Speaker 1: 0:02

What is happening everybody? This is Dave Kroff, 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 library. So we are checking out a hybrid horror Q called Dark Calling written by John Dupont, so we're going to take a listen to this and then talk about it on the other side. Alright, so that was Dark Calling written by John Dupont. John, thank you so much for sending this along. This was sent along during our week 42 weekly feedback thread and we feature a weekly feedback thread every single week and I choose one of these Q's to feature here on the YouTube channel and in the podcast. So, john, I did enjoy this.

Speaker 1: 2:59

I'm not sure. I'm not sure how like horror it is, and maybe I mean it feels a little like old school horror. Like horror you might feel more in a Danny Elfman kind of Batman Returns. It's macabre, but I'm not sure it's horror. And in the modern landscape of horror, I would expect more sound design elements and we're doing a pretty good job with the, the booms and those kind of things, those extremes of dynamics. I think those are okay, but knowing this was for a taxi listing, perhaps it was. The briefs were a little bit more thematic, like this, because this feels very thematic and modern horror cues in my experience, and I admittedly I don't write a ton of them, but they tend to be less thematic and much more sound design. But I did, I did like this. I thought the theme was great, the building, the layering, the intensity I think we're doing. Really, you might, might want to hear where we have the, the, the melodic kind of ostinato cooking along. There we go, okay, so we are kind of going up and down with that melody. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't the exact same melody cooking that whole time.

Speaker 1: 4:36

Now, one of the challenges of writing these types of cues is going to be the disparity between things like impacts and other ostinatos and looking at this, it looks like there's a really big difference between the impacts and the high volume, or not even real high volume, just really kind of sub heavy, gain, hungry type of sounds versus the ostinatos, and I'm thinking it might be a little too much.

Speaker 1: 5:07

So I feel like we either need to throw some compression in there or bring these impacts down in volume a little bit, probably need to do a little bit of work with some of our low end so that it's not when those impacts hit, they're not completely just dominating the conversation this guy right here at the end and we could see, if we look at our integrated luffs and our short-term luffs during this section, it's about minus 22,.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Minus 23,. It's all hanging out very, very kind of safe and I'm looking at short-term right here, and then this final impact on the button and we have an almost 10 dB shift from the lowest to the highest in the short-term and you can see our RMS pings into the nines and so I think they're just too loud and I think it's a lot of the low end. If I'm being honest, it feels low-endy. So if we were to look at this low end mix here, yeah, some low end reverb that probably needs to be cleaned up here it's kind of rumbling and so I would be really careful about that so that it doesn't become a challenge for an editor to use. And there was here at the beginning and this is being super nitpicky here- it feels like a major third above tonic.

Speaker 1: 6:51

And I'm sure it's just some sound design element and that immediately felt like a major third kicking in. And maybe let's connect this swoosh here how the energy kind of pulled back a little bit right before it hit and you can see in the waveform how it's building and then it pulls back and then it hits, yeah, and I wonder I wonder if we just take this and I'm just nudging it over a little bit. Yeah, just connect those. Now I'm not suggesting trimming out a beat and a half kind of like I did there, but rising into that downbeat. Don't pull your punch before you hit that impact. Yeah, I thought this was all really really nice. Again, it feels more macabre than horror, just about pushing it forward into the big Brahms.

Speaker 1: 8:25

There was a little bit of a sound like a sound design element got chopped off a little. Do you hear the kind of the noise? Stop, nice layering. I like the development of our piano motif into the strings, into strings plus octaves plus brass. I think that's all working really well.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Like those. They remind me a little bit of the Batman Returns in the Dark Knight, that kind of Hans Zimmerie Zebra by Yuhi, that synth I think you can lean into this stuff a little bit more. I think in the Yuhi Library I think it's called Bat Flaps. That would work really well throughout here. But I think if we want to go into horror territory, I feel like we need more creepy sound design elements to really push us into horror Again.

Speaker 1: 10:01

Not having heard any of the references for this taxi listing and I think you've already submitted this, so please let us know if this gets up forward I do feel that the mix is a little dark, could probably come up and if we're going to do a dropout like this, let's prepare that with some transitions. Shooooon, and I would almost just hang on the one chord here and I think nice and just like the other impact, let's not pull our punch and we can see in the waveform here how the impact is. I don't know. There's like a little break or a little pause or just a reduction of energy, and let's see how that would sound if we really Right. It's subtle, it's subtle, but you want to drive energy into the impact and you definitely don't want to lessen the impact of the impact. As far as the title, I think the title is working just fine. It's dark calling. I think that works. Just need to clean up some of the low end of the mix here, maybe make it a little bit brighter.

Speaker 1: 11:50

I did pull this from an MP3, so I've got a little bit of 18K fall off, but that's totally fine. Like I said, I do appreciate you sending this along. This was sent during our week 42 weekly feedback threads and I will be choosing from our week 43 to feature next week. If you would like to possibly have your cue featured here on the podcast and on the YouTube channel, then please, why don't you reach out to us? But thank you so much, john. I really appreciate you, and if you enjoyed that and you would like more direct feedback on your own cue, then you could also reach out to 52Qscom slash coaching and order up your very own. But that's going to do it for me. Appreciate it Until next time, peace.