first time I give a like before even pressing play! VI placement has always been a simple concept yet not an easy one, and today seeing Cory explaining it (with his excellent & clear presentation skills as usual), I'm sure this will put all mysteries about thus subject to an end. Thank you Cory!
Dry sounds like retro JRPG soundtrack haha. Awesome reverb (and composition), thanks to your videos of it I'll be picking it up during black friday if it goes on sale.
Great video! Nice pace and clearly presented in logical progression. Thanks! I wasn't sure about 7th Heaven, but you're swaying me, lol. Keep up the good work and lovely piece, by the way! :)
This was super helpful and I know this approach is gonna improve my mixes. Actually the brucasti alone is a stunner. I feel like I stole the thing at 70 bucks. It's just so top shelf. It makes me smile every time I use it. Total, total game changer. For those of you heading over to part 2 Valhalla, skip it and head to getting the brucasti. There is no other. Thanks again.
Let me chime in as well; VERY nice composition and it made me buy Seventh Heaven Standard a while back as well. Something about the track gives me a distinct Pink Floyd vibe (which is meant as a compliment)! Mister Pelizzari is definitely one of the best reviewers out there in this realm. Thanks very much Cory!
Great video as always! I can only reiterate what other people have said in the past, you are indeed one of, if not (very likely) the best review channel for libraries and or plugins! Especially the presentation through the visibility of your DAW and the organized structure make it extremely easy to follow, just in general very focused and deep-dive enough that one can get an excellent idea of what one will get into. Seventh Heaven and Drumatic Creator are on my immediate purchase-list because of you, and the first one especially will be money so well spent that I really can't thank you enough for showcasing it, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed (usually not too well informed about all that is out there)! If you could make a video on how you mix an orchestral piece, that would be absolutely phenomenal! Maybe you already did one, I'll have a look, but if it wouldn't be too much of a hassle I'd really appreciate it! In any case, please continue your fantastic work, for it is indeed fantastic! Cheerio :)
Mixing's serious business. It's better done by those who specialise in mixing and mastering rather than composers, however, I do understand it's an unreasonably expensive service so I can understand why composers would rather take on the challenge themselves. I won't lie, it's hard mode plus. I can provide tips and starting points in a video (not sure when, I'll have to do some serious writing for it) but even with the right info and tools, mixing is something that comes with many years of success and failure and requires a long time of evolving and getting a feel for what works best for any given set of instruments/sounds. It's very easy to mess up and very difficult to nail which usually results in composers mixing the safest way they can and relying on a lot of presets in dedicated mixing/mastering plugin suites - which will give you a very general and flat sound. I'd say unless you're really ready to take on mixing as a dedicated hobby or obsession, you'll have to either settle for a general sound (which you may not be fully satisfied with) or you'll have to carefully consider which songs to dish out the money for to have mixed by a professional. That being said, when it comes to trailers, generic mid tier action music and certain ads, the general approach is to ruin the mix by overcompressing everything (in those circumstances music is seen by clients as "product", not art) so if you're aiming for that market you won't actually have much to worry about. Either way I'll see what I can do about a video on the subject.
@@CoryPelizzari Thank your very much for the reply! Regarding the mixing, I do know very well how darn complicated that can get, which is why I am currently in the midst of an apprenticeship for audio engineering to fix my lacking knowledge and hopefully the gained ability to make my own stuff and ideally others sound as best as possible. Since I am not yet in that segment of my education, I was just interested in getting as much knowledge from sources I deem competent enough and a few specialized perspectives, such as yours, before that'll come around. But again, that is obviously just an idea I wanted to plant in your head, so you may do something along those lines in the future, no pressure whatsoever :)
@@CoryPelizzari Trailers actually rely a lot on production value, and when I say a lot is A LOT, they might be overcompressed and super heavily limited but they take an insane amount of mixing and production knowledge to put together, it's mostly rushed ads music that tends to suck in that regard
Seventh Heaven Standard(with Bricasti impulses) always seemed like a nobrainer to me. But I've been very impress with what i heard from EW Spaces lately. Thanks for the video.
Thank you for this Great lesson ❤🤗🙏 would love to see a tutorial on mixing as well 😇 at least some tips for mixing our own music, that would really help us beginners🙌😇
I downloaded the demo from LiquidSonics, sounds very nice but I will probably stay with the EW Spaces 2 (finally you can also download this demo too if you want to checkout), I think Spaces 2 sounds great and it is perfect for composers who do not want to spend a lot of time in plugins. I would love to hear your opinion :) Thank you for your reviews, I hope that SpitfireAudio would change their minds!
I've got Virtual Sound Stage and I'm DEFINITELY interested in picking up 7th Heaven, sounds like I'll get better results out of it than my Acon Digital Verberate (this has been my go-to for a while, I like it a lot but when I'm putting a huge, symphonic-style pipe organ somewhere in there to mix I tend to get a LOT of weird swirling) - could I use that for my panning? I'd imagine I'd best turn off VSS's ER sims to make way for 7th's.
Yeah you can use its positioning without the convolution to easily place the instrument and 7H will do the rest. You can try using the VSS convolution as well if you want to get a sort of echo too but it'll kill some of the transient detail so it's best used for effect at a lower mix setting.
Hey Cory! Thank you for the video! I'm also really thinking about getting Seventh Heaven, standard edition. I wonder - I'm using Spitfire products almost exclusively and almost all of them are recorded in Air Lyndhurst. Can I use Seventh Heaven to make Dry Instruments sound like they are in the same space? Like, if there is a Preset that works well in your opinion for this?
My favourite preset is Boston Hall as it has a similar kind of bloom and slight darkness, but when it comes to Seventh Heaven it has its own sound and won't really reproduce any specific sounding hall (Altiverb has Air Lyndhurst but it costs a fortune). I use Spitfire libraries as well and I've been happy so far with the Boston Hall preset. If you check my plugin spotlight for Seventh Heaven, towards the end of the video I swap out the decca mic in Chamber Strings for the close mic with the Boston Hall preset.
nice Cory,bougth this one too,first wanted to buy EW hollywood choirs,is 260$, but with VAT for my country it came out on a staggering 320 euro,wich for me was a bit too much so,no luck there,anyway,i have the seventh heaven plugin instead :-)
hi Ronny just a heads up...I noticed you was after EW Hollywood choirs, on audio deluxe they have it for 60percent off they also add an extra 15percent, also it doesn't look like they add vat, I'm from England and I went to pay using PayPal and the price stayed the same...so if your still interested then go check em out...ive checked to see if they are a legit company and many peeps have said they have used this site for years but sometimes it can take a day to get your key code...but check for details yourself ...hope this helps, cheers
with the extra 15percent off it works out to be 225bucks...also check out usa sellers on eBay they have Hollywood choirs for 260bucks, I brought sonuscore elision from there and paid in bucks....best to pay in dollars but check to make sure they sell the key with it...cheers
What do you think of Westgate woodwinds? Ever considered doing a video on them? It's hard to a find good information on them as they are so old. Do they still hold up against more modern libraries?
I'm collecting them now and should have a video for the collection within a month. They definitely hold up - libraries made ten years after still don't have the legato quality of these woodwinds.
I haven't used anything with Seventh Heaven. I've considered trying MIR Pro but the fact that you need an exclusive Vienna key rather than their products working on a regular iLok really turns me off their products.
Since you were tailoring 7H for each instrument, you used an instance on each track rather than busing some (I think). Is that right? And is that ok on CPU loading? Also, what are the narrow channel strips to the left? Are they buses for mixing? Thanks.
The channels on the left were the dry versions of the tracks. I prefer to use reverb on individual tracks when I'm placing dry instruments as each instrument has its own tone and space it needs to be in. That being said I won't usually have reverb on all the tracks at the same time - I just did that for the video. Seventh Heaven is pretty light on CPU and you can have multiple instances running. I was running 22 of them at the same time for the video and my computer's 7 years old!
Hey Cory, a couple of questions, Why pan the 2nd violins to the right instead of letting them sit in their traditional seating position? I noticed that you used only the Early/Late reflection knob for front to back positioning. Why not use the Pre-delay knob instead? Any specific detrimental effect that renders it not that effective?
The violins was a personal choice. The pre-delay knob doesn't need to be used unless you specifically want a delay between the early and late reflections - Seventh Heaven runs the early and late reverbs parallel so I wouldn't need to use the pre-delay unless I wanted to get the sound of the instrument closer with an echoing tail.
Cody’s second violin placement is also known as Russian seating from the antiphonal placement of firsts and seconds so that one can get a dialogue effect - I have used it in live work albeit thinking carefully about the disapproval of stage management before I ask for it!
@@bergerecossais Interesting! Thanks for the information, I need to read up on that. How did you have your string section set up? Violins 1, Violas, Celli, Basses (seated behind the Celli) and Violins 2?
@@sayandas27 Actually, the alternative seating with the 2nd Violins on the right is also called the German seating, as it's been used by traditional orchestras here. I've grown up being used to that, rather than the seating that's used most of the time. The latter is also called "American Seating" here. In my hometown, our symphony orchestra (Bamberger Symphoniker) always has the 2nd Violins to the right. ;)
Cory is 7th heaven a good choice for placing instruments in smaller spaces, say for jazz/funk virtual instruments? I’m also considering Abbey Road Chambers. Altiverb looks great but the price is a hit high for me. FYI, I’m on Logic and have the stock Space Designer convolution plug-in now.
While the reverb sounds pretty good on individual inst but in the whole orchestration they just sound like a big mess lacking definition and clarity to me. It doesn't feel like a grand orchestra at the grand concert hall. When I use Hollywood orchestra with it's built in mics plus reverb from 2C audio they sound closer to the real thing.
I'm sorry, I love you Cory and I've watched all your videos, and the composition is amazing, but this sounds really bad and I really don't get the point of doing all of taking away all the space, mics and natural acoustics, it just makes the problem worse for yourself since there's no plugin that can accurately simulate said acoustics at this moment, just different kinds of reverbs that add tail to the sound, so it just sounds like close mics with reverb. Tthis can be very misleading especially for beginners or people who want to get into orchestral music production because orchestral scores aren't at all recorded in this way. The only examples I can think of are Demon Souls which is known for having very dodgy recordings, to the point where people think it's old samples when in reality it's live players, and some games from the early 2000s, also known for sounding like they were recorded with a phone. Composer Blakus (from the Star Wars trailers and a lot more amazing stuff) also talks about how using too much spot and close mics makes harder to achieve balance and depth in a mix (See his video on Abbey Road One Orchestral Foundations) In reality 99.9% of scores aren't even recorded with spot mics or close mics placed this close to the instruments, so there's that. In my opinion the process doesn't need to be this convoluted, the difficult part is training your ears to get the best out of the provided mic positions in your libraries, and using them in your favour to solve the depth problem and blend different libraries, as opposed to working against them. Also, JDFactory is about to release a panning plugin called Panbox that does tonal and mid/side pan (renamed to smart pan recently) if you are feeling fancy or if a library was recorded in a very specific way, like violin players seating in antiphon (opposite sides of the room) or like some of the patches in the Metropolis Ark Series with cellos placed in the middle, etc.. But 90% of the time with normal libraries panning the close mics, decreasing their volume considerably and doing some very little extra balance pan will do it
One of the best tutorials if not the best that reveals the secrets of depth creation in a denced mix... Thanks a bunch Cory... Cheers..👍👍👍
first time I give a like before even pressing play! VI placement has always been a simple concept yet not an easy one, and today seeing Cory explaining it (with his excellent & clear presentation skills as usual), I'm sure this will put all mysteries about thus subject to an end.
Thank you Cory!
Same
Dry sounds like retro JRPG soundtrack haha. Awesome reverb (and composition), thanks to your videos of it I'll be picking it up during black friday if it goes on sale.
That piece sounded beautiful. Thanks for the tutorial!
Great video! Nice pace and clearly presented in logical progression. Thanks! I wasn't sure about 7th Heaven, but you're swaying me, lol. Keep up the good work and lovely piece, by the way! :)
This was super helpful and I know this approach is gonna improve my mixes. Actually the brucasti alone is a stunner. I feel like I stole the thing at 70 bucks. It's just so top shelf. It makes me smile every time I use it. Total, total game changer. For those of you heading over to part 2 Valhalla, skip it and head to getting the brucasti. There is no other. Thanks again.
Wow, really helpful and well done. Nice composition too. I just bought 7th Heaven the other day based on your review.
Me too - very nice indeed
Let me chime in as well; VERY nice composition and it made me buy Seventh Heaven Standard a while back as well. Something about the track gives me a distinct Pink Floyd vibe (which is meant as a compliment)! Mister Pelizzari is definitely one of the best reviewers out there in this realm. Thanks very much Cory!
Thanks Cory
Great video as always! I can only reiterate what other people have said in the past, you are indeed one of, if not (very likely) the best review channel for libraries and or plugins! Especially the presentation through the visibility of your DAW and the organized structure make it extremely easy to follow, just in general very focused and deep-dive enough that one can get an excellent idea of what one will get into. Seventh Heaven and Drumatic Creator are on my immediate purchase-list because of you, and the first one especially will be money so well spent that I really can't thank you enough for showcasing it, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed (usually not too well informed about all that is out there)!
If you could make a video on how you mix an orchestral piece, that would be absolutely phenomenal! Maybe you already did one, I'll have a look, but if it wouldn't be too much of a hassle I'd really appreciate it! In any case, please continue your fantastic work, for it is indeed fantastic!
Cheerio :)
Mixing's serious business. It's better done by those who specialise in mixing and mastering rather than composers, however, I do understand it's an unreasonably expensive service so I can understand why composers would rather take on the challenge themselves. I won't lie, it's hard mode plus. I can provide tips and starting points in a video (not sure when, I'll have to do some serious writing for it) but even with the right info and tools, mixing is something that comes with many years of success and failure and requires a long time of evolving and getting a feel for what works best for any given set of instruments/sounds. It's very easy to mess up and very difficult to nail which usually results in composers mixing the safest way they can and relying on a lot of presets in dedicated mixing/mastering plugin suites - which will give you a very general and flat sound.
I'd say unless you're really ready to take on mixing as a dedicated hobby or obsession, you'll have to either settle for a general sound (which you may not be fully satisfied with) or you'll have to carefully consider which songs to dish out the money for to have mixed by a professional.
That being said, when it comes to trailers, generic mid tier action music and certain ads, the general approach is to ruin the mix by overcompressing everything (in those circumstances music is seen by clients as "product", not art) so if you're aiming for that market you won't actually have much to worry about. Either way I'll see what I can do about a video on the subject.
@@CoryPelizzari Thank your very much for the reply! Regarding the mixing, I do know very well how darn complicated that can get, which is why I am currently in the midst of an apprenticeship for audio engineering to fix my lacking knowledge and hopefully the gained ability to make my own stuff and ideally others sound as best as possible. Since I am not yet in that segment of my education, I was just interested in getting as much knowledge from sources I deem competent enough and a few specialized perspectives, such as yours, before that'll come around. But again, that is obviously just an idea I wanted to plant in your head, so you may do something along those lines in the future, no pressure whatsoever :)
@@CoryPelizzari Trailers actually rely a lot on production value, and when I say a lot is A LOT, they might be overcompressed and super heavily limited but they take an insane amount of mixing and production knowledge to put together, it's mostly rushed ads music that tends to suck in that regard
Our current fav reverb.
Seventh Heaven Standard(with Bricasti impulses) always seemed like a nobrainer to me. But I've been very impress with what i heard from EW Spaces lately. Thanks for the video.
The dry mix at the end sounds straight out of Chrono Trigger.
The dry versions remind me of Sega Genesis/Megadrive FM brass sounds so much.
Thank you for this Great lesson ❤🤗🙏 would love to see a tutorial on mixing as well 😇 at least some tips for mixing our own music, that would really help us beginners🙌😇
I finally broke down and bought 7th heaven. I wasted a lot of time futzing with Valhalla and PhoenixVerb first. Thanks for the presets.
I downloaded the demo from LiquidSonics, sounds very nice but I will probably stay with the EW Spaces 2 (finally you can also download this demo too if you want to checkout), I think Spaces 2 sounds great and it is perfect for composers who do not want to spend a lot of time in plugins.
I would love to hear your opinion :) Thank you for your reviews, I hope that SpitfireAudio would change their minds!
I've got Virtual Sound Stage and I'm DEFINITELY interested in picking up 7th Heaven, sounds like I'll get better results out of it than my Acon Digital Verberate (this has been my go-to for a while, I like it a lot but when I'm putting a huge, symphonic-style pipe organ somewhere in there to mix I tend to get a LOT of weird swirling) - could I use that for my panning? I'd imagine I'd best turn off VSS's ER sims to make way for 7th's.
Yeah you can use its positioning without the convolution to easily place the instrument and 7H will do the rest. You can try using the VSS convolution as well if you want to get a sort of echo too but it'll kill some of the transient detail so it's best used for effect at a lower mix setting.
Hey Cory!
Thank you for the video! I'm also really thinking about getting Seventh Heaven, standard edition. I wonder - I'm using Spitfire products almost exclusively and almost all of them are recorded in Air Lyndhurst. Can I use Seventh Heaven to make Dry Instruments sound like they are in the same space? Like, if there is a Preset that works well in your opinion for this?
My favourite preset is Boston Hall as it has a similar kind of bloom and slight darkness, but when it comes to Seventh Heaven it has its own sound and won't really reproduce any specific sounding hall (Altiverb has Air Lyndhurst but it costs a fortune). I use Spitfire libraries as well and I've been happy so far with the Boston Hall preset. If you check my plugin spotlight for Seventh Heaven, towards the end of the video I swap out the decca mic in Chamber Strings for the close mic with the Boston Hall preset.
@@CoryPelizzari Absolutely breathtaking sound! Thank you for the heads-up, appreciate it! :)
nice Cory,bougth this one too,first wanted to buy EW hollywood choirs,is 260$, but with VAT for my country it came out on a staggering 320 euro,wich for me was a bit too much
so,no luck there,anyway,i have the seventh heaven plugin instead :-)
hi Ronny just a heads up...I noticed you was after EW Hollywood choirs, on audio deluxe they have it for 60percent off they also add an extra 15percent, also it doesn't look like they add vat, I'm from England and I went to pay using PayPal and the price stayed the same...so if your still interested then go check em out...ive checked to see if they are a legit company and many peeps have said they have used this site for years but sometimes it can take a day to get your key code...but check for details yourself ...hope this helps, cheers
with the extra 15percent off it works out to be 225bucks...also check out usa sellers on eBay they have Hollywood choirs for 260bucks, I brought sonuscore elision from there and paid in bucks....best to pay in dollars but check to make sure they sell the key with it...cheers
What do you think of Westgate woodwinds? Ever considered doing a video on them? It's hard to a find good information on them as they are so old. Do they still hold up against more modern libraries?
I'm collecting them now and should have a video for the collection within a month. They definitely hold up - libraries made ten years after still don't have the legato quality of these woodwinds.
@@CoryPelizzari Thanks Cory. Looking forward to the review!
@@CoryPelizzari yes. from the sound of it, it's still sounding pretty good.
How do you feel about MIR pro or virtual sound stage 2 in combination with 7th heaven?
I haven't used anything with Seventh Heaven. I've considered trying MIR Pro but the fact that you need an exclusive Vienna key rather than their products working on a regular iLok really turns me off their products.
Since you were tailoring 7H for each instrument, you used an instance on each track rather than busing some (I think). Is that right? And is that ok on CPU loading? Also, what are the narrow channel strips to the left? Are they buses for mixing? Thanks.
The channels on the left were the dry versions of the tracks. I prefer to use reverb on individual tracks when I'm placing dry instruments as each instrument has its own tone and space it needs to be in. That being said I won't usually have reverb on all the tracks at the same time - I just did that for the video. Seventh Heaven is pretty light on CPU and you can have multiple instances running. I was running 22 of them at the same time for the video and my computer's 7 years old!
Hi Cory, i'm interested to know how you where able to turn off all the convolution in Infinite Brass & Woodwinds
Hey Cory, a couple of questions,
Why pan the 2nd violins to the right instead of letting them sit in their traditional seating position?
I noticed that you used only the Early/Late reflection knob for front to back positioning. Why not use the Pre-delay knob instead? Any specific detrimental effect that renders it not that effective?
The violins was a personal choice. The pre-delay knob doesn't need to be used unless you specifically want a delay between the early and late reflections - Seventh Heaven runs the early and late reverbs parallel so I wouldn't need to use the pre-delay unless I wanted to get the sound of the instrument closer with an echoing tail.
@@CoryPelizzari Thanks Cory. This was really helpful! Waiting for Part 2.
Cody’s second violin placement is also known as Russian seating from the antiphonal placement of firsts and seconds so that one can get a dialogue effect - I have used it in live work albeit thinking carefully about the disapproval of stage management before I ask for it!
@@bergerecossais Interesting! Thanks for the information, I need to read up on that. How did you have your string section set up? Violins 1, Violas, Celli, Basses (seated behind the Celli) and Violins 2?
@@sayandas27 Actually, the alternative seating with the 2nd Violins on the right is also called the German seating, as it's been used by traditional orchestras here. I've grown up being used to that, rather than the seating that's used most of the time. The latter is also called "American Seating" here. In my hometown, our symphony orchestra (Bamberger Symphoniker) always has the 2nd Violins to the right. ;)
Great video. How did you get the different track sizes in the mixer?
Cory is 7th heaven a good choice for placing instruments in smaller spaces, say for jazz/funk virtual instruments? I’m also considering Abbey Road Chambers. Altiverb looks great but the price is a hit high for me. FYI, I’m on Logic and have the stock Space Designer convolution plug-in now.
There are plenty of different selections in 7H, from long chapel styles to smaller smokey rooms so you can chuck it on anything.
@@CoryPelizzari Thanks for the quick reply Cory! I’ll try the demo this weekend.
While the reverb sounds pretty good on individual inst but in the whole orchestration they just sound like a big mess lacking definition and clarity to me. It doesn't feel like a grand orchestra at the grand concert hall. When I use Hollywood orchestra with it's built in mics plus reverb from 2C audio they sound closer to the real thing.
I'm sorry, I love you Cory and I've watched all your videos, and the composition is amazing, but this sounds really bad and I really don't get the point of doing all of taking away all the space, mics and natural acoustics, it just makes the problem worse for yourself since there's no plugin that can accurately simulate said acoustics at this moment, just different kinds of reverbs that add tail to the sound, so it just sounds like close mics with reverb. Tthis can be very misleading especially for beginners or people who want to get into orchestral music production because orchestral scores aren't at all recorded in this way. The only examples I can think of are Demon Souls which is known for having very dodgy recordings, to the point where people think it's old samples when in reality it's live players, and some games from the early 2000s, also known for sounding like they were recorded with a phone. Composer Blakus (from the Star Wars trailers and a lot more amazing stuff) also talks about how using too much spot and close mics makes harder to achieve balance and depth in a mix (See his video on Abbey Road One Orchestral Foundations) In reality 99.9% of scores aren't even recorded with spot mics or close mics placed this close to the instruments, so there's that. In my opinion the process doesn't need to be this convoluted, the difficult part is training your ears to get the best out of the provided mic positions in your libraries, and using them in your favour to solve the depth problem and blend different libraries, as opposed to working against them. Also, JDFactory is about to release a panning plugin called Panbox that does tonal and mid/side pan (renamed to smart pan recently) if you are feeling fancy or if a library was recorded in a very specific way, like violin players seating in antiphon (opposite sides of the room) or like some of the patches in the Metropolis Ark Series with cellos placed in the middle, etc.. But 90% of the time with normal libraries panning the close mics, decreasing their volume considerably and doing some very little extra balance pan will do it