[Various] Demo Reels (.mp3) Please Advise

[KrazyKatz]

Hello fellow trackers,

I've presented two Demo Reels and am looking for critique. Please mention anything you dislike. If you find your attention wavers, please state where. This should be nothing short of professional.

Many thanks.

Orchestral Reel
http://www.sonicbrilliance.com/SBS-Orchestral-Demo-Reel.mp3

Ambient Reel
http://www.sonicbrilliance.com/SBS-Ambient-Demo-Reel.mp3

[Sam_Zen]

Orchestral : well, what should I say, a clean-cut production with nice transitions.

Ambient : Technically I could say the same about it. But as a content I have a problem with this.
It just has too much similarities with the Orchestral one. Suppose you skip the Orchestral one, and rename the Ambient one as Orchestral..
I don't think the listener would get confused about this.
With Ambient I expect a bit more sound elements of some 'natural' environments.

[KrazyKatz]

I hear what you're saying, and I've always had trouble defining the genre, but even though it's simply a wording issue, how would you define it??

[Sam_Zen]

In music, genres are fuzzy per definition. So I'm not going to define anything. Associations are quite individual.
To me, 'ambient' is coupled to the idea of creating an environment.
Sometimes completely artificial, sometimes a mix of existing 'natural' sounds and sounds, non-existing in nature.

I made some myself, and I associate the concept also with things like 'music for airports' by Brian Eno.
But there are also productions from a holistic point of view, where a slow beat with lots of echo is combined with a pan-flute,
calling it 'ambient music'.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

These are good, KrazyKatz! I quite enjoyed listening to them and picking out your various pieces. Personally, I think that the ambient reel works better than the orchestral one. I think that this is because the music is so much simpler (not in a bad way), and so you can get the gist of it in just a few short seconds. I think that with orchestral pieces, so much of what you hear relies on a knowledge of what has come before, and it becomes hard to choose the "best" bits for a reel. All that being said, I think that they both work well. Nice work here.