IndieGoGo campaign

This one's for all you gearheads out there. Strezov Sampling is currently running a campaing to crowdfund the sequel to their Storm Choir library (which is an excellent tool any creator of epic music). This is a library I've used in basically all my Epic North Music tracks. I've done my part to fund this, now it's your turn...

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/storm-choir-2

Until The Sun Rises

Strezov Sampling are a maker of excellent sounding libraries. One day I noticed that they we're holding a composing contest in which they tasked you to compose music to the picture on the left there. I liked the idea and decided to participate. My contribution to the contest is titled:

Until The Sun Rises

I downloaded the picture and started to look at it. I was drawn to the shooting little lights that clearly are going back to the tree as the sun rises over the horizon. To me they seemed to be going for shelter. What were they? Pixies, fairies, spirits of the tree? Is it possible they can't survive in the light and need the dark? What do they do? Are they playing, hunting, gathering? These questions came to mind and from here I began to work.

Flute. The first thing I dug up was the flute. And not one of the ethnic flutes I love so much, but your plain old ordinary flute. For me this required flute. It needed air, it needed to be light. Once I had the flute in it became clear that the creatures were playing. They were spirits of the night and their only worry was being caught by the sun.

And that basically the story I wanted to tell with this track. It spans the night from dusk till dawn. I has the creatures waking up and coming out, then they play. Finally the sun begins to rise and they hurry back to their safe home among the foliage before the sun kills them.

And the sun gets pretty close to it too. I wanted to end this in tension. And it does. The orchestra rises to a crescendo of chaos as the sun rises higher and it is doubtful if all the creatures make it back.

For me this was a nice departure from the epic landscapes of Epic North Music. It was really fun to just create something as airy as this. And hopefully this gives me renewed energy to tackle more of those heart stopping, epic action tracks again... Hint hint.

Gear I used for this track:

DAWs and editors:

• Cakewalk Sonar X1

Samplers and instruments:

• NI Kontakt 4
• NI Absynth5
• NI Massive
• Vienna Instrument Special Edition
• Spitfire Audio Albion
• Spitfire Audio Loegria
• Spitfire Audio Solo Strings
• Spitfire Audio Dulcimer
• Strezov Sampling Storm Choir
• Cinematique Instruments Upright Piano
• Cinematique Instruments Complex Environs Gecko Free
• Sonivox Flying Hand Percussion
• Sonokinetic Delphi
• MOTU Etno Instrument 2
• Soniccouture Pan Drum

Effects:

• Vienna Suite
• Minimal System Instruments Master Compressor
• Minimal System Instruments Master Limiter
• Variety of Sound Ferric TDS
• Sonar LP-64 Multiband

Highland Wars blog

Paul is creating music for Skyrock Games' new feature "Highland Wars". He's also sharing his creation process in their development blog. Go read it. Now.

http://www.highlandwars.com/2013/05/the-music-of-highland-wars.html

Epic North Music

This year started of pretty fast. I had had plans to be up and running with my "Sumeria" album, but it still standing and waiting for a release later this year. But the reason behind this tardiness is simple: we have been hard at work on something possibly very massive.

Paul and I we're drawn into a project not seen in Finland before. That project is called Epic North Music. In short it is an effort to create the most epic film advertising music ever imagined. And it is done with a fully finnish crew. We released our first album "Rising Storm" stacked with 19 earth shattering tracks on 20th of May and the reception has been phenominal!

Trailer Music World has already featured two tracks from our album; one from Tapsa and one from Paul. Both of the have gathered a good deal of listens during the first days so needless to say that we are really excited about the future. Now It's Time for the awesome guys at Time Films to go hard to work and get this project out into the big world!

I leave you with the two tracks featured on Trailer Music World:

Getting up to speed with, well, a lot of things

Where the heck has this year gone? Today I feel like it's still the beginning of the year, but looking at the calendar reveals that it's almost December. And I've been very absent in my writings here. So I'll make a short summary of what has happened this year.

I'll start with a personal note to some how try to explain my absent minded writing. This has been a big year in regards to personal goings about. I started the year with my grandmothers's funeral. Then I started to plan my wedding which was in the summer. Then when autumn came we bought a new house into which I am just now starting to settle in. So with these things I have been rather busy. But onto Reveltone stuff.

I've posted a couple things here about my big mystery project which I said was going to be released this fall. Well, it got pushed back first to the end of November then finally to February 2013.

In Clear Sight has progressed to the point that the score is mixed (thank you Paul for the excellent work) and is being mastered by Erno. The first master is waiting on my desk for me to listen (which I will do tonight). So the movie is good shape.

I've been working on a few ideas lately. One of them is the idea of rebooting the "Sumeria" concept album which I didn't have much time to finish. I've re-concepted it and will start working on it shortly.

Also next week I'll have an interesting new track coming along. So stay tuned for more...

Living the quiet life

Yeah. Right.

Times have definitely not been quiet. I've been busy with two projects lately. The first one is the mystery project I've blogged and even shown you a video clip about. But I won't talk about that today and I'll focus on the other major thing taking up my time currently. I'm writing the score for a movie called "In Clear Sight".

"In Clear Sight" is a roughly 60 minute film set in Cold War Germany directed by Atso Pärnanen. It follows two soldiers on a surveillance mission of a Soviet military exercise. So, this one is right up my alley. We started talking about the music with ideas from Jerry Goldsmith's Rambo and the later addition by Brian Tyler. Also mentioned were Basil Poledouris' The Hunt for Red October and the Inception score by Hans Zimmer. From these stemmed several ideas we thought would be necessary for the score we were about to create.

The main theme of the score needed to be more human than military, so we chose to not have too many marching rhythms there. I've written a few different orchestrations of the theme, the main one having an acoustic guitar in the background and a duet of a trumpet and a french horn as the lead. The basic version of the theme is fairly simple, but it still has the potential to be really grand and big.

One of the big things in the film is the tension that is there as our heroes are operating behind enemy lines and spying on their activity. This we've chosen to create with synthetic sounds so we can create a slightly surreal feeling in it.

There is also a need for some action music in this film. The path we've chosen for the action music is more primal than your standard everyday Hollywood action score. It will be raw and big. Ok, maybe there will be some melody in there as well...

So, this is what I'm working on right now. I'll post some clips as soon as we're satisfied with the score.

27th of January

A simple video blog this time. Just check it out:

Breaking new ground

For the last few weeks I and Teemu have been working on something really new to us. Well, the material we've been writing isn't actually new but the reason for it is. We've been commissioned to write performance music for a live performance pony quadrille. This is something neither of us has done before. Actually neither of us has been that close to anything resembling a horse (ok, ok, they're ponies) before and we know basically nothing of such shows. It's not the first (nor will it probably be our last) leap into unknown territories and we're really getting a crash course in horse shows. At least no one can say we wouldn't live up to our motto: "If you need music we'll create it."

The music will be in the vein of Avatar, since that is the theme of the show.

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?