Billy sounds like you have taken on an ambitious project. Just a few comments on the drum thoughts.

Regarding orchestral percussion. I did make a couple attempts of working with this in the short piece you uploaded. I have gone down that rabbit hole over the past years and have a collection of suitable VSTs to produce this, for example, Kirt Hunter's kettle drums and tympanyi, Kontact Komplete 13, several of the Spitfire Orchestra products, and those are only a few of the products I remember I have.

As suggested by others here, these type of swelling and thunderous hits with long tails make sense in your space story board. However I found they just did not fit in the track you provided. These types of sounds simply need more "space" in the mix.

That short track has three sections: Intro (4 bars), Bridge (8 bars) and Soft Section (~18 bars). The Bridge section is the best candidate for the orchestral percussion, but each downbeat has a hard guitar strum which does not go well with a big drum hit. In fact, the Toms I used avoided the downbeat in all sections. And the Soft Section is too quite for a heavy hit.

Bottom line, it is a nice piece and a good start to your project. If there is anything else that I can do for you, just holler.

Dan


BIAB – 2025, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, 1TB WD Black NVMe SSD, 2TB WDC Blue SSD, 1TB WD Blue, 2 TB SK NVMe, 6 TB External, Motu Audio Express 6x6