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Producing film music

Hi
I compose a lot of film-like scores of a musical notation software called Musescore but the playback is pretty unnatural. I am thinking of converting the parts to midi files and inputting them into a DAW. I don't have much experiences with DAWs but, upon looking at garageband, I feel like there aren't enough of the sounds I want.

I compose mainly large orchestral scores, for fantasy/video game music, and garageband sounds very electronic. I'm looking for another DAW but they are a bit pricey so what would you recommend? I have a mac so I've looked at logic pro but apparently that has a steep learning curve.

Reply 1

nzy

What about the playback in Musescore do you feel is unnatural? If it's that you're unhappy with using General MIDI sounds, you can install an alternative sound library and give that a go instead. I wouldn't invest in an entire DAW purely for playback purposes.

Reply 2

asianism

Original post by nzy

Its hard to describe. It's just that its very machine sounding like - its very hard to get a natural sounding build and tempo changes. And the sounds just sound dull like theres a lack of fiddling around with them. I've tried doubling instruments together an stuff, to get a sound I like but its very hard. So I basically want 'greater freedom' over sounds.

Reply 3

The MIDI Man

I know this is an old post, but for future readers, MIDI is machine-like by nature because of how it works. Any DAW will not resolve this as the DAW just uses the exact same MIDI with a nicer interface than MuseScore.
MIDI is just computer-controlled signals triggering notes on and off. A computer is pretty much 100% accurate on timings for better or worse, therefore the MIDI playback appears to have no musicality or feeling.

A remedy would be to play live. You could buy a cheap plug-in keyboard/controller and play virtual instruments on your computer. Many good ones are available for free. This will preserve the human touch of your music.

In terms of getting better sounds, MuseScore uses the default soundfont which on windows is the Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth. This uses Roland GS sounds compliant with the General MIDI sound set. It can produce pretty much any sound you want at the click of a button but it is old and therefore the sound quality is poor.
You can download the Timbres of Heaven soundfont for free and replace the default one in MuseScore's settings. I won't link it in case of link rot but it is quite easy to find. This provides better sounding instrument sounds that MuseScore can use right away.
Alternatively, as mentioned above you could use virtual instruments which will likely provide even better sound quality and control at the cost of not being able to integrate it into MuseScore (very easily at least). This way you can also design the sounds to your liking.

I hope this helps any future music producer wondering why their MIDI music sounds cold when the computer plays it back.