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