Unfortunately no weekend photos this time. I've got a pretty brutal deadline to meet for some tracks I've been working on, and just simply couldn't afford to take time away from working on that.
Doesn't mean that I don't have time to keep up on the blog though. I figured when I started this that there would be moments when I'm really busy, but I also promised myself that I would keep this up!
So today's sound is something along the same lines to a thing I did last week, making dark modern scary sound effects and atmospheres. As I mentioned then, one of the things that really comes to mind with that type of sound is string effects, almost mandatory for scary films.
This time around I thought that rather than starting with synthesised ones, I'd begin with a string sample and see where I can take it.
DARK TWISTED STRINGS by Noisy Neighbour Sound
The sample came from a CD of Elgar's Enigma Variations, a piece called Nimrod, which if you're not familiar with I really recommend you check out. I opened the sample in Sound forge and got to work with the EQ, just trimming away the frequencies that I didn't want, low stuff especially since I planned to put that in myself later on. Once that was nice and tidy I topped and tailed it, and then loaded it into Absynth, as usual, in one of the granular channels. Loads of messing about with the various parameters, little bits of pitch shifting as well. I was aiming to get something atonal with the characteristics of strings, but without being instantly identifiable as such.
Next I opened up Reaktor and got to work on making the low end stuff. Initially I tried using Steam pipe, since I thought that it would complement the string sound well, but I just couldn't get quite the right sound. I ended up using Carbon 2. Using all 3 oscillators with some heavy modulation, and the Band Reject filter. A bit of chorus, managed to get a nicely brooding angry synth sound.
I then recorded this out, and again EQed in Sound forge before loading into Absynth. I spent quite a while getting the two sounds to mesh together in the right kinda of way, and lots of small little automation tweaks in the envelopes to keep things flowing properly. Last up a bit of light filtering and some reverb.
I really like this sound, definitely dark and creepy. I'd like it more if there where less granular artifacts perhaps, but that more down to my heavy handedness than anything else.
Now back on with these tracks! I've got to have 12 minutes of audio, all written, mixed, mastered and ready for sync by Thursday!!? Wish me luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment