On 1/6/2018 at 1:30 PM, Mulahey said:

If you have some hints on how to improve the mix, sound, orchestration etc. please feel free to let me know.

Hi Dustin. I haven't had time to drop in here much lately. I apologize in advance if my responses are possibly a little sporadic. 

I'm listening on a JBL surround system and a pair of SM9's in a pretty well treated room. I'm getting a lot of bulkiness in the low 100's and 400's that I feel are giving the mix too much warmth. Its a little overpowering because I don't feel this has enough 8k, and the air at 12-20 rolls off. Its odd to say this, but I feel the entire 180-800 range is a little under compressed by modern mix standards here in 2018...as far as current mix trends go I think this mix would benefit from being tighter on the low end and brighter and the top.

The other thing I wasn't getting a lot of was depth. One thing I might consider trying is running multi-band saturation in parallel particularly on the upper register of the strings. If I had this mix infront of me, I would try to get the top to open up more by doing this. If that didn't work, I'd try some non-modulation based imaging *(meaning don't use a SoundToys MicroShift or Eventide H3000), again in multi band. If you don't have an accurate well tuned room to work out of, you might consider of using a Waves, Izotope, or Boz Labs plug to collapse your stereo spectrum to mono in the low end using a graduated summing filter on your 2 bus. Next, at 2:50 or so, I would re-structure your verb busses in the strings, percussion, and choir. It almost sounds like you used verbs that came with those VI's and whatever's going on there is walking all over itself. I think these are really important for establishing space. I would probably go strait to my Bricasti for this (if you have access to a studio that has one). To make the verb really cut thought and shine, I'd consider throwing some transient design on the tail, and if I used my Bricasti, would make sure the pre-delays of were fine tuned to stay out of the way of the initial transients on anything the accents in the string groove or percussive hits.

I hope this helps a little!

I think there's some good stuff going on there musically! Its a pleasant track to listen to

What a great track! Love the composition. Two thumbs up from me.

Thanks for your great feedback! I will try to follow your hints for my next composition projects. 

By the way: here is the complete film excerpt, to which this piece as well as two more cues were originally written:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Op4EXgQk0

The film itself is obviously very trashy and extremely LOW-BUDGET (shot in 2005 with a discounter camcorder), but I was primarily interested in the opportunity to finally write film music in the musically incredibly rewarding fantasy genre.
Hope you'll enjoy it!