composition

Sound Design Inspiriration #22

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FILM

‘SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today’

Really looking forward to watching this!

COMPOSITION

I can’t say I’ve kept up with all the interesting content being produced by the Composer Magazine, but I did manage to catch this great talk through the progression of creating a cue for the final episode of The Queen’s Gambit, by Carlos Rafael Rivera. Looking at the thematic material he’d produced, how he tied it together in this sequence and a look into his orchestration process.

GEAR

This may have been around for a while but looks like a good way of integrating Bluetooth into a Dante Network. The AUDINATE Dante AVIO Bluetooth® I/O Adapter

SOUND EFFECTS

Hiss and Roar have been busy with a few new libraries.

Whenever I’ve played with Hydrophones, it’s been a bit hit and miss whether you get something useful. This set of Mud Pool recordings sound promising, lots of movement and ‘underwatery’ worlds to play with.

Hiss and Roar have also begun selling IR samples, starting with this Glass Object Impulse Response library. An interesitng way to place your sounds into another world.

Sound Design Inspiration #20

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PODCASTS & VIDEO INTERVIEWS

As we all descended into isolation part of my daily routine starts with a walk and so podcasts inevitably have become invaluable! So I just wanted to share a few I’ve found interesting/inspiring/useful

Firstly the Soundworks Collection podcasts for anyone who hasn’t come across them before, not only do they create Podcasts with insights into industry practices, specific sound/music challenges and processes of films, tv shows, games and advertisements, but also create incredible video interviews with some of the leading pros in the industry. Here’s a couple of podcasts worth diving into:

The Sound of Uncut Gems

Next is Score: The Podcast, which has just begun its 3rd season interviewing Danny Elfman. Robert Kraft and Kenny Holmes host interviews with some of the top film/tv Composers and come across some fantastic routes into the industry, processes of working on all sorts of types of projects and more. Definitely worth having a listen, here’s a couple I’ve had a play through:

Pinar Toprak

Orchestral composition | Side project | Fate Approaching

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A couple of years ago I decided to teach myself as much as I could about MIDI orchestration and dive into Composition a little more. After years of trying to understand more about it I went through the Evenant trailer music course which actually simplified a lot of things for me and mostly taught me to concentrate on specific elements at different moments in the Compositional process. Eventually I had a few tracks published through Chroma Music specifically tailored towards Trailer Music, namley the track ‘Wonder’:

Since then I started writing some tracks for EOS, some of which ended up moving away from the very Trailer heavy style and into a more melodic, listenable set of tracks which we decided would be better out of the trailer world and so I’m slowly releasing them into the wild over the next 6 months as a challege in mixing for myself and producing my own work. The first of which is this track, Fate Approaching, available on Itunes, Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp.

Sound Design Inspiration #13

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PODCAST

Here’s a podcast with Steven Price, Oscar winning Composer talking a about his work on the Our Planet series of films, a little on Gravity and working with Edgar Wright.

SOUND EFFECTS

Some interesting new sounds from Hiss and Roar, continuing to bring new sounds to the table in imaginative ways!

INTERVIEW

Came across this insightful article from the Wall Street Journal, an interview with Qianbaihui Yang, a Sound Editor at Skywalker Sound. Interesting to hear about her journey through the different roles of Film Sound and the exciting world of recordings, creating and editing Sound for film. Check it out here

Photo: Cayce Clifford for The Wall Street Journal

Photo: Cayce Clifford for The Wall Street Journal

Sound Design Inspiration #11

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COMPOSER

Sherri Chung is a Composer based in LA, Soundiron have done a pretty in depth interview with her about the process she goes through on a project and her career trajectory to date.

SOUND DESIGN

The School of Sound is an annual, multi day event with lots of industry leading speakers in the world of Sound Design and Music. Generally focused on Film and TV. They’ve started uploading talks by speakers from the last 11 years worth of events and this is the first 9 speakers. Just starting to listen through them and it’s an incredible resource!

http://www.schoolofsound.co.uk/sos/audio-and-video-archives/

VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS

I’ve tried to steer clear of buying new samples recently and try and use what I have. I went through a stage of purchasing, but not listening properly to what I’d bought. Having said that this new piano from Native Instruments based around Nils Frahm’s sound, does sound lovely and certainly looks well sampled!

INTERVIEW

I’ve not seen the film yet, but here is a very in depth interview with the sound team behind Alita: Battle Angel.

https://bit.ly/2CJYk8a

The Unreturning Trailer

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A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of combining two styles work - Theatre and Trailers - and worked on a short score and Sound Design for Frantic Assembly’s The Unreturning trailer.

The show is Directed by Neil Bettles, Designed by Andrzej Goulding, Lighting Designed by Zoe Spurr and Costume Designed by Lily Arnold, an awesome team! I Sound Designed the show and it’s now on a UK tour having just finished at it’s third venue the Liverpool Everyman picking up some great responses. Next up is the Traverse in Edinburgh. It arrives in London in January as part of the second half of the tour, so catch it there if you can. The show is ace and I can’t recommend it enough!

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Here’s the trailer made by Tea Films and a version of the audio seperatly for anyone interested. I used Spitfire Audio’s Chamber Strings, a bit of Omnisphere for the simple synths and percussion and Cinesample’s Tina Guo Acoustic Cello, one of the most playable VST’s I’ve tried!


Sound Design Inspiration #6

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INTERVIEW

Mary Anne Hobbs interviewed Ryuichi Sakamoto on BBC Radio 6. Talking about how he began his life in Music and his process. "Spontinety is my faith"...

APPLE

Apple have released an updated Macbook Pro which is able to house 32gb RAM and up to 4tb SSD drive... it comes at a steep price though!

The more samples I've been using recently, the more RAM I've been needing. I'm hoping that one day it will be the portable version of a nMac Pro I've been waiting for, but for now its a movement in the right direction

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/12/apple-launches-2018-macbook-pro-lineup/

SOUND DESIGN

One of the shows I Sound Designed which transfered over the NY to St Ann's Warehouse is now available to watch online as part of Donmar Warehouse's initiative to get these shows out to a wider audience. This was the third piece in a Trilogy of Shakespeare plays led by an all female cast of women around the concept of a female prison. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0696f99/the-tempest

INTERVIEW

Jason Graves, the award-winning composer of the Dead Space soundtracks showing his studio and some interesting instruments he's used to create the unique sound of Dead Space...