their Renaissance Compressor, and I'm very glad I did. I ended up using six instances of it on this mix, on drums, bass and master buss, and it really does add punch and warmth in a very subtle and professional way.
Another thing I did different on this track, that I used to do and just haven't lately since switching to Logic, was that I created a "drum submix" where I broke out the kick, snare, toms, hat and overhead drum "mics" onto separate tracks, and then did different EQ and plugin settings for each track. I also created a separate reverb buss for the drums, feeding just the right amount of post-fader output of each track into this channel. I also used several instances of Toontrack's EZMix plugin on some of the drum tracks to give them some extra sparkle. In the end, this drum mix sounded so good to me, I wanted to go back to all of my recent Logic projects and drop in this drum mix! In fact, I did on one, and Logic's "selective import" feature makes this incredibly easy to accomplish. You can copy pieces and parts of tracks and track settings very easily from one project to another. Very cool. Try THAT in Pro Tools!
