Sound creation - tools
Image by Desiree Johnson from Pixabay
I have recently been asked what instruments I use to create the ‘music’ and ambient soundbeds and most recently in relation to the 51GN5 series of ambient tracks.
All of the instruments I use are soft synthesisers played through the computer with piano midi keyboards. There is a whole world of instruments and companies that produce soft instruments out there and the choice can be somewhat overwhelming. I have a few criteria for selection. Firstly, they must be affordable for a home musician / producer. Soft instruments range in price from free to, for me, unaffordable. I take advantage whenever I can of promotions and sales to get the instruments I want. Secondly, I don’t have masses of disk space or the most powerful of computers to run them on, so they have to be friendly to my computer spec and not require masses of disk space. Some libraries out there would literally take half my disk space. Thirdly they need to fit in with the kind of music and soundscapes that I am creating. Lastly, I prefer the instruments to run in either Halion or Kontact, although I have a number of soft instruments that fall outside of this.
My ‘go to’ instruments for most of my sound creation presently are Heavyocity’s Mosaic series; Pads, Base, Leads, Tape, Voices, along with a number of other soft instruments that run in Kontact; Metal Pipes and Plates, Natural Forces, Entropy, Ibridocinematic, Oscilliaries, Etherial Earth. All of these give me a great foundational pallet of sounds to start sound designing from.
Within Hapion I use; Baltic Shimmers, Nordic Noir and Vertigo Glass and Iron for the more ‘experimental’ pieces, and for more orchestral requirements the Vertigo series of; Strings, Violin, Chello, Flute and others such as Zilhouette Strings and Vertigo Mosaic.
Another ‘go to’ are some of the Crow Hill Company offerings with Crystal Pads and Brackish Pads providing me with some of the more ‘different’ sounding instruments that add those focus points in a piece, along with instruments such as mystic piano if I want a piano sound.
Beyond this I also use Sonokinetic Ibrido Cinematica, Dawsom The Zyclop and Raizes Sierra Atlas and a number of Decent Sampler instruments that have very specific sounds from glass to gongs, to Bodrum drums for as and when I want those very specific sounds, or the specific type of resinence to build sounds from.
I normally start by finding the ‘glue’ sound that I want which is most often one of the Mosaic or Vertigo series and then it organically grows from there as to what else comes into the sonic picture.
The instruments themselves though aren’t the end of the picture, only the beginning. Beyond the usual compression and EQ required I use a number of effects tools to further alter the sound of the instruments.
This ranges from spatial placement with A1 stereo being a go to, reverb with Stonevoices D-reverb being my most often used, colouration of the sound with XLN RC20 Retro Colour, 2BPlayed Satorium, SSL Module 8, SSL X Saturator and Heavyocity Fury providing me with the tools to colour, shape, degrade, create movement. The last tools in the box are granular effects to further break down and re-arrange the sounds including Arturia EFX Fragments, FRCTL Audio GRN4, Excite Audio Motion Fractal.
The whole process is intrinsically ‘sound design’. As I mainly produce ambient soundbeds to create a feeling or ‘sound picture’ the instruments themselves are really only the beginning of the process, and while the chosen instruments will fit in with the overall feeling that I want to create the ‘sound’ itself it heavily modified to sit and glue together to create the picture.
The final part of most of these compositions are real world sounds but heavily processed through some of the tools above but also time stretched with PaulXstretch to retain some familiarity with the original sound source, but also enough to make the recognition of the original sound just out of reach.
Every piece from the more traditional tracks with recognisable instruments to the darker more liminal soundscapes are my explorations into sound. They start with an image in my mind which I then translate through finding the sounds that allow me to portray the image or the feeling of the image. Every piece grows from the first note played and with each part laid down the next part organically forms to compliment and to continue to form the realisation of the orginal idea. I really is an extension of sound design, something I love working on from creating real world settings and sounds for audio drama or in this case painting pictures through almost ‘musical’ sounds.
As to whether the majority of my works are ‘musical’ is open to debate. What they are to me are simple explorations of sound and feeling.
The latest track (No 6 in the 51GN5 series) is a pure journey into sound and this time inspired by a found image.
Image by Roger Jeffreys from Pixabay
More information can be found on the music page along with the opportunity to ‘buy me a coffee’ on Ko-fi if you like, want to see more or use any of the music or soundbeds.
Until next time...
If you are interest in talking about sound design and music requirement for a project, please contact me at blackcreekpodcasts@gmail.com
Free to use music and soundbeds can be found on my SoundCloud Artistspage.
