I still put myself in the amateur composer category. The field is just so vast. Humility comes with merely stepping into the realm of Orchestral compositions. My workflow normally starts on a sketchpad, moves on to a defined musescore. I still gravitate towards Musecore early in the concept because its free and its flexible. NP is indeed a great innovation and a good way to conceptualize what the final product will be.
Musescore is a wonderful program with a lot of users, it’s great to have it around. Sibelius is over priced and can be troublesome but that, Finale and Dorico are the only way to get Noteperformer and I wouldn’t be posting anything orchestral without that at this point. Supposedly NP was trying to get Musescore to get on board but it’s not happening as far as I know.
I know pros who are not very good and amateurs who are better so the whole concept is kind of useless. You have a great approach to the whole thing, I never would have gotten that far.
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ingolee,
Thank you for the recent reviews! Now your song: sounds like high quality software/real instruments. This has a Disney-esque movie feeling for me; hope you take that as a compliment. For me, the xylophone sounds fine as is. I agree the reverb could be in a “bigger room”. Nice song & recording! 
Hi ingolee,
Typing as I listen, having not read any comments.
First off, what are you using to make this? I use UVI Workstation Orchestral Suit which I like.
Honestly, I am finding it hard to critique this in any meaningful way, largely due to my lack of knowledge. I used a lot of orchestration in my last EP (Giggons) but that was mixed with heavy rock and largely revolved around strings and french horns.
The part you have here all fit nicely and never crowd each other. I’d love to see it alongside an animation or movie scene, as that is what it reminds me of with all it’s moving parts. How’d you go about writing this?
Nice one, looking forward to hearing how you did it and what you did it on.
Thank you Aaron, that is definitely a compliment in my book, Disney has some great music. I am in the minority when it comes to orchestral reverb, I actually have to force myself to use as much as I do, not sure why!
Hi Dan, thank you for the kind words. The sounds on this piece are from NotePerformer which is an audio library plugin that works with music notation software. I use Sibelius for notation so I can write something and then play it back right away to hear what I screwed up and hopefully fix it.
I’m not familiar with the software you mention, I’ll have to check it out. There’s a lot of quality sounds out there these days.
You are correct. My main thing is ease of use. I used to use Miraslav’s Orchestral plug in but I found it hugely complicated and unwieldy. The UVI user interface is far more intuitive (to me anyway).
Great job.