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a thread about non-guitar centric music.. hybrid orchestral, movie / TV scores, trailer, atmospheric / ambient style etc..
to chat about AU / VST instruments / synths, tips and tricks with production / composition..
and of course, folk can drop audio clips in there for fun, review, help etc…
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Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
“Theory is something that is written down after the music has been made so we can explain it to others”– Levi Clay
“Theory is something that is written down after the music has been made so we can explain it to others”– Levi Clay
“Theory is something that is written down after the music has been made so we can explain it to others”– Levi Clay
I used some samples - you can hear the street scene at the beginning - and some of the other strange sounds. I'm big into found sounds and have a Zoom recorder I often take out with me. For example, I used to go to London on business so would take the recorder and get the sound of high speed trains rushing through the station - slow a recording down, EQ the bottom out, add some delay/reverb/distortion and layer up three tracks spaced apart by a second and you have a pad.
I'm also into using a guitar and looper .. loop up some chords, reverse, add three delays to regenerate and cascade the sound through the loop, slow down, EQ and you have a great ambient pad.
The track above used Omnisphere and Native Instruments Kore and Komplete plus some guitar - I have have a guitar with a Midi pickup and hook it via a Roland interface into a Roland guitar synth or soft synths on my PC. I also like to copy Bowie from Sense of doubt on the Heroes album and play spare piano chords or single notes which drench in reverb.
Another trick for a pad is to use soft synth with a build in arpeggiator - play some notes, reverse and slow down .. a good base for creating an evolving pad.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
haaaaa.... propper sound design stuff.. I love this stuff.. but as you'll know, some of this can be seriously time / labour intensive.. the beauty of it though it that you'll be creating sounds that do not exist in any plug-in instrument... totally unique..
I remember whatching someone create a dubstep track once [which is actually seriously clever if they're not using a sample library].. where they create each individual sound / 'wob' with different LFO settings [1/4 note, 1/4T, 1/8 note 1/8T etc], bounce them and then make a sort of collage from the audio snippets... it gave me an idea.. during the fade out on a song I recorded for a band called the Civilians, I recorded about 10 small funk licks / grooves with lengths varying from a beat to a bar.. and then dubstep style, I pieced them all together to create this super funky groove... sounded mental and very cool too.... this method can put a seriously different spin on your composition.. cos you can come up with things that you'd never have thought of if you were actually playing..
just thought of something else to toy with... dynamic range..
if you leave enough headroom in the mix when the atmospheric vibes are running, a sudden "boom" or very deep percussion hit [with something like a Teiko drum] can knock the listener out of his chair.. shock'n'awe..
so for example.. if the piece is generally averaging around -14dB to -10dB RMS during the atmospherics, a sudden hit at -6dB to -4dB will be quite startling..
and of course from a production / compositional angle, leaving that amount of headroom free up front allows the piece to grow..
a trap I fell into when I first got into trailer composition was starting out way too loud.. what happens then is that as the piece evolves and the orchestration gets more dense you'll start "pinning the meters".. from that point on, anything else you add cannot get any louder cos the meters are already peaking at 0dB. So rather than get louder, the mix simply gets more congested, less defined and ends up sounding like a wall of mush...
solution... when you're mixing down, start at the loudest part and work backwards [in terms of "the next loudest section" etc].. the final sections you mix are the softest..
I have a very powerful hand shower which I once recorded and by raising and dropping the shower head and choosing different ends of the bath and tiles to splash the water over I got a great sample which made a cool bed.
It was Delia Derbyshire that got me into this sort of fiddling. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop produced some great stuff as did some of the early German Kraut rock bands like Can.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!