Hi, a big thanks for that overview! Glad to know other people have similar questions.
I am about 70% in the produced music category. 30% notation based.
I find the Cubase chord track helpful just as a label system for key/chords.
I sometimes start in notation, as it can be easier to keep track of my process, but then I find it painful to translate it to a mix in a DAW.
I think I’ll generally stick with DAW approach for now, as I tend to have more fun doing so.
I will check out the composers you mentioned
By the way my video is indeed up, you should be able to click the link which takes you to it on YT. (It’s just not displayable outside YT.)
Yes, I was definitely thrown by the message saying the video was unavailable. But when I clicked, I could watch it. You are definitely on your way! I’m looking forward to more from you!
2 Likes
Hi @concorde2! Thank you! 
@Early21 hit the nail on the head, these are very different approaches according to the composer’s background – classical composers focused on score vs. more “freestyle” composers focused more on creating the sound. I am somewhere in the middle. I am somewhat classically trained, but I was also a rock drummer. 
And the way my brain works (I am autistic+ADHD), I’m not very good at reading music, unfortunately. My ideas are usually formed in my head, and then I need to get them down. I am much better at translating them directly into sound, than into a score/notation. So for me, it is easier to do the “mockup” thing first, and then later, if certain parts are going to be performed and recorded by musicians, I’ll do the score parts for them after I have done the mockup. To me these are two separate processes. I use Nuendo for the mockup and all the recorded stuff, and Dorico for creating the scores. In Dorico I don’t care as much what it sounds like, because by then I already know what I want the recorded parts to sound like, so the focus there is solely on creating parts that are easy for the musicians to read.
- Yes, I use a MIDI keyboard with a modwheel. And then often I use the MIDI editor to trim certain curves. If I want even bigger volume “swells” than the modwheel will allow, say, on a string part, I may add some careful volume automation in addition to that. I go very much by instinct – I just trim and change stuff until it sounds the way I envisioned it.
- At least for the libraries that I often use, I use very little panning, at least when working in stereo, since I find that there often already is a stereo placement in the stereo samples, and panning would only make the samples seem “smaller”, in a way. Track levels I do adjust as I go, without thinking too much about it – the balance just needs to feel right. I usually create some kind of “main reverb” bus I think of as the main room, and send desired amounts from each track to that reverb. It can be something like Chameleon Surround or Altiverb, but more often lately I use the wonderful Seventh Heaven Professional – the best modelled reverbs have a tendency so actually sound more “natural” than actual sampled (IR) reverbs like Altiverb! The reverb bus helps “glue” things together, even when using different libraries from different developers. I might even reduce or completely bypass the included reverb in the sample libraries, only to use the reverb bus instead.
I listened to your track and really like the composition! What I will say, sound-wise, is that I found some of the dynamics to be stronger than what I felt was natural, for instance the harp glissandos sound like they are played at a very high velocity, and at the same velocity – which makes it sound a bit flat and “machine-gun” like. Or maybe the libraries you used do not contain the softer layers of the velocity at all? I also think it sounds like you quantised the MIDI to hit the beats 100%. If you want it to sound natural, I would advise against that. If you feel that the playing is too sloppy, you could try a “soft quantisation” value of say, 40%. That way you keep the feel of a human performance, it can make a lot of difference! But I think the main issue is that the velocities sound at the same high level throughout.
1 Like
My mode of work is akin to a mud fight, wrestling with samples, until what I do sounds OK. 
But yeah look, just to echo the fellow composers, there are two version of working as a film composer (DAW or Score), but I feel your best bet is to work through the DAW (usual input, by a keyboard or write the parts in the edit window) as you will have to present fully finalized (or next to fully finalised) demos which will have to blow away the directors, and you cannot do that with a basic playback from Dorico, especially bearing in mind that most scores (if not all) incorporate synthesised sounds with the orchestra.
Directors and producers have very little musical imagination…
One other piece of advice: try not to write everything in one day. Try to not to finish 2 minutes of music (or whatever the goal is) in a day. There is a good chance you will get extremely fatigued.
Sketch over a few days to achieve the running time of the week, then visit again, fix and orchestrate, fix and orchestrate, etc. Think like what a printer does which prints one colour at a time to achieve the full picture.
I started doing this after I was dying in front of a screen trying to deliver 2 minutes of finished music a day…
Good luck.
2 Likes