Very cool piece! Are you ducking the music under the narration or using any MB compression?
Thanks!
To answer your question, it isn't ducked, but I was lucky, it didn't need to be. It was scored in sync with that film, with the narration already in place. So the instruments and musical ideas were chosen to work with the images and voice-over.
There are times I need to duck a track if they make significant changes to an edit or VO, but it didn't happen this time.
Just for grins, I'll share the processing plugins I used:
The BX Focusrite SC console plugin was used to EQ and lightly compress each track. The hardware was a relatively uncolored Rupert Neve design that sounds pretty neutral with the instrumentation I used, and I owned (and still own one piece) the Focusrite Red Series hardware based on the console. It's still highly sought after, and I was an idiot to sell it. The plugin sounds OK.
The instrument section buses (i.e., Percussion, Strings, Synth, Woodwinds, etc) were lightly compressed with an SPL Iron plugin to even out the levels and knock off the peaks. When the plugin's threshold is reached, you can barely hear it. The tracks just sound like they belong together.
On the stereo bus I used a wonderful mastering EQ called the Three-Body Technology Kirchoff EQ. It is an EQ that emulates several types, but it does have some dynamic features, so one might say there's MB processing in the chain. It's not in the compressor, however, it's to pick levels where I want the EQ to kick in to prevent harshness or accent a frequency.
The bus compressor was a DDMF Magic Death Eye, a regular single band vari-mu compressor emulation that's wonderfully simple to operate, it works kind of like an LA-2A with a couple of Fairchild style features.
Honestly the track didn't need much, but I did even everything out with the BX Limiter True Peak, a single-band compressor that is very easy to learn and use, and works well for a lot of things that will later go on the web. I probably only added 1 or 2 dB of gain, and set the limiter to - .25 dB as I always do, just to prevent 'overs'.
