Score: 6
"hmmmm"
date: October 17, 2008
I'll ignore the dodgy attempt at a biblical representation or the use of biblical themes and go straight to the song.
For a battle of gods and demons, especially armaggedon you need a lot more in a song then this to really capture epic. You had a decent idea, but it fell flat because of the following reasons:
You probably busted the decibel range on your program so the drums sound supressed and they cause the song to fall flat.
How many violins did you use? Too few anyway, for epic you need HUNDREDS of instruments, or heavy control of the instruments, that means lots of articulation, crescendo and the like. You really need to pull out the feeling behind something, and that often takes more skill then most people give credit for.
Choirs are an excellent idea but you really need a lot more bass then what you had, something ground shaking, rumbing, thundering in our ears. That especially goes for the drums, make them thunder, those ones sounded like cheap twenty dollar drums amplified a whole load of times.
You need more instruments and more control over each instrument section, ie weave them in and out of each other, epic is complex, thus the epic songs also need to be complex. This one's far too simple.
Some of those instruments were mildly annoying with the length they went on for in a sustained note, I'm not sure it's possible to make a violin sound on one note for 30 seconds and it sounded jarringly unrealistic, it really grated on my nerves.
I couldn't pick out the Gabriel section, there wasn't nearly enough contrast or feeling or the sense of loss as a being of unimaginable power is struck down.
The choirs need to be less sustained, use more stacato, shorter notes, hum haaa, hum hum haaaa, sort of thing not haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa onwards to infinity, and punctuate the notes with drums and short bursts of violins, chellos and other strings.
You don't have any brass! Where's the brass?!! Where are the brazen trumpets?!! The earthquake trombones?!! The horns? The Saxaphones? You can't do an epic piece like this without some sort of bass brass in there.
And finally, you need to work on the intruments, they sounded tinny and unrealistic, you should look for some proper instrument packs.
October 23, 2008
Author's Response:
i should have kinda explained the process behind the piece to avoid bad scores for no reason, i had to copy it onto Sonar using drag and drop, this explains why the choir can only do voice ahhhs, the violins sound like vibraphones, and the timpani are just snare drums EQd down alot. Needless to say, crescendos and sticattos, and overall complex dynamics were out of the question. the decibal ranges and the chimes/timps were created after the song was finalized on east and west. with that aside, however, thank you for your review, ive been working on rewriting the song on a different program to use more brass and keep the timps on a decent sound, ill let u know when that comes up
(btw, saxes are woodwinds lol)
