I currently have a head like a meatgrinder combined with a washing machine on the spin cycle.

It’s quite hard to deal with. The not switching off, the constant circular destructive thoughts with no end. Sleep is not great and waking hours are full of noise. Concentration is difficult. Positivity impossible or at least seemingly so.

However, I forced myself (gently) to sit down at the workstation to try and compose something.

I like to set myself challenges. It is a learning experience, and it is play time, and hopefully something is created that has some use.

Recently I have been creating several tracks with a space theme. A kind of story in sounds. I don’t think that you can call it music, it is more sound design to create a story with atmospheric sounds.

After creating five tracks I sat down tonight and in quite a short time created a sixth. There is possibly one more to come. I deliberately in tonight’s exercise wanted to us a majority of free or very low-cost software instruments and specifically a handful of specific ones.

New Frontiers

So…

I made an Album. That maybe an overly grandiose way of describing the product, but I have made five tracks and around about twenty-five minutes of music that thematically work together.

Now whether you would call twenty-five minutes of Ambient ‘deep space’ themed sounds with a musical quality, ‘music’ - may be open to discretion or interpretation or whether you like or hate ambient ‘music’.

Breaking the Mould

 Once again, I find myself searching for sounds. Instruments created from objects ranging from recordings of the elements to a broken Dulcitone.

It is a strange position that I find myself in. The ease of access and sheer choice of instrument vsts is mindboggling. They range from free, to collections costing many hundreds of pounds, and most in the middle ground costing £40 - £100 for a single instrument. If there is an instrument or ‘sound – then there will be software somewhere to allow you to play that instrument.

As a sole indie creator, I want to create outside of the box. I have no one to please but myself, and if someone else appreciates what I have created all the better – but that isn’t the main aim.

I want to see where I can go with my creations and as a creator. I want to learn and grow every time I play a note on the keyboard, and I don’t want to follow the crowd.

It feels like some productive time has been spent here over the last few days.

Two projects have seen their realisation with the launch of both Paranormal Nation – The Interviews and Shattered Realities. So far there is episode one out for both series and others will follow on a fairly loose schedule.

Today saw the launch of the first Paranormal Nation spin off – The Interviews.

Now, considering that the Paranormal Nation series hasn’t launched yet that might seem a little strange.

The idea for The Interviews came after scripting the first three episodes of Paranormal Nation and well into the recording of the second episode. I decided to scrip and produce a series of short interviews featuring in each episode one member of the main cast and an ‘experiencer’. These ‘shorts’ were to be released as a runup to the main series. They would introduce both the main cast characters and also the general theme of the main audio drama to come. The Paranormal Nation series is as much about the individual characters as it is about spooky happenings, and I thought that it would be nice to start this journey with solo appearances by the main characters.

I sat down and set myself a task last night.

To ‘compose’ a short horror track using as few instruments, sounds and musical phrases as possible and in a short amount of time.

There was no intended use for the piece, it was simply an exercise in creating. I often do this although without the limitations of time and instruments. What comes out of the process often surprises me. It’s all a learning curve.

I had intended as with several recent ‘experiments’ to upload the finished piece to Soundcloud for free use. That was to change today after the original upload yesterday.

Over the last few months, I have been re-evaluating what Black Creek Podcasts is. I have been spending numerous hours, days, weeks and months in learning new skills, honing old ones and building a production suite capable of the production of high-quality sound design and music. This is an ongoing process and investment both in time and financially. While working on current projects I started to consider what I wanted to do moving forward.

A video by Venus Theory – a musician and sound designer and about limiting the number of plugins you use to create and just keeping those that you actually ‘can’t do without’, made me think. I don’t use a massive number of effect plugins. Yes, there are a reasonable number, but they are already limited to those I find useful and use. However, I looked at some of the soundbed tracks I have created and the are a multitude of instruments from different sources. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact I would say the opposite. It did spark an idea though - what if I used just one source and a limited number of instruments to create a tension / suspense soundbed and to keep that selection minimalistic.

The focus the last couple of evenings has been on coming up with the opening theme for the Paranormal Nation ‘Shorts’ which is a separate intro to the main Series full episodes, and the creation of two outro pieces for scripts already out to VA. The ‘Shorts’ all have a very different tone to them, and each will have an outro especially produced to fit that theme.

So for tonight for the first time since the announcement of the Paranormal Nation project I have included an example of the main theme and outro for the first two episodes along with a second file that is just my exploring ‘sounds’ and using instruments that I don’t really get to use with current projects.

The focus the last couple of evenings has been on coming up with the opening theme for the Paranormal Nation ‘Shorts’ which is a separate intro to the main Series full episodes, and the creation of two outro pieces for scripts already out to VA. The ‘Shorts’ all have a very different tone to them, and each will have an outro especially produced to fit that theme.

So for tonight for the first time since the announcement of the Paranormal Nation project I have included an example of the main theme and outro for the first two episodes along with a second file that is just my exploring ‘sounds’ and using instruments that I don’t really get to use with current projects.

Ideas are always buzzing around in my head. Forming and solidifying. Knowing that Paranormal Nation was some way off release I started to think a little wider. I realised I wanted something a little quicker to create but that was also something that would link in and as it turns out support the main project. This wasn’t about creating some totally separate, it was about something complementary to the main idea.

The idea that took shape was one of five-minute audio shorts.

Everything is about an emotion or feeling. Sadness, fear, regret, hope, anticipation, trepidation. Emotion and feelings are what drives a story and in an audio drama both voice and sounds have equally important parts to play.

This is the first piece of writing for weeks that isn’t a script.

My free time is and has been for some months now filled with either script writing or, sound design, editing, or production.

New Dawn – which is still very much alive, was and is really a forerunner to creating a full audio drama. I had an inkling of this when I conceived of New Dawn. It was to be a hybrid bridging the gap between actual play and full audio drama; however, its real purpose was to see if I could write and create audio drama.

The Ephemeral nature of everything.

Why do we spend so much time creating something that is ephemeral? OK, films and books can go out of popularity, circulation or print – but there still will be physical copies somewhere in someone’s collection or in a library. A podcast? Well, you could argue that maybe it is in someone’s downloaded playlist, possibly, maybe.

Sound Design for New Dawn Mini Season 2

When I originally conceived the idea of New Dawn, I knew that one of my primary aims was to create something with attention to detail in terms of music and the soundscape.

Mini Season1 tested the idea and I am not unhappy with the results. With mini season 2 I tend to take raise those aims.

In the beginning.

How New Dawn happens. The process.

It all starts with writing a scenario. It may be entirely original, or it might take inspiration from something existing. But either way it starts here with an actual play scenario.

That scenario forms as a cinematic piece in my head. It takes on a vibe and a theme. The first New Dawn case was very ‘spacious’. There were lots of locations and movement over distance.

The second is very different. Confined, Personal, Faster Paced.

So how does it take shape?

Recording your Voice.

I was recently asked to think of some tips for anyone involved in recording during an actual play and this is just as valid for anyone generally recording voice.

So here are a few general hints and tips that I would suggest are worth the time to read if you are recording your voice live or on your own to be sent to someone.

Great Horror.

‘how does a person fall in love with horror?’

It’s an interesting question especially as someone who plays a lot of Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green which fall into the Cosmic Horror genre of tabletop role playing games.

The art of sound design

When film and TV present a scene it provides a complete ‘picture’, it is a picture painted in full with very little left to the viewer imagination. When a radio drama paints a picture, it is filled out just enough to set the scene, the place, the atmosphere but then it leaves the listener to fill in the details from their own experience or imagination.