Mark Morgon-Shaw

I’ve not used Halion but I've got Falcon 3 and it’s great. Super deep, and it’s the only platform for a few libraries I use regularly like Bohemian Violin and Cello. But honestly, it’s not a patch (pun intended) on Omnisphere as an all around tool for a working composer. Falcon ships with around 1,600 factory presets, whereas Omnisphere 3 comes with over 41,000 patches now apprarently (including 26k+ new ones). That’s an enormous, curated library ready to drop straight into cues but still with a ton of tweakability. Falcon’s more of a modular sound design environment and brilliant if you want to build but a lot of us don't have time for that. Omnisphere’s designed to deliver - and when you’re working to deadlines, that scale and immediacy make a massive difference. You talk about cost but I look at value.

Most controllers have a DAW mode and an instrument mode so you can use it for bot - the transport controls normally still work even if controlling a VSTi ( at least with the last couple of controllers I've owned ) Guess YMMV depending on your DAW , VSTi's and Hardware controller

Just having my midi controller integrated is reason enough for me, I have Analog Lab which works natively with my Arturia Keylab and it just makes life way easier.

I get why the price raises eyebrows, but Omnisphere really isn’t aimed at casual users. There are plenty of free or budget synths out there that are great for general sound design- but for working composers, this thing is a bit of a godsend. The sheer breadth of the sound library, the reliability, and how quickly you can get a cue up and running make it invaluable. It’s a proper workhorse. Virtually everyone I know writing for TV uses it in some capacity, and personally, I’ve made the cost back from a single placement. It’s one of those tools that quietly earns its keep over and over again.

It's the least worst to my eyes.

I also have one, no issue here in either DAW

I despise the flatness but if they were gonna do it they should at least have implemented some colour pop. I just tried Bitwig and it's vector GUI is so much clearer than CW-Sonar . Hate it as a DAW though ! I think if Sonar dissappeared tomorrow I'd be a Cubase user.

It's also very genre dependant. In a modern pop song going in word by word or even sometimes down to a syllable can hep keep the vocal front and centre but you wouldn't really need to do the same in a folk song where you can often just work phrase by phrase. Vocal automation is also a good chance to unearth emotion in a performance and bring it to the fore. Little breaths, sighs , fading up the ends or longer words where you can sometimes get little vocal cracks. These are gold in certain genres when it's more about emotion than technical prowess.

Nice use of it in the song Parasite Eve by Bring Me The Horizon

In order : Performance / Mic Technique Compression / Limiting on the way in Comping / Editing More Compression More Limiting Automation Best way is to dive in and get your hands dirty

I never install any of them because I had better options since before Sonar introduced their bundled plugins or the Pro Channel.

I had this recently and it turned out to be a hardware fault with my midi controller..spewing out random pitch bend data. If you have Kontakt there is a tool in there for monitoring incoming midi data and I saw pitch bend data being sent even though I wasn't touching the controller. Definitely worth ruling out first.

Thanks, gave it bit more width too was the other I meant to say Really enjoyed your song BTW

PS @Smashing Galaxy Hope you don’t mind — I was curious what would happen if I pulled your MP3 through a stem splitter and did a quick rebalance/remaster. Mainly pulled the vocals back, matched them with the guitar reverb, and gave it a bit more low-end body. To me it feels more emotional now. Here’s how it came out, thought you might find it interesting. Wiil I Be Good Remaster.mp3

Really nice song and performances so congrats on that. Mix and master sound good, a few thoughts on going the extra mile... First I think the intro is far too long for modern audiences, the first thing I would do is chop it half so we get into the vocals more quickly When the track is more sparse the vocal sounds a bit thin and feels like it could use some warmth. Maybe you filtered out the bottom end to make it sit in the mix better and I think when all the other parts come in it's fine because they fill out that part of the audio spectrum and mask what's missing. You could maybe "mult" your vocals onto two separate tracks with slighty different EQ so we get a fuller sound in the sparse sections and then you can thin it out when the full arrangement kicks in. Guitar is a bit bright to my ears in the upper mids - it makes things like fret squeaks really jump out and set my teeth on edge. I think you can darken it a bit and pull out some of those harsher upper frequencies and it will sound easier the ears. I have Oeksound Soothe so personally I'd throw that on it as it does a good job of taming these things without ruining the overall tone. If you don't have anything like that then maybe use a dynamic EQ so it's only pulling them back when needed. It's more when the picking pattern hits the higher notes that they sound a bit overly bright. Regarding the fret squeaks they are quite loud so I'd look into what you can do about them. These days I use Izotope RX and go in surgically to tame them but before I had that I'd use the split tool to isolate them and move them to an adjacent track which is lower in volume so when they occur they don't leap out at the listener. There's a bit of a balance issue for me between guitar and vocal, it's sounds like the vocals are 2-3db too loud and they sound like the singer is stood right in front of my face whilst the guitar is some way back playing on stage. I think in these types of songs you want the listener to imagine you are playing and singing at the same time , so the voice and instruments need to sound the same distance away from the listener. Some of this is just balancing the two and maintaining that balance throughout the song with automation etc and some of it is to do with the FX on each part. You might need you cut some of the vocal frequencies out of the guitar so you can turn the vocal down a but without losing any intelligbility. These days I use Trackspacer to help with these types of things as it works dynamically I think part of the reason the vocal sounds a little bit disconnected to the rest of it is it seems drier and doesn't see to share the same space as the guitar. In some places there are some BV's which are wetter and I think when those come in it helps glue the track track together better so you might be able to use a little of that to feed your lead vocal to. I like the string parts, they sound really nice which is great as they're often difficult to record and are a great addition. The ending feels a little abrupt - maybe you faded it out to upload it here but it deserves a bit more of longer a ring out I think or a more composed ending. I don't know if you used any reference tracks for this when mixing / mastering - something like Lower Your Weapon by David Ford sprung to mind as it was a similar arrangement ( although an entirely different sentiment ) Hope that helps