The Seventh Insignia

My first time using Stormdrum 2 by East West to produce those epic drums. Tried to do something different with those I haven't done before. 

I have very few complaints about the chords you used. You string together quite interestingly. Movie score-esque but not to the point of cliché. 1:45 was a bit strange simply because of the A and A-flat juxtaposed. The last chord also kind of came out of nowhere, but I think it was fine. It seems like this was a percussion writing and synthestrating exercise.
Your drums do one or two of the following generally:
1) they aren't present enough - there aren't enough of them to feel driving or impactful
2) they don't "sustain enough"- the sound kind of just dies away and feels weak
3) there's not enough initial impact on some of them - mainly a volume issue.
4) they don't vary enough - drums have their highs and lows, just like instruments do.
I'm not exactly sure how that program works, to be honest, but see if messing around with mic locations (that's a Logic thing) or audio tapering would change anything. Pretty good work!

Cool thanks. Yeah drums definitely are not my string suit so I do my best to work with them.

Well done!

Mixing and sound design isn't my area, but I can say the composition is nice! You might experiment with varying the harmonic presentation occasionally to spice up the sections where there isn't as much happening in terms of melodic lines. For example, arpeggios/voicing/instrumentation, etc. Just a thought, but really it's quite a well thought out piece, keep it up!

Gustav Johnson

p.s. now that I'm listening a second time, I hear that you did what I just mentioned! It's a little hard to dig out of all the sounds going on. It's so cool, find a way to spotlight it! :)

Hahaha alright thanks. I'll definitely keep that in mind. 

Thanks!

Nice work. The percussions sound like you may be having a similar problem as I: there are so many drums in SD2 that you don't want to go them all through and end up using a few you've become familiar with. More different instruments from several frequency ranges would make this sound a lot more alive! But it takes a while to get familiar with all the different instruments in SD2. At least for me they were all just drums at first xD

... okay I admit; I still ain't familiar enough with most of them...

Using the many sounds in SD2 isn't the problem for me, the problem for me (since I use FL Studio) is routing SD2 to the mixer board so I can mix and master each drum sound. I mean I know how to route it but it takes the insert tracks that the other program I use for the majority of instruments use for mixing. So it's either mix SD2 or the other program to bring out a more lively sound. Ofcourse I chose not to mix SD2 and instead did the other one since it's like 95% of the entire piece and SD2 is like 10% 

But thanks I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Ah okay! But, I may have misunderstood you, but as there are 99 insert tracks in the mixer I don't quite understand how you'd have room for only for either one?

The other program I mentioned is Hypersonic 2 and in there the inserts go from 1-16 I think, so in the mixer I have the instruments lined up accordingly insert 1, 2 etc. You know how in SD2 the instruments aren't listed as Hypersonic, the inputs are like 1/2, 3/4, 5/6 etc. and I get confused there like I ask myself how can I map the inserts after I've already assigned Hypersonic to the inserts in the mixer.

For instance:

Hypersonic 2 - I assign the instruments to the mixer between inserts 1-7.

SD2 - The very first percussion has a input that reads 1/2 which would obviously take the first insert in the mixer which is already taken, so how can I assign that instead to insert 8.

I hope that explains it.

Umm, still makes no sense to me, unless you've got an old version of fl or something. At least in fl 12 it shouldn't matter whether you use Play, Engine, Hypersonic or Kontakt or whatever. All the channels are linked to the mixer the same way and can be changed to any mixer track anytime, and any mixer track can be routed to any other mixer track, although it does require some work to open the right effects in the new mixer tracks.

For me it's just; insert PLAY, load a stormdrum patch, route to the mixer by changing the number next to channel pan and volume.

What am I still missing?