Originally Posted by: winknotes_282 
I think this sounds really good. The brass at the end are a tad "overblown" sounding for my taste but the mix and mastering sound really very good.
Hi Steve, thank you very much for your feedback, I am glad you like the mix. :-)
Originally Posted by: winknotes_282 
I never thought I'd be asking questions about mixing and mastering but wondered for mixing if you leave your tracks as midi or create stems/audio tracks and mix those?
That's a very good question: it depends, and I'll explain why....
I prefer audio stems because they allow me to mix more creatively, I find it easier to splice the audio, do automation of all sorts, duplicate tracks and do weird tricks (such as parallel distortion, parallel compression, parallel reverb or even naughtier stuff) that way.
With that being said I only do it when the music is in its final form, so for example if I am mixing one of my bespoke compositions for a client I know that at any point they may come back and say "change this bit, extend that bit" and so on......so in that case I leave it all MIDI and mix that way.
Originally Posted by: winknotes_282 
EDIT: Was there a target volume (LUFs) you were shooting for in mastering or just what sounded best? Forgive the naive question but again I've never even given these things a thought.
Personally I just use reference tracks and trust my ears rather than LUFS, I have references that I like the sound of so I use them to set a listening level on my monitoring system and then master the music so that it's in the same ballpark, sometimes slightly louder, sometimes slightly quieter*.
Dark Castle was mastered by Justin Colletti at JLM, you might find his Sonic Scoop podcasts on YouTube, and I gave him two reference tracks:
Descent Into Mystery from Danny Elfman
DDay from Christian Kardeis
He used them as a gauge for loudness so that my album would sit somewhere in between.
*I find myself liking the quieter versions of pretty much everything these days if you ask me: when I started I was obsessed with loudness because it looked hard to achieve and I thought it was part of being 'competitive', obviously if you hear Two Steps From Hell they make very loud stuff and it stands out a lot initially......but then that type of audio becomes tiring to listen to....at least to an extent.....I want to be able to hear the nuances, the transients and I don't feel the need to bring up the room so much at the mastering stage.....beside all limiters, even the more transparent ones tend to introduce some kind of harshness when you push them and I can hear that a lot with the strings so I don't go for that anymore when I am mastering orchestral music, obviously if I am doing heavy metal I still do.... XD so I found that older reference material, such as Jurarric Park 1993, Batman 1989, sounds crispy and detailed and it has beautiful stereo work going on and it would be only a tad too quiet for a 2021 release so I use that as a starting point and then I try not too exceed the DDay level, I never get close to Two Steps From Hell in terms of volume because it wouldn't do any good to my music. Sometimes I push it a little harder like on this one
Quantum Rift but only because I think it'd fit the style.
I hope that helps.
All the best
Francesco