|
A few months back, I was asked to come up with some original music for a class project. The project was initially going to be a video documentary on animals. With that in mind, I composed four original pieces, thinking they would be in an animal documentary video. Well, the project didn’t happen, so I ended up with four homeless pieces of music.
They are largely mood pieces, two of which are very synth-heavy, and two which are more cinematic and orchestral. I didn’t give them any proper names, so the moniker “Animal Documentary” remains.
0 Comments
This week I availed myself of a great sale that Native Instruments was having on their Komplete 9 bundle. Though I’ve only scratched the mere surface of this product, I was able to put a few very nice sounds through their paces.
In addition, I’ve also added a few other pieces of equipment to my home studio, namely a Behringer Xenyx X2442 line mixer. This has been exciting to me as it’s made use of my hardware synth collection much easier. I now have all of my old romplers and older keyboards lined in and ready to go. Also, I’ve been listening to Peter Gabriel almost nonstop for the last two weeks. So there’s a chance that some of that influence has come out in this piece. I’d like to think so, anyway. And now for the track breakdown:
I’m finally getting back into the flow of things here. I’ve managed to hole myself up in my studio the last three days and develop a good bit of material. Hopefully I can get back on a weekly schedule here…..but no promises!
This week’s offering is – yet again – part of a class project that I produced this last week. I had to shoot and edit a 1-minute video for class, so that gave me a chance to do another soundtrack. I was going for spooky and mysterious. No real curve balls here in terms of plugins, though I did recently pick up Reaktor 5, which is pretty incredible. I’ve barely scratched the surface with it, but I have discovered the downloadable ensemble packets from off of the NI website. There I found all manner of cool user-created synths and presets. One that I was particularly excited to find was the Soundforum synth that I remembered using some 10 years ago. I didn’t think you could still find that one….I used it for the Vangelis-esque Blade Runner pad at the beginning of the track. Oh, and here’s the video, too. Enjoy! In the interest of not allowing this Song of the Week thing fall completely off the map, I’ve decided once again – and against my better judgement – to pull another piece from out of the tune vault. While I realize nobody but me will know whether or not a piece was written yesterday or twelve years ago, I still feel obligated to maintain some transparency about when something was written. There. I feel better. I wrote this about 10 years ago, not long after I first discovered VST technology. It had been out for awhile even by this point (2004), but I was pretty behind the times. A friend of mine gave me a copy of Computer Music Magazine or something and it had a software companion that included an light version of Orion by Synapse Audio. I’d used Reason a bit by then, but one limitation of Reason was that it didn’t have third-party VST plugin support – whereas Orion did. I thus began my long and adventurous journey into the world of free VST software synths. This tune was among the first batch of tunes that I’d written using this new software. I’m not completely sure of all the plugins I used on the track, and I’m sure I’ve lost many of the synths by now. I was also on Windows at the time, so I’m sure that many of them are no longer available. A few plugins I do remember:  Pokegy – this was a Moog Prodigy emulator. Not sure how much it sounds like a real Prodigy, but I used it for the bass line in the piece. It’s a sounds that I try to imitate often even now.  Crystal (Green Oak) – this one is still out there. Great little synth capable of a lot of sounds. Available for Windows and Mac OS, and apparently for iPad and iPhone as well. Definitely worth checking out!  Blockfish (Digital Fish Phones) – a great little compressor plugin. DFP has a variety of other free plugins worth checking out here. Triangle I and II (rgc:audio) – I believe rgc was bought by Cakewalk, but these used to be freeware synths. Some killer bass and lead sounds could be coaxed out of these bad boys.
The last few weeks have been crazy busy, so I haven’t gotten around to updating the blog. I do have a few pieces to show for it, however, though they’re all in varying levels of non-completion.
In my last post I offered a soundtrack to a series of tutorial videos that I produced for one of my Instructional Design master’s courses. Here I will show off the rest of the soundtracks that I included in the remaining videos. I haven’t taken the time to give any of these proper names, so we’ll just have to settle with “Section 2 Soundtrack” and stuff like that. So the real challenge with these tunes was really my time constraints. I had to churn out four videos in fairly short order, and only had my spare time to do it in – which itself is in pretty short supply. So time was of the essence. I’d like to think that given some work, these pieces could actually develop into good material. As they are now, it’s strictly background music.
WORDPRESS PART 2
This one may be my favorite of the three that I’ve posted here. It centers around a neat plugin by AAS called Strum Acoustic. It emulates a variety of acoustic guitar instruments, and has some pretty cool features for mimicking strumming patterns. Perhaps the coolest feature was a built-in set of strumming patterns in the form of MIDI files that can be loaded into your DAW. I was able to pull up a pattern and tweak the notes to configure different chords and there it was. It doesn’t sound completely real, but it’s perfect for being buried under a video voiceover. There’s little else going on in this track, except for the second melody guitar/dulcimer part (which is a Sonik Synth patch), the pad, and the glockenspiel (both of which are coming from the EXS24). For sure I’ll be digging into the Strum Acoustic more in the future. 
WORDPRESS PART 3
This was supposed to be more than it ended up as. Just a little cheesy urban jazz jam. I did play a real guitar on it, so that’s something! The usual suspects on here: Scarbee, SampleTron, etc. WORDPRESS PART 4 This may be the most ridiculous sounding thing I’ve ever done. It would almost work if it weren’t for the sloppy sounding drums. Again, the Strum Acoustic makes an appearance.
REJOICE PART 1
Since I was running out of ideas, and time, and the inclination to create more content, I filled some of the other space up on this last video with a piece I improvised several months ago. I used a guitar sound out of NI Kontakt that I like a lot. Again, nothing terribly elaborate. This could use some arrangement and turn into a solid piece of music perhaps.
It would seem that I’m beginning to forget how many weeks behind I am on my song of the week. Fortunately, I’ve been busy catching up.
I’ve been producing tutorial videos for my Master’s program on how to use WordPress. Not that I’m any genius at WordPress, mind you. But I’m having to produce about 5 or 6 of them once all is said and done. The whole process is pretty time consuming, though I enjoy it. Of course, every video has to have a soundtrack, right? So naturally I used this as an opportunity to flex some of my musical skills a bit as well. No real surprises here, really. Same old synths I’ve been using lately. I seem to be gravitating towards a sort of 80’s revivalist thing with a lot of these tunes, especially with the cool Linn Drum samples coming from the Arturia Spark. I love that thing. And who doesn’t love a little glockenspiel?
I thought I’d try and continue in the spirit of an earlier entry and doing another ambient soundscape type of a thing this week.
This tune had it’s start over a year ago when I put together something on a rainy Christmas Day. I was going for something moody and ethereal, but it wasn’t working, though I’d found a few sounds that I liked. In particular was a church organ type of sound that I was getting out of the u-He Tyrell N6. It’s augmented here with the Martinic Combo V, and lots of reverb. The driving force behind the piece is really the 16-note ostinato synth pattern, which is being layered by a number of synths: Chip32, Oki Computer in Reaktor (and a time stretched loop of the same sequence played as 32-notes), AAS Acoustic Strum, and Scarbee Mark I Rhodes. I was shooting for that cheesy 8-bit vibe with the Oki line. It reappears later in the piece on top a series of actual chord changes as well. The secret weapon is the soundscape generated on NI Reaktor with Metaphysical Function. I layered two tracks of noise that came out of this thing. Some other plugs:
Lagging behind over here lately, on account of school and other contract work. Also, it seems that I’ve run out of space on my free SoundCloud account, so I’ll instituting a change of venue for storehousing the song files. Kind of a drag, since SoundCloud can tell me how many plays I get and all. Oh well….guess I’ll have to pony up and start actually paying for the service. In the meantime, my latest offering was borne out of a rainy Sunday afternoon stuck inside, doing my best to put off doing actual work. I felt obligated to put “rain” in the title, and now that I think about it, I guess I was giving my actual work a “raincheck” so to speak. Anyway, I was trying to go for a more upbeat, groove-oriented fusion vibe for this tune. I’ve been listening to a lot of gospel stuff lately (Kirk Franklin, Richard Smallwood, etc.), and I was hoping for some of that to influence me somehow. Not sure it did, but I was thinking about the syncopation in that music and how I might emulate in a tune. Again, I was trying to be a guitar player….I should just start apologizing for that up front. I do have plans of tracking a real guitar part in the places where you hear “synth guitar”, so just bear with me. Also had a time programming the drums. I should probably take a class on it or something. Some items of note: found a pretty cool compressor plug called Molot by vlagd/sound, which I used on a buss for the drums and bass. Also broke out the ES1 for the bass synth, which I’m really digging. Two others I don’t mess with too much were the EVD6 and Ticky Clav by Big Tick Audio, both of which added a lot during the “funk synth solo” section. Most everything else are stock plugs that I use pretty much all the time:
This week’s offering is more of an ambient soundscape than an actual song. I thought about developing the main motif a bit, but decided against it.
I ran across a site called freeSFX that has some great sound effects, which is where I found most of the ambient airport background noise and laughing kids and stuff. I also used a VST plugin produced by Tweakbench called Field, which has some need ambient sound effects. Another cool synth I pulled out is Plucked String by Synapse Audio (makers of Orion). It really doesn’t sound like a guitar, but it does sound pretty cool. Finally, I used Reaktor Spark (NI) for the sequenced 8th-note bass synth, and SynthMaster by KV331 Audio for the spacey pad sound heard throughout.
This week I had a video project to produce for one of my graduate courses at school. Naturally, this seemed like a good opportunity to come up with a new tune to use as a soundbed for the project. Check it below (the new tune comes in at around 4:00 minutes). The video also features a tune I posted a few weeks back as the intro and credits.
A few new plugs I haven’t really used before: the Rob Papen RG Muted CM rhythm guitar plugin intros the piece with a funky little delayed guitar lick. Also featured is a cool little Reaktor plugin called Aerobic, which is providing a pretty cool little drum machine track. Also pulled out the trusty ‘ol LinPlug Alpha CM for a cheesy organ pad to flesh out the middle section. Other plugins used:
|
Pat Strawser
Musings about keyboards, synthesizers, and music in general. Archives
March 2019
Categories
|
RSS Feed