New and improved website

I'll give you guys a heads up with a quick news flash. We've gone over our website and given it a make over and it now looks snazzier than ever. There's a chunk load of music to hear now as we've placed some our favourites from past years at your listening pleasure.

The Brand New Firelight:Studios Website 

Sippo and the Funk

This one is about the theme song for the online person of YleX radio station, Sippo.

Sippo and the funk.

What was wanted from the music that it would give you the feel of a lot of hassle and stuff going on. Also a bit of that undercover cop feeling wouldn't hurt. So my mind pops up with the feel of the 70's, of funk music and Starsky & Hutch.

I pondered on the elements for a while before one day I was going to lunch and a clavinet melody started playing in my head. It was just the thing I needed to get things rolling. So there I was trying to eat lunch as fast I could, humming the melody in my head all the while. Then a rush back to the studio and some quick writing to get it down. It ended up forming the backbone of the song.

Next up was the beat and bass. I didn't want the beat to be too grrovy, but rather be a forward moving force that drives the track onwards. I stacked three different sounding drum kits on top of each other to get a good layering into the drums. I selected some of the most dry and dirty kits I had at my disposal at the time. For the bass line I selected to do a slightly slapped bass to get some of that funky feeling. But not too much since I wanted the bass to be low.

From the actual lead theme I wrote an ascending and descending brass theme for saxes, trumpets and trombones. It's a simple enough melody, which starts out from the same note each time go either up or down. I wanted the brass to sound dirty and used quite a bit of gracing elements on the trumpets. There are stabs and falls all through the melody.

The sound is rounded out by a rhythmic organ and wah guitar.

I'm still pondering whether to do a more song like version of this with added string elements. Now the structure of the this song is more of a loop than an actual theme song.

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 8.5
  

Samplers, instruments and effects:

• NI Kontakt 3
  
• NI KorePlayer
  
• NI Battery 3
• NI Guitar Rig 3
• Kjaerhus Master Limiter
  
• Melda Equalizer
• PerfectSpace
• Audio Damage Roughrider
• Bootsy Ferric TDS
• Smartelectronix SupaPhaser
  

Libraries:

• Vienna Horizon Series Overdrive
  
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion
  
• Project SAM Brass
• NI Battery 3 Library
• NI Kontant 3 Library

The Giant Steps

Yesterday I wrote about composing by colors. Well there's another aspect of that same project that I'm working on, the sound design. There's going to be a TV commercial about the event and it needs some new sound elements the first of which was needed before the actual commercial is even ready. Since the project spans different medias (TV, radio and the internet) it requires a quite large array of different sound pieces.

One of them being an audio signature identifying the artists performing in the event. All the elements sound have the same feel to them so I started building a few blocks to form the basis for that sound world.

One of those blocks I started with is the foot steps of a giant walking in a city. I started by selecting the lowest and most massive bass drum sound I could find to form the thud caused by really heavy feet.

For the second layer of the sound I wanted a realistic sound of something heavy hitting the ground. At first I was thinking of concrete blocks, but then turned to falling trees, which had a more organic sound. I doubled that layer and shifted the pitch down an octave to get it to sound heavier and a little unnatural.

The third layer of the sound consisted of pitch shifted snapping branches and breaking wood. They give a nice organic breaking sound. Another layer had large falling rocks to designate the small pieces of pavement that might burst around the foot step.

As final touch I added a layer of shifting sand to make it sound like the pavement actually moves to the side when the foot presses down on it. After this I made several different version of the sound with varying volume levels for each layer to make them sound a little different and to make them work at different distances from the actual foot step in the commercial. Some of them are just low thuds and some of them have all the elements blaring at you at very close range.

This sound became the start of the audio signature. The rest of the audio signature consists of the green and orange musical sound scape I talked about in my previous Production Diary entry.

Composing by colors

This is one of the weirdest composing tasks I've had so far. I'm responsible for how an outdoor event sounds like and the only thing I have to go with are palm trees swaying in the wind and the colors green and orange. So now I'm pondering how does green sound? And what about orange?

The helping hand of technology

I've been battling with a crowded monitor display for quite a while now and finally the camel snapped. I went out and purchased a new monitor. A larger one. My previous display had a resolution of 1280x1024, which isn't bad if you're used to just surfing the net and writing the text or two. But for anything as large scale as my compositions tend to be it started to get rather small. So yesterday I bought a BenQ G2222HDL wide screen display with a resolution of 1920x1080 and boy is my screen now a lot less messy.