Latest / 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast / Spy Dramedy Cue Review

Transcript

Spy Dramedy Cue Review · 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast

• 0:32
  Speaker 1: What is happening, everybody?
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: This is Dave Croft, and welcome back to another Q review, where I feature a Q written by a member of the 52Q's community and provide critique and feedback, like you might hear from a music supervisor or a potential librarian.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Today we are checking out Hyde and Sneak from Simon Tong.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: This is kind of a I don't know kind of a spy-y kind of drama DQ, so we're going to take a listen to this and then talk about it on the other side.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: Hi vaulting series.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: Interestingly, the show so commonly gets mixed sounds, since this one isEnthadow orhab scarf.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Alright, that was Hide and Sneak from Simon Tong.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Simon, thank you so much for sending this along.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: This was sent during our week 44 weekly feedback thread and Simon says second week posting and I've got a third iteration of my track from last week which I've been working on over the weekend.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Composing isn't new to me, but composing in the production music style has been a fun challenge.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: I had to build up to one track a week by the new year, once I have the format locked down, but until then I plan to get a few tracks up to an acceptable standard.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: This track is called Hide and Sneak and the big changes are making it less jazzy and trying to keep the emotion consistent.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: I've also worked on the general mix and the overall building arrangement throughout.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: So, simon, first of all, welcome to the community and I'm so glad to have you with us and welcome to the production music journey Really really glad to have you with us.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: So the vibe of this is spot on.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: I'd be interested to hear the version, which might have been a little too jazzy, and this is actually a version, since the one that you posted this was, I think, the final version and I think the vibe is absolutely spot on and the title nails it.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: The title is so important because it establishes or manages expectations.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: So before a music supervisor ever clicks on this, they know that they're going to have kind of a sneaky spy kind of thing going on.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: And so we're playing on these old kind of mission impossible oh, I'm the man from Uncle those types of old school 60s and 70s spy shows.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So I think we're really spot on.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: My recommendation would be to mix up our baseline a little bit, because it's kind of the same thing Boom, boom, boom, and except for one little section, kind of right through this B section, it stays that same line the whole time.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: So I wonder if we can mix it up a little bit.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: Maybe then the same lick on Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Mix it up somehow.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: And my methodology for this is I will create kind of a motive and then I will repeat the motive with a little variation, and then I'll repeat the motive again, which is essentially the same thing from motive one, and then repeat it again in the fourth bar of the phrase with a bigger variation.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And so I write my hip hop hooks like that, I write my drum parts like that and I write little baselines like this like that.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Because the same base pattern over and over gets a little repetitive.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom boom Right and we do have a little bit of break in there.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: So I want to acknowledge that.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: But I think it's that second bar that just needs a little something.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Now you've done a pretty good job of interrupting the energy.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: One of the things that makes dramedy cues work really, really well is some start and stops, because this is where an editor will go in and create space, put a punch line, maybe a funny look or something like that, and I think we can make a little bit more of a break If I back up going out of our kind of our intro section.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: I think we could have done a little bit of a more definite downbeat and a definite break here.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: Boom, boom boom, boom, boom, boom.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: And then leave it totally clear you don't want that snap, you want the audio tail to kind of ring out.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Leave it nice and clear so that if the music supervisor, you know, wanted to edit it and add additional space, they could without that snap kind of ringing through.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: And likewise, at the end of your fourth bar phrase we interrupt our baseline.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: So we're coming up to our last phrase.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And let's give a instead of just kind of stopping the baseline Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and leave a little bit more clear, clear, clear section and have that.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: I love when the brass and everything comes in nice and strong.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: Now, speaking of brass, we can actually look at the waveform here and we can see that our right side is louder than our left side.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Pretty consistent, pretty consistently throughout.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: And it is reflected in our loudness.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Our loudness overall is okay, a little on the low side, but we're all right.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: But if we look at our right versus left side RMS meters here we've got like minus 14 RMS on the right and minus 17 on the left and that stays pretty consistent.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: With that low brass coming in Again, you can actually see the waveform and see how right heavy that is.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: So the options are to turn down that low brass or to counter pan it where you're panning it in the opposite direction.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be dead center.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: I in general I like your stereo placement of the instruments on the stage, but we're just a little too right heavy throughout and it might cause some friction.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: You know, a two and three dB difference in loudness on the right and left could potentially cause some problems.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: As far as the mix goes, things feel a little overly compressed.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Our peaks are okay.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: We're at minus three.
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: If we were to look at that, we're at minus three peaks, so we're kind of low.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Unless the library specifically asked for minus three, I would push it up to minus one or so.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Again, certain libraries will ask for different things, but my rule of thumb is around minus 14 lofts and minus one of peaks.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't overly compress the loud parts.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: So I would watch that.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: Looking at the reverb, one of the things that I have found that makes dramedy cues work really well is to have a sense of closeness or intimacy to the string sounds.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: The orchestra sounds in general, and so this might be a little overly reverbed.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: The vibraphone sounds really far back in the stage but the vibroslap seems really really close.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: So if I'm kind of picturing where they're standing, it's like a vibroslap concerto.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: They're on the front of the stage going haha, but the vibraphone and the rest of the percussion is way, way, way back, and so I would vibroslap a little bit further back, have the percussion a little bit closer and everything just be a little drier.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Going into this B section we just came out of, we just came out of that high string kind of pizzicato I love the switch up of the harmony here.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: I would rather hear this vibraphone carry the lead earlier.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: So give the the, the high pits a break, because we've been hearing a lot of high pizzicato plucking for quite a while and so if we went and it gives the sense of sustained sounds so we've just come from really short, pizzicato, short articulations, and we want to go into more of a flowing kind of thing, which you're doing with the marimba, with the marimba rolls.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: You know, percussion rolls are just sustain, it's what those accomplishing.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: So I love, love the marimba rolls, but I would give the high pits a break right here and then I would double it.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: So I would essentially switch where the high pits are and where the vibraphone is taking the lead here.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: One thing to watch out for if I'm looking at the waveform as a whole, we have a pretty big disparity between the highest peaks here and these low peaks.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: And that's not to say that it has to be a toothpaste.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: We definitely want to want to keep a healthy looking waveform, but this might be a little too, too too big of a difference, and I would, I would add a little break right here, leading back into this big section.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Big section, and you could almost stretch this out even more, right?
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: So we want to give a nice healthy, healthy break, almost like a fermata, and you want to let that audio tail kind of kind of fade out.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Not, don't go to zero, we never want to go to absolute zero there.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: But but yeah, I'm going to see how this sounds.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: See, if I can't, let's do this again.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: If I'm getting a nice clean, clean break, so we're going to snap it right there, let's give it a nice long decay Again.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: This is you.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Would, you wouldn't, you wouldn't do this with audio and, and I think I would bring that the descending line that we've been hinting at this whole time, that kind of I don't mean this in a bad way that that that tropey, kind of cliche descending chromatic line which we hear all over, like James Bond movies and even like naked gun movies and all those commission impossible movies.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: It's, it's, it's a trope and it's super effective for this kind of dramedy tongue and cheek type of a thing.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So I wonder if we can bring that out Like have that be a little bit, a little bit more of the star of the show here at the end, because by this point you know we've heard this, this motif, quite a while.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: You've done a really fantastic job of layering, though like kind of every time we're adding energy, we're adding layers, adding octaves, you know, and it might be, you know, in my mind I was thinking low brass, but that might be good to bring out bassoon, more of a woodwind, woodwind trio kind of sound.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Just bring it.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Bring it out a little bit more.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Fantastic button, really really nice button.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: But, simon, thank you so much for sending this along.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: I really do appreciate it.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, one final note let's clean up our, let's clean up the top here.
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: We got a little bit too much, too much Dead space at the beginning.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: We really want to leave no more than like 200 milliseconds or so.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: That tends to get us to where we need it To be.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: But, simon, thank you so much for sending this along.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: Like I said, simon sent this for our week 44 weekly feedback threads and we put weekly feedback threads together every single week and I will be choosing a cue from our week 45, search or or or thread.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Would love to have you join us and if you found that feedback helpful, then head over to 52 cues, comm Slash coaching, where you can order up your own feedback cue and get a feedback video.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: And while you're there, you can also check out my other coaching services, such as one-on-one zoom sessions, and you can be put on the waiting list for our winter Mastermind group.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: But that is going to do it for me.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining me.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day until next time, peace.