Song of the Week: May 1 – WordPress Soundbeds

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.

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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.

• TAL-Bassline (bass synth)
• NI Abbey Road Drums
• AAS Strum Acoustic (guitar)
• NI Kontakt Clavinet
• Martinic Combo V (Vox organ)

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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.