Chase

The elevator doors slide open. The first thing you see is that they're carrying guns. You don't wait to see more but turn and bolt back inside the room and towards the window...

Chase.

This one's set into the same story line as "Sunburn". This delivers even more of an adrenaline punch than the previous installation as I've upped the tempo and intensity quite a bit.

...The balcony. A quick look around. You turn and jump just as the door of the room is kicked in. The railing of another balcony, swing up, break the window, dive in. Bullets behind you...

I wanted this track to be more relentless in pace and sound. The beat drives on with force and only breaks for short periods before the release at the end. There's no time to breathe, no quiet moments of peace here. The beat makes sure your feet won't stop. Because if they do, you're dead.

...Yank the door open. Quick look around the hallway. Staircase to the right. You dash to it. Sounds from above, men rushing downward. Jump the first railing, a few steps along the wall, then another jump...

I also made the overall sound a lot harder. The sounds are sharper and more broken. I didn't want this to be as ambient as Sunburn, but rather be an in your face kind of track. The sounds will assault you and probably mangle your ears and nose a bit, but they're there for that reason. Because they are harsh. Because they will kick you. Because if they don't, you are going to die.

...You land and roll to an open door. A window there, the roof of a building visible there. It's far. But hopefully not too far. Your feet move, you gather speed. Jump. The window breaks. An eternity. Then the roof. You roll, and sprint for cover. Shooting behind you, bullets miss. A door. You open it, duck inside.

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar X1

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 4
• FutureAudioWorkshop Circle
• Cakewalk RXP
• Synapse Audio Junglist
• u-he Tyrell Nexus 6
• HG Fortune Serenity
• HG Fortune Altair 4
• NI Massive
• Sample Logic Cinematic Guitars
• FM Future Loops

Effects:

• Vienna Suite
• Illformed Glitch 1.3
• Kjaerhus Classic Master Limiter
• Kjaerhus Classic Delay
• u-he Zebrify
• Variety of Sound Ferric TDS

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

The Terror: Ice bound - finished

Just finished mixing the intro track. I felt it did not need any of the compositional changes I was pondering. So without further ado, here it is:

The Terror - Ice bound

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 7
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers, instruments and effects:

• NI Kontakt4
• Sonar PerfectSpace
• Timeworks Equalizer
• Waves L3 Multimaximizer

Libraries and impulses:

• VSL Horizon Series Chamber Strings
• VSL Horizon Series FX Percussion
• Soniccouture Bowed Gamelan
• Cinesamples Drums of War
• Cinematique Instruments Bowed Psaltery
• Sample Logic Vuvuzela
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion
• Kirk Hunter Symphony Orchestra Diamond
• Cinematic Strings Monster Staccatos
• Project SAM Brass
• NI Kontakt 4 Library

• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion impulses 

Yeah, I used Sample Logic's Vuvuzela library. Can you spot this much hated instrument there?

The Terror: The beast attacks

I started work on the main action cue of this project. This is where we get the Tuunbaq, the beast that hunts the stranded men, inside the ship. This is when they are hunted in their temporary home. This is where many of them die. It will be a brutal track without respite, without mercy. There are lot of drums and less melodies. It's more about panic and haste than coordinated action. This is where they scramble to survive.

The Terror: Ice bound

Just finished the first draft of the intro track of "The Terror". It sounds very cool even before mixing. There are still some things I have to think about though. Mainly the ending and the length of the middle section. Both are good, but I'm thinking that the middle could be a little longer still. So going to do some intensive listening for the next few hours. Of and the name of the first track is:

Ice Bound

The Terror: First notes and bars

I began work on "The Terror" album right away. Since it's one of my favorite stories I really didn't need to search far for inspiration. The intro track is about halfway done and it conveys very well the main elements of the story: isolation and freezing cold. Both of them ooze out of the novel. You'll never look at snow the same way after reading the novel. I'm hoping to convey that into the music as well. If the intro track had images to go with it they would contain a Luc Besson style moving camera that floats over the ice and snow towards two stranded ships.

New spec project

Chipping in with a simple cover picture post of a new project I'm starting (yeah, I know, maybe I should finish some of these spec projects for a change). I'll be doing some tracks inspired by a fantastic book by Dan Simmons called:

The Terror

After the fall: Prypiat suite

"After the fall" is a video game inspired apocalyptic story. The first part (which is actually the third track, writing these isn't going to happen in sequence) of it is:

Prypiat suite

Prypiat is an abandoned city originally built close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and inhabited by the plant's workers and their families. It was transformed into a ghost town after the, umm, minor malfunction at the plant in 1986. It has already been featured in a few games, but since this is simply a concept production I feel that it's a good place to use.

As the name suggest this is a suite of cues, in other words this is a collection ideas what might happen in the Prypiat chapter of the fictional game. The different cues that make up this suite are:

1. 00:00 - Out of quarantine
2. 01:03 - Abandoned
3. 01:55 - Where am I?
4. 04:09 - Death
   
5. 05:44 - Strange footprints
   
6. 06:21 - Run!
   
7. 07:48 - Leaving Prypiat
   

I was originally inspired to write this kind of music after playing Resident Evil 4 and being a long time fan of post-apocalyptic scifi I felt like writing music for a fictional game in the vain of RE4 set in the future after the world of man has fallen. So it's the vein of survival horror. In this chapter the main character is mainly unarmed and running and hiding and just plain surviving.

In this chapter the main character also has his first contact with the horrifying creatures preying in this cold world. He doesn't yet stand a change in fighting them so he has to keep quick on his feet if he wants to make it out alive. The chapter ends with him leaving Prypiat.

I started out to write music that is less thematic and more dramatic and ambient. I started with several NI Absynths at the core of the sound for this. From them I got the spacey desolate whining pads the play through out most of the track. They are the lungs of this song as they breath in and out of the listener consciousness. They provide the track with a welcome feeling of alienation and unfamiliarity, which is a must for such subjects.

If the pads were the lungs then the beating heart are the percussions. For most of the track there is a steady presence of massive low booming drums that keep the track in motion. These sounds were provided by Project SAM True Strike 2, Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion and NI Absynth. To contrast them I used the Epic Dohls from Tonehammer to give the track a feeling of suddenness as they provided a shard rushing sound to mix. With them I could rush at the listener if I needed to.

A big part of the sound is the female vocals provided by Tonehammer Forgotten Voices: Francesca library. The vocals are a key element at bringing a human side to a track filled with alien noises and on rushing sounds. They brought warmth and emotion. They also increased the feeling of alienation from as they brought an element of home into the dark and hollow soul of the track.

An interesting fact about this track is that for once I didn't spend more than an hour tweaking the mix. It had all come quite nicely together in the composing phase, so the end mixing consisted of some equalizing and level checking. Wish every project was as easy to mix.

In the end this kind of sound is something I want to explore more and will do so as I compose the other parts of "After the fall" concept album.

Gear I used for these tracks:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar 7
  
• Sony SoundForge 7
  

Samplers, instruments and effects:

• NI Kontakt 4
  
• NI Absynth 5
  
• NI FM8
• NI Battery 3
• PSP Nitro
• NI Guitar Rig 4 Pro
• UWI Workstation
• Timeworks Equalizer

Libraries:

• Tonehammer Epic Dohl
• Tonehammer Forgotten Voices: Francesca
  
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion
  
• Project SAM True Strike 2
• Project SAM Brass
• NI Battery 3 Library
• NI Kontant 4 Library
  
• Cinematique Instruments Bowed Psaltery
• Soniccouture Music Box
• MOTU Ethno Instrument
• Vienna Horizon Series FX Percussion
  

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.