Calling cards

(I've spent quite a lot of time this autumn thinking about our calling cards. I've tried to re-imagine what our cards should be like. I wanted them to show our sounds somehow (which incidentally is frigging hard when you're dealing with cardboard). The first thing I came up with was memory sticks. We got them printed and packed them full of music and sound design stuff (a whopping 11 hours and 28 minutes worth). 

But I wasn't really yet satisfied. I wanted to have something we could just easily give someone. For some reason I started to think of videos. They've usually got some sound and most people are kinda visually oriented.(Geewiz, film composers making videos with images and music... That's original.) But I gave it a shot and came up with this:

(And here's the music on SoundCloud)

Now, if we could only get our hands on something like this:

Come on Sony. Get that sucker into production so we can finally have our cool calling cards...

Sunburn

The sun shines brightly. The pavement feels rough under your running feet. Jump. Grab a drain pipe. Start climbing. Gravel on the roof splatters around as you jump on it. You move again, running...

Sunburn

Sunburn is a track started out as something else than a track. I originally needed a loop to fill out the background of a radiospot. For this I used about an hour but then the loop started to sound pretty damn good on it's own.

In the original loop I only had some atmospherics and the beat, which clearly were not enough for a ful fledged song. The biggest thing about the original loop was the lack of  a melody since it was not meant to have one. And that was the first thing I started to work upon. For the melody I drew inspiration from the soundtrack of Bladerunner. I kept it fairly simple so I wouldn't loose the atmospheric nature of the song.

...The sun light reflects of the glass and steel around you. Foot steps on the gravel behind you. They're chasing you. The roof ends. You jump...

After I got the melody down I started to work on the structure. I wanted to have this track rolling and not change too much, but still wanted clearly different sections as I imagined this to be the soundtrack of  a Mirror's Edge like video game level. I wanted to have some calming moments, some dramatic moments and some parts that rolled forward. And all the time I wanted to keep a good pace. So I imagined different kinds of situations you could get into and began to mold the section according to them.

...A railing. You grab it mid air. Fling yourself over it. A fire escape. Kick the ladder down. Slide...

After I had finished the structure and mixed the track I still wanted to mess with it a bit. I popped the beats and the melodies on different tracks in Sonar and started to mangle them with Illformed's Glitch plugin. I used it to create new drum fills and section changes. I used it to stop the beat, reverse it, retrigger it and just generally abuse the hell out of those drums. And then I did the same to the melodies. To top it of I intentionally forgot about making clean and smooth cuts between the effected parts and the clean ones.

...Head down the alley and back into the sunlight. A plaza, people there. Blend in.

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 8.5

Samplers and instruments:

• u-he Tyrell Nexus 6
• Synapse Audio Junglist
• HG Fortune Serenity Free
• HG Fortune UltraSwamp Free
• HG Fortune Altair 4 Beta
• Cakewalk RXP
• NI KorePlayer
• Novakill Neokiller III
• Ummet Ozcan Genesis

Effects:

• Cakewalk z3ta+ FX
• Variety of Sound Ferric TDS
• Illformed Glitch 1.3
• MeldaProductions MEqualizer
• Kjaerhus Classic Master Limiter

rvltn @ IGDA 8.11.2011

We visited the IGDA event of November in Helsinki with really big plans for promoting ourselves to the Finnish game industry. Well, turned out that Supercell was giving out free beer and the bar was full. So we did whatever a reasonable person does: made a video of it.

A wee bit of a teaser

I wrote about a really huge project I'm working on a little while back. I'm really excited about this project and the work has started out really well but the thing is I really can't reveal what I'm working on until the autumn of 2012. It's a really BIG and long project. But I still want to share something.

This is what I've been mulling over the past weeks. This simple line of melody. Two and a half bars of notes. And hopefully I'm on the right track with it.

reveltone @ Facebook

This is just a reminder for those of you who haven't noticed it yet (I'm betting a lot you haven't...). We can now be found also on Facebook.

rvltn @ FB

Mush over there and like us if you like us!

Starting something big

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will begin to write and design something big. Short but big and really frigging exciting. The concepts I've seen really are inspiring and I'm quite anxious to get work started. That's about all I can say right now.

The New Dawn

A little while back I spotted an interesting contest on Audiodraft. It was hosted by Nelonen Media. They were looking for a new sound for their brand. My suggestion did not win, but I got a chance to flex out Sample Logic's Cinematic Guitars.

The sound I went after was uplifting. I began with pads and guitar harmonics. I got some really nice and airy atmospheres created with the new guitars. But they alone would not be enough to carry the track.

So I dug out a crushed and glitched drum kit to create a driving rhythm to give the song a good momentum. I didn't want to create too elaborate of a beat so I kept it simple with just the bass drum and a fast paced glitch ticking. On top the beat I wrote passages with a massive tom ensemble.

Once these were done I turned to the orchestral elements. I used lush strings to create a melody which I doubled with french horns.

The track was kept short due to the lenght requirements in the contest, but I'm quite happy how it turned out.

The New Dawn 

5 second audio stories

A short post this time. I have a really good feeling at the moment about a bunch of IDs I worked on this week. They are to work as transitions between songs.

I didn't just want to make single sounds but rather wanted them to be mini stories. It's actually quite a challenge to create an understandable short story with just sounds. Also they needed to have a good tempo so they won't slow down the show. I think I got them sounding really awesome.

The elements I used in then I collected from things around the office and things associated with the channel. They range from monkeys to UFOs.

I'll post some of them here later.

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Pelasta Punainen Pallo - End Credits

 I finally got around to actually uploading this piece online. A detailed account can be found in an earlier post.

Pelasta Punainen Pallo - End Credits

So that's how it sounds. I'm proud of it.

The Frontier

Every now and then I start up a track just for the heck of doing something. Anything. With out any real purpose to begin with. This is a journal of one such track:

The Frontier

Like I said this started out as something to do on an idle day. I layed out the beginning pads and bleeps one day and then nothing. The track sat on my hard drive for quite a while just waiting. Eventually I just forgot about this.

Then another idle day came and I browsed through my projects folder to find this one. I gave it a listen felt I could build on the simple beginning I had in my hands. I began laying drums and strings on, but the strings began to have a little too much of an ethnic vibe, which I for some reason did not want for this track. So I dumped most of the strings and pulled out the brass. They began with a simple idea that grew.

The more I wrote for the horns to play the more I felt the melody push you towards an entrance to some unfamiliar (yet all too familiar) place. So that became the theme to carry this track. The brass melody became grand and everything felt like it was going to plan. Then I hit a wall. What next? What happens when you get to the gate?

For a second time this track was left to wait.

For a while I had no answer. I made several different versions in my head but all of them sounded wrong. I actually spent a few weeks thinking about how to go with the second half. Then yesterday I fired up Sonar and began to write without much thinking of it. And the second half kinda just wrote itself.

In the end it was fitting that writing a track to portray the transportation between two worlds was so hard yet so easy to write.

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar X1
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers, instruments and effects:

• NI Kontakt4
• NI Battery 3
• NI Massive
• NI Absynth 5
• Z3ta+ FX
• Vienna Suite

Libraries and impulses:

• MOTU Ethno Instrument 2
• Zero G Animato
• Sonic Couture Konkrete 2
• Nine Volt Audio Stickbreakers 2: Ten Man Taiko
• Kirk Hunter Symphony Orchestra Diamond
• Cinematic Strings Monster Staccatos
• VSL Horizon series Epic Horns
• NI Kontakt 4 Library

Pelasta Punainen Pallo - charity concert

Ok, let's break this long overdue silence on this diary.

I  did a pretty rush job at work. Due to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, there was a charity concert in Helsinki, which YleX was a part of. The sound work for the radio and TV spots and the YleX Areena web-TV broadcast fell into my lap.

The first thing that was decided was the tone of the sound. None of us working on this project wanted to have the sound feel too solemn or downcast. We wanted to give people a good feeling about the concert. In the end they're going to see their favorite artists perform and the side product is them helping out. How can you do that if they get a dark mood from the sound? On the other hand we didn't want to go with something overly energetic since that would give out a wrong signal as well.

I started with the beat. I didn't want it to be too in your face but it still needed to have a driving force. I took the human heart beat and built the basic beat around it. Over this I built a mix of dub and downtempo drums that rolls forward slowly but steadily. I made the drums sound quite dark to give them a more dramatic tone.

I didn't want to use your traditional Japan clichés so I steered away from your normal goto Japan instruments: the shakuhachi and the koto. Instead I focused on getting the feel of Japan into a set of modern pads. I gave them a lot of air to contrast the dark tones of the drums. I also layered some electric guitar licks into them.

The final touch I added was the sound of a geiger counter ticking. For me this was the most dramatic part of the sound of this project. The geiger counter is such a regocnizable that it really drives home things. It's a simple touch which doesn't underline the tragedies too much.