Questions similar to this one come up on various trailer composing forums from time to time and the responses from the experienced professional trailer composers are always that learning and becoming very proficient at production is 100% a prerequisite for those that aspire to become trailer composers. More so than being good at actual composing believe it or not. To quote Dan Grahams book on composing for production libraries (and I’m paraphrasing) ”whether or not you think it’s a good thing, the state of affairs is that a composer with excellent production skills but perhaps less than stellar composing skills is more likely to get a placement than a composer with excellent composing skills and mediocre production skills.” I guess the take away is that learning the ropes of production and getting those skills to a professional standard is a must if you’re setting your sights on eventually getting placements with trailer libraries.

For violin you should really take a look at Joshua Bell Violin by Embertone, it has two versions, one at €99 and one at €150 and is considered best in class by many. https://embertone.com/instruments/joshua-bell-violin-series/ As an aside, I can offer some hard won advice, which is to save and get the best in class libraries for everything over time. I know it’s frustrating, you want to compose now. But the truth of the matter is that sooner or later you’re probably going to get them anyway, to be able to compete on a level playing field with other professional composers. A library won’t make you a better composer of course, but if you’re already a good composer (as you are) it will make a world of difference. I wasted an ungodly amount of money on ”make do” libraries, that just do not get used at all anymore now that I have a some decent ones. It truly helps with composing too I find, when you play a library and it sounds just like the stuff you hear from pro composers tracks. It’s pretty inspirational.

@Alex Pfeffer Can I ask why you say that? A lot of trailers transition from 4/4 meter in act 2 to 3/4 or 6/8 in act 3, especially action based trailers?

@Alex Pfeffer well I learnt it from one of Daniel Beijboms courses where he demonstrates the technique (going from 4/4 in act 2 to 3/4 (6/8) in act 3) in a walkthrough of one of his placed trailer cues, it was either Spider-Man or Logan, I’ll have to check, but its apparently quite common in the MCU stuff. I’ll have a dig around to find some more concrete examples and get back to you 😊

Fantastic track! To my ears the intro vocal up to around 1:00' is very crisp and clear, which is great, but to me it sounds a bit disjointed, that is it doesn't feel like it sits in the same space as the piano. Maybe you're going for that upfront separated sound, but if you aren't, I'd try bussing the vocals and piano to a reverb so there's some space cohesion, as if you were singing next to the piano in the same room. When the vocals double up, around 1:00 they seem to get progessively more and more buried in the mix, especially after about 1:20. Almost too low to hear properly, for me anyway. Again, this might be your intention, but if not maybe try sidechaining your vox to the underlying pads with a compressor (maybe send all the pads to a bus and side chain that to the vox) so they duck as you sing. Alternatively there's a great little plugin called Trackspacer which is very good at helping with this type of thing. You have an amazing voice and the track is a killer, so well done!

There's a few libraries that have effective pitch bends built in, such as (most famously) Realitone's Sunset Strings (which sounds amazing) and also their Nightfall Strings to a slightly lesser extent. Then there's Westwoods Novella Carbon, which is an insanely good toolkit for hybrid trailers which has some very cool string bending going on. Last but not least if you're not in the mood to splash out big bucks for those libraries, there's a very innovative plugin call Fluid Chords by Pitch Innovations, which performs pretty insane pitch glides from one chord to another chord no matter the interval and it works for any VST instrument you choose as well as having some cool built in sounds. https://youtu.be/MpNtAqcmwn8