Latest experiences

I wrote about ordering Native Instruments Komplete 6. Well I finally got around to actually using the new tools in productions and I have to say I'm impressed. Especially Kontakt has been tweaked really well from the previous versions. I always ran in to trouble with the Direct-from-disc loading with the older versions, but with version 4 this works like a charm and found myself just loading more and more instruments while working. It was just a joy to work with the new Kontakt 4.

Absynth 5 seems to be even better than the previous versions and the rest of the classic soft synths in the Komplete packet are killers. Sorry for the shameless product pluck but working with them is just sheer pleasure.

Also I've been waiting to really use Tonehammer's Propanium and Epic Dohl libraries. They are absurdly excellent. The propanium has such an off worldly sound that you just get inspired by that alone. Also the Epic Dohls are massively usable. You can hear the ensemble in the individual sounds.

Finally have to mention Bela D Media's The Giovani Edition is a brilliant choir library. I've had it lying on my hard drive for quite a while now but this is about the first time I actually use it. The library has a really aetherical sound which is perfect for haunting choral passages. Can't wait for Bela D Media to finish of their choir library with a male and female choir... At least the boy and girl choirs rock.

I'll chug the tracks I worked on here so you can hear what I'm talking about. They're just a collection of ideas and as such are rough and unfinished. They're for a short scifi film.

Landing
The ship descents
Killing time

Gear I used for these tracks:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 7
  
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 4
  
• NI Absynth 5
  
• NI FM8
  
• NI Massive
• NI Koreplayer
• u-He Zebra CM
• NI Guitar Rig 4 Pro
  

Libraries:

• Tonehammer Propanium
  
• Tonehammer Epic Dohl
  
• Bela D Media The Giovani Edition
  
• Project SAM True Strike 2
• Vienna Symphonic Library Horizon series Epic Horns
• NI Acoustic Refractions
  
• NI Kontakt 4 Library
• Samplelogic AIR
  

Isolation

This is about a track called:

Isolation

I started working on this track at my day job when I needed to test out my new computer and the software I installed on it. So it's basically a test track.

Inspiration for this one came from the brilliant movie "District 9". I loved it's realistic approach to scifi, the themes it touched and well just about everything about it. I wanted to create something on a similar basis.

As the basic ideas and inspiration behind this track were quite opressive I wanted to create a gritty sound. This in turn gave me a good chance to get familiar with NI Guitar Rig 3, which I hadn't used before. Also getting my hands on FM8 was something I had waited for a while. I used quite a lot of distortion and compressing on a lot of the instruments to get that dirty sound. I found that Audio Damage's RoughRider gives out a quite nice crushed sound so I used that quite a lot on different tracks.

The biggest new technical thing on this track was mixing it in surround sound. It's a whole new world for me and experimenting doing a surround mix took some time. The first four or five mixes were totally and utterly incomprehensible. But after a few mistakes I found the right kind of balance for everything so that the track sounds good in normal stereo and surround. Listening to in surround gives a few more little things to the listener, but it's not necessary.

With a lot emphasis on the grittiness and harshness of sound I wanted to bring a "human" element into the track. I chose a set of natural sounds from an up close and personal violin to warm ethnic percussions and Arabian Oud lute. I used them to round out the overall sound and to get a more vibrant air. The middle between the earthy natural instruments and the gritty synthetic side I filled with orchestral strings and brass.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the results and will definately continue exploring along these lines.

Gear used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 8
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 3
  
• NI FM8
  
• u-He Zebra
  
• NI Battery 3
  
• NI Massive
  
• Cakewalk TTS-1
• NI Guitar Rig 3
  

Libraries:

• NI Kontakt 3 Library
  
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion
  
• Cakewalk TTS-1 Library
  
• NI Battery 3 Library
  

Gearhead

I'm really starting to be frigging gearhead. Native Instruments is releasing Komplete 6 on October 1st and they've made a really nice deal for Kontakt 3 user, which I could not pass. So now I'm waiting for the mailman to bring me the goodies next month. Can't wait to get them!

Ender

For over a year and a half, playwright Jari Hietanen and director Antti Mankonen have been setting Orson Scott Card's cult Sci-fi classic Ender's Game for the stage. The book presents a deep investigation of interpersonal relations in society by looking at the uninhibited interaction of children - the setting being not entirely unrelated to the more widely known classic, Lord of the Flies.

The production for the stage piece is now in full steam at Legioonateatteri in Tampere, Finland. This production, in what the director calls a 'mystery theatre' approach, is the first ever stage-setting of the novel. I am taking the huge responsibility of the audio side of things, starting with the actual design of the PA system: the theatre has recently relocated and received a state grant to get the lights and sound upgraded.

What I have made out of this freedom is a three-speaker plus subwoofer system with Ableton Live for playing out the audio. The sound for the play is built for a left-centre-right speaker configuration from the ground up, this really adds a great degree to the means of spatialisation. For every sound scene, the audio has been split into stems that can be independently sent into the stereo set of speakers, the middle speaker or reverb using a set of rotary encoders, and the live sound mixer has the opportunity to really react to the action on stage.

In keeping with the mystery theatre ideals, the sets will be abstract and minimal, and lots of mime techniques are used to 'sketch' the surroundings into thin air. On the sound front, my guiding thought has been to work every sound scene into a single drone, where abstract renditions of what one might expect to hear in the scene are coupled with synthetic sounds bordering on noise, but still exhibiting a fundamental frequency. What the audience hears is a complex weave of sound, and for those more sensitive to aural experience, delicate harmonies are found everywhere.

This production has also seen what must be my finest creative moment in sound design: time-stretching the slow release of water from a toilet water container to create the resonances of a spacecraft's walls in takeoff!

Ender - Defender of the dead will premiere on 6th September 2009. For more info (in Finnish) take a look at the Facebook event page or Legioonateatteri's web site.

Sumeria: First tracks

Another small scribble here about the progress of Sumeria. The opening track has turned out like I wanted it to sound and is mixing ready, though I'll mix each track once the whole album is composed. The opening track is synthetic and weird is sound and yet retains a certain acoustic and natural feel thanks to the few selected acoustic instruments used. The Tonehammer instruments work like a charm.

I'll reveal a little about the album here as well; the names of the first three tracks.

The first and opening track is called: Zero.
The second will be called: Zoe
And the third will be called: Grijalva.

Sumeria: Production has started

Well, writing a short bit about the first track of the album. I finally got all the pieces together and managed to start composing. It was pushed back by the fact that I needed to write out what each track is about; to give them their stories that they rely on. I'm not throwing out story telling entirely, but the overall story will not be a finished one.

Second reason for starting only now is the fact that I was searching for a few new instruments to play around with. I found a small firm called Tonehammer who make excellent sampled instruments, and I've bought four of them for scoring this album; their sampled Didgeridoo is excellent and is featured quite prominently in the first track, their Epic Dohl library, which is something I've been looking for a long time, the dreamy sounding Propanium and their latest Bamblong library. I also bought Bela D Media's Sampled Landscape, which contains some very cool instruments and drones.

The first track of the album is turning out very nicely. It's a bit ambientesque as there will not be that much melody in it. It is the prologue for the album and it sets up the overall sound and feel. For this the first track is called: Zero.

Concept album: Sumeria

It's been a while since I've done a bigger project of my own, but I've decided to do a concept score album. I really want to do something different stylewise. The album will be more fragmented than most of my larger works and will not contain a straight forward storyline to connect the dots between the pieces. The whole thing will be called:

Sumeria

The album will contain 13 tracks and will be released when it's done and no sooner.

Ei Kenenkään Maa

This article backtracks the scoring of the latest film by director Oskari Sipola:

Ei Kenenkään Maa
(Enemies within)

Production for this started shortly after we had finished scoring Oskari's previous film "Repeämä". He gave us a script with a Romeo & Juliet type of love story setting, neonazis, immigrants, broken friendships, hate and violence to read. I for one was intrigued and inspired from the get go.

From the first meetings it became clear that we were all going for a sublime, brooding type of score. It was clear it had to sound threatening and raw but not overpower the images on the screen. We set out to create a score that plays in low register and most of the time you feel the music rather than hear it.

We started off by doing a few short cues of what the score might sound like. The most dominant elements used in these cues were haunting atmospheric pads and primal beating drums. The cues did their trick as Oskari felt we had the right direction and we were able to start with a basic palette once the final cut of the film was ready.

The composing was done separately with me working in my own hole and Teemu in his. Though we worked individually we still managed to work as a team, since we bounced bits and pieces of the score back and forth between us as the work progressed. One can't really spot what piece is done by which composer. It always feels really weird to notice that on our own both of us compose really different kind of material and yet together our composing styles blend seamlessly (I personally am glad that it works that way). During the composing process we had two pit stops with Oskari to check the direction of the score. Both times we made some slight modifications to the details, but the general direction was clear all the time. The final editing and mixing was done on my setup with the score spanning over 60 different instrument tracks, it was so heavily layered.

The score is a haunting mix of layered pads that give an almost eerie feeling to most of the score, with an under current bass rumble and pumping to make it menacing. At times the score just swims elusively with the images, events and sounds, just out of reach but constantly present. We used melodies sparingly with most of them being played by a lonely echoing grand piano. It moves in and out of the score. Also a vital element were the large tom drums; primal and militaristic in nature. They were edited into a low rumble, that rises and falls as the events unfold and only during the final clash at the end they were given free reign to beat with force.

Other instruments used include industrial clangs and metal hits, which accompany the toms, orchestral strings, which appear in both clean and lush and heavily effected forms, percussions from Africa and Asia, which are used to give the toms more backing and give the score a more worldly feel, some very urban beats, ethnic flutes, Tibetan bells, glass harmonica, acoustic and distorted electric guitars, an Arabian female vocalist and a shaman throat singing. Most of these are layered into the synth work, so that they're not really discernible, but add flavor to the wall of sound that the score is.

In the end I feel the score leaves you uneasy since it is not a light listen with only a few points standing out as something to take hold of. And I for one love it for that. It has the feel of the movie, it pulses and grows as the story unfolds, it breaths a steady but unnerving heartbeat. It's not in your comfort zone and it's not meant to be.

Oh, this movie also incorporates a bonus from us: a rather generic heavy rock track that was needed when the director and producer noticed there wasn't enough left of the budget to get the rights for Rammstein's "Feuer frei", so I loaded up Ministry of Rock and played around with it for about 45 minutes and composed a little piece of bad heavy music. I then chugged it over to Teemu who did some vocals for it and presto! The end result plays filtered from a radio in one of the scenes.


The Score

1. In the beginning
2. The soldiers
3. All alone
4. Two worlds
5. The clash
6. A friendship ends

• Bonus track "Disemboweled virgins on crack"
  

Gear I used for this project:

Hardware

• Ensoniq MR-61 Workstation Keyboard

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 7
  
• Sony SoundForge 7

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 3
  
• NI Massive
• NI Kore Player
• EastWest PLAY
• Vienna Instruments Special Edition
• Yellow Tools Independence Free
• Homegrown Sounds Astralis Orgone
• Ummet Ozcan Genesis

Libraries:

• Ilio Origins
• EastWest Ministry of Rock
• EastWest Voices of Passion
• Vienna Horizon Series Glass & Stones
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion

The Deep Blue

I'll start this diary off by following the production of a single track:

The Deep Blue.

I've always loved water as an element and doing stories that happen in and around water have a certain appeal to me. For this track I had no particular story in mind, only images of a single diver, free diving in the ocean. The ever darkening shade of blue, the isolation, receding light.

Production for this started over a year and a half ago. It started out as a test for my newly acquired soft synth Massive, which I had had lying on my computer for a while. Well, it grew into something more, umm, massive.

I wanted the sound to be deep and grand, but still retain a certain up close and personal feel. I used a lot of echoing and low synths and big, soft brasses to give it a bottom sound to give the music the same vastness and depth as the Earth's oceans. Then again I used a clean acoustic guitar to give the song a personal feel as it plays bright and clear over the wall of sound that creates the rest of the track. An essential element was the use of a large choir, singing almost constantly through out the track.

This song went through several different stages and forms of development until I found the current form for it. At one stage there were acoustic percussion along the track, but in the end they just sounded wrong. The instruments used changed a few times before they settled in: at times there were more synthetic elements and at others more acoustic. The only element that was there all along was the choir.

The ending proved more challenging than the rest of the track and the whole song laid dormant on my computer for almost a year before I bought NI Acoustic Refractions for Kore Player which gave me the final tools that the ending needed. From there I found the high, dreamy sounds that I felt necessary to contrast the low sounds with which the track fades out.

Gear used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 7
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 2
• NI Massive
• NI Kore Player
• Vienna Instruments Special Edition
• Yellow Tools Independence Free
• ComputerMusic CM303
  

Libraries:

• NI Acoustic Refractions
• Ilio Origins
• Vienna Horizon Series Overdrive
• Spectrasonics Symphony of Voices
• FutureMusic FutureLoops Vol. 2