A Pro Score Using Free Samples??? - Andrew Huang SPACETIME

hi there my name's christian henson i'm a media composer which means i write music for a variety of media from stroppy teenagers to belgian detectives pharaohs misogynistic car enthusiasts monsters robots monsters in space and i particularly like space so when andrew huang reached out to me to write some music for this thing called space time i said yeah the thing is i'm also the founder of a company called spitfire audio and we make samples and as a consequence i just use spitfire samples because if there's something we haven't made and i need it then we kind of go and make it it's an amazing train set to play with but i didn't want to come across on this amazing opportunity as some kind of huckster selling our samples so i thought to myself is it possible to score triple a material with sounds that you get for free off the internet because the last thing i want kind of people starting out on their adventures in media composition is that they have to splash the cache in order to create something that is interesting inspiring but also sounds broadcast quality so you'll see here that i've used a majority of labs instruments which is basically an endless series of free plugins that spitfire audio makes and they tend to be of the quite unusual variety so i wanted to put these to the test to see could i just create a score a kind of epic science fiction score using these plugins and a couple of other bits from elsewhere and not only that i took it a step further and only used the host effects that you get within logic i mean i even use the chroma reverb so what i want to do today is just take you through track by track how i approached this video i guess the first thing that's interesting about it is i we didn't get a brief so it was very much a carte blanche do what you do on this video and it's so strange after kind of 25 nearly 30 years of being a media composer it's kind of unnerving to not have a brief the important thing with media composition is is that primarily we're here to help tell a story as opposed to just create some musical sound effects so i first looked at the video and worked out what we were working on and what story there was to be told so let's just have a look at it you'll see how daunting it is when you receive a movie like this with absolutely nothing on it great so to me this looks like and feels like a multi-episodic drama series and it's probably a thriller so it's not a space comedy and it doesn't feel like a a horror um i think that the story that's being told is obviously rocket state takes off we meet andrew he's exiting orbit and it feels to me very much like he's going on a mission with some unexpected circumstances so for me it's marking the excitement of going into space and then i feel something that i've always loved having worked on alien isolation and studied the the the scores of the early alien franchise i think what ridley scott was introduced the idea of remoteness and the vacuum of space and how helpless you can feel through music so for me i really wanted to mark this point start very terrestrial here and then go you know really mark the vacuum of space and then go into a a kind of a world that we we understand less but the thing i really also wanted to do is there's there's a sense of loneliness it feels like andrew is on his own and it's like he's the only man who can do this mission and i wanted to provide a degree of um motivation so i felt that a female voice a calling would be a good texture to use and then wanting to get a sense of the epicness of the journey we're about to go on here and then into the intrigue and i guess over the logo i also wanted to get a manomic a kind of a motif that you associate something very simple that you associate with space-time so the first thing i always do when looking at a video is get a sense of a tempo that's going to work for it now i'm not one of those composers who believes in hitting all the cuts i once worked with a quite a well-known editor we're working on an opening sequence for a movie i was doing and he said christian i've noticed that you've hit all the cuts and i was like yeah that's good good boy pat on the pat on the head and he said why i said well because that's that's what you do isn't it and he went but why because he's just making my edit look really lumpy like every cut boom boom like that so for me it's all about getting a sense of of tempo that's kind of working to the pace and the cutting pace of the video but i'm not going to do any clever mathematics to hit every cut and stuff i just find it totally unnecessary so i settled on quite something quite slow 75. you can see we're we're kind of hitting stuff it's not frame accurate and what i'm doing is i'm spotting the kind of subdivisions of various things that are happening on camera here so we've got kind of quite an interesting rhythm not that i'm going to match up doors all opening in time and that's kind of a double time back so all feels because i guess it's got kind of quite an operatic feel this piece um everything feels like it's working in a rhythmic harmony there we go so that it would just be trial and error i probably would have kind of sat there clicking a long time with it found the bpm that was close to that speed and then just shifted it around 74 76 which feels better and settled on 75. the first thing i wanted to do because it feels like a franchise to me was to create a a sound uh that you'd hear from like if you're making a cup of tea in the kitchen you'd hear that come on on the telly and you go it's space time it's the space time sound so i opened up our labs trumpet fields which is kind of trumpet textures that i actually recorded for this um series i did called tutankhamun actually made a film about shooting the score of that it's a fly on the wall film of of me filming the orchestra in london which is well worth catching up with if you haven't linked above and basically it's like a almost like a fan fair space time is beginning i'll take you through what i did there in a minute and as i said i wanted to feel terrestrial at that point now the problem with this sequence is that we don't have any temp effects in there i have a feeling that you are probably not going to hear much of the music at this point that it's going to be ten night and we have left off all of that kind of stuff um so i wasn't i just wanted to basically use very broad brush strokes nothing too intricate and detailed so i pulled up which are recorded in a small studio so i've sent them to a bus reverb which is um the chroma here which i also did some eq on because it had a kind of a 2k thing that i wasn't that happy with i'm not not a fan of that river but i really wanted to stick my guns just use the host plug-ins so it's acceptable to me now i thought that's kind of it's a bit just lumpen it's just an accented very straight rhythm so basically what i did is copy that region twice and basically muted half of the notes on that one and the other half on that one and added a bit of delay so this is the first one [Music] there's a real strong sense of panning there so what i did on this one is i use this gain utility to swap left and right so we get a stereophonic effect the next thing i wanted to play with as well is this sense of of time ticking and there's a great technique called bartok pits which is pizzicato's usually where they pluck the note violinists and cellists with with their fingers bartok pits is where they just rotate their bow and tap the string with the bow if you're going to use this technique it's always good to call ahead to your string player or string players because it can damage the bow and bows are very very very valuable so often it's bring your practice bows or a spare bow or indeed provide them with a pencil to do it with it doesn't damage the instrument at all but just the the impact um can hurt the bow so this is the sound of the bartok pits and then i just wanted to give it a sense of epicness with some drums so what i did was just got up the labs drum kit [Music] just your basic drum kit and i tuned it down massively so we could use the kick drum added massive amounts of reverb and then i didn't like all the flab so just filtered off the top and combine that with a slightly brighter one for the very first hit a bit of a heartbeat there there's another interesting sound that i used here is opia a collection of sounds from people who collaborate with olaf ronald's and this is a tape warp again with a bit of reverb on i wanted to lay on the manomic just plant a little seed of this this memorable motif at the beginning of the piece we've also got a mod piano on top of that which is a piano put through my modular rig behind me [Music] [Laughter] and to give a real sense of other worldliness i actually got some whale song that we sampled in collaboration i believe with the national theatre in london so interesting organic sounding pads i would say that this whale song is verging on sound design you've got to be careful about creating sound effects that are non-tonal because you're part of a crew as a media composer you don't want to step on their toes but it's kind of interesting i also use the whale song to create a pad which i then automated into a a pulse with a tremolo plug-in so let's just have a little look at that automation there so this is volume and this is the tremolo automation here so you'll see the depth will increase i'm very much a believer in using automation as a means of expressing so you just don't have these flat and still sounds that they are dynamic and that's the beauty of media music is you can turn on the sixpence and you have the picture to support it and you have that power of dynamism things can rapidly change so automation is an absolutely crucial part of what i do whether that be door automation i for your effects and your your volume that kind of stuff or indeed midi automation and i'll show you what i mean by that now we've got a selection of strings and you'll see here if i open this up that there's a combination of both expression and what is in fact modulation data so the expression is here this just controls the the volume great for balancing that ensemble against the rest of your mix and then we've got modulation which is actually a timbral difference so we record the samples quietly and then loud you'd hear the vibrato increases so when working with strings because they're able to change the volume whilst they're playing a note it's really important to use expression to make strings emote but also sound realistic as opposed to which sounds at best dead at worst like a synth so we've got this part here [Applause] and then what i thought i'd do was use these physical frozen strings which was some samples that i developed for a tv series that i didn't end up working on actually they felt that my approach was a little bit scandy to use their words so i thought that i'd give away the samples that i'd made for that series because i think that they've got quite a an interesting sound so we've got the violins or cellos [Music] it doesn't sound like a synth but there's something there's an alien quality to it that i quite like and then we had some sultasto violin sultasto is where they play on the neck and the further up on the neck that you go the less musical tone the violin actually makes all the cello instead of the moon it becomes like a and then it just becomes a sound so i instructed them to play on the edge of where the tone is is audible and in a technique that i call super soul testos check this out [Music] now you don't have to know about how these sounds weren't made or anything like that it just so happens that some of these labs instruments are sounds that i've made so i hope it's interesting to give you a little bit of uh background of what how they were actually made and then we've got uh supersoul testo but in the violins again i don't know why i've marked it as cello this is really eerie [Music] and then a harmonic cello if you've ever played or seen fake harmonics on a guitar they do it's exactly the same technique on a cello they they rest their finger a fourth above the actual note but just just rest it on the strings and it creates an upper harmonic that's two octaves above the actual note and it's great on cellos and basses did that on the violins as well let's listen to that all together but without the harmonics first and then with the harmonic [Music] so it's just like a fine layer of icing on the top just a little bit of sparkle the last thing i did with these strings is a trick that a lot of hollywood composers employ and that is to put a sine wave an octave under the bases of the the strings and for this i just use the logic host sampler when you load it up it actually loads [Music] with a sine wave in it and it's a good sine wave and just rolled off the attack a bit and and the release so it wasn't too d too clicky so let's listen first without the sine wave and then with [Music] just gives a bit of extra weight and warmth so i'm enjoying these two acts of the score here so we've got our motivating aspect with the the voice and the menomic and then we've got something that's very kind of descriptive here for okay epic journey we're going on i wanted to get us from a to b or rather b to c if you like with something that gave a sense also of it being a thriller and for that i used this one of my favorite sounds i booked four cellists into a studio and actually got them to play in the control room mic them all up and put them into a series of fender tweed amps with a massive pedal board and i sat in the in the live room with the pedalboard with all of these amps doing stuff live whilst they played these extraordinary techniques and i really love the sound of this so let's have a listen to this [Music] slide and i think that's something that's you know it's really worth remembering with media composition and it's it's very difficult to know how heavy they go with the sound effects but there's a tradition in this country to go very heavy very very layered i don't know if the same is in in canada it tends to be a little bit more sparse in america so you have much more dynamism with the sound effects and stuff but um for me i'm very used to having very very layered landscapes to try and creep out above of um so that's why i'm not marking any of these lights going off i'm not doing any rhythm there because i know there might be a clunk clank clank possibly i don't know and whether we're going to have like generator sounds all of that kind of stuff so i'm really sticking to the music i'm not trying to create music sound effects i'm not trying to enhance the imagery it's it's more the emotional sense of what the what the video is doing so we've covered exciting kind of string beginning we've got this reflective piano piece that we'll repeat we've got the epicness of the journey we're about to go on we've got the bar top pits coming back there this sense of time we've got this sense of weirdness with the whales i just wanted to also give this sense of motivation of possibly a female entity a calling if you will so i employed the amazing talents of homo schmitz who's one of the spitfire composers and she's also a wonderful singer [Laughter] you'll see that i've not applied anything to that specific track she recorded it beautifully sang it beautifully i'm not going to fiddle with it i'm not going to process it love the purity of that and then what i did is just did some tracking she gave me a bunch of different takes and i thought well actually why don't i just try tracking them so we've got all the way to the left all the way to the right and one in the middle let's have a listen to that together [Music] i think it's interesting by having them all together it gives a slightly childlike choir sound to it that i think is very interesting and inspired me to actually use some choral elements to help this sense of a potential momentous journey that andrew is going on so what i did is we've recorded a choir with eric whitaker for spitfire if you don't know his music check it out it's just one of the best choral composers out there today very accessible and just we'll move you to tears and we did some free samples for labs so let's just start with that i think it was just a drone at [Music] first and you'll see just like oh there's a little drop out there naughty you'll see just like the strings i'm also using these expression and modulation controllers as well and then i just doubled up what the strings were doing with the choir so up to now i've been using mainly labs but i also used this choir patch from a thing called piano book which something else i'm involved with which is a a community of composers sharing sounds for free with each other check it out pianobook.co.uk and we did this nuts thing this christmas we got about about 900 people sang whether it was into iphones or their home studio or in empty swimming pools all around the world about 900 people sent in just single notes and we mix them all together to create this like super epic choir there's more male users of piano book than female so there's definitely a male bent to those voices the one thing i was a bit wary of though was how rich that sounds and whilst it's great again to be tempted to enhance the weight of this vehicle strafing past again with the sound effects there's a big old engine there um i felt that there would probably be a huge amount of rumble from the sound effects team and rumble and crackle and whilst you can't hear anything in space i think there usually is that artistic license so i uh lent back off the bottom end of the strings in the choir of this epic moment and you'll see indeed that actually i've automated in the volume here of the the bigger fatter sounding strings to respond to the vehicle not to try and compete with the inevitable rumble that the sound effects department would put onto [Music] it [Music] and we've got our motif at the end something i also wanted to do as i mentioned before is really accentuate the leaving of something terrestrial and full of oxygen to being in a very lonesome vacuum so what i did was i got a piano note and put absolutely masses of reverb on that bounced it down and just reversed it here i also time stretched it a bit as well so you'll hear there's a few kind of artifacts so what's going on there well again my trusty tremolo trick so we've got our depth here as we did before but also i've automated the time so no depth in there you can see the rates changing but there's no depth there at all so it's just a flat kind of audio image until we hit there we go and it there's no reverb on it or anything so it just stops dead did something similar with this symbol here and basically again just took a symbol from the drum kit the labs drum kit bounced it reversed it and then so i've stemmed stuff into a variety of different buses not really for stemming purposes but more for for mixing so you see i've got my rom which stands for rest of mix pianos choir and then the two reverbs and in fact if you look here we've actually got up some some bus tracks here and have automated them so everything other than the pianos and choir is going into the rest of mix and i just wanted to do what i call a kill switch so i've got a phaser which is mixed in zero and then [Music] volume automation which creates a crescendo there and if there's any uh delays or reverbs it cuts them dead we've also got a i want to get the sense of oxygen being sucked out so we've also got a high pass filter [Music] and a little bit of bit crusher as well and then finally it was kind of interesting because i was just listening to the decay of the very end [Music] and i just heard that sound i thought that's really interesting so i bounced down just the whole track the the very end there and then simply looped it to again give this assist this sense of time and a ticking clock that time is maybe not on andrew's side again really weird for me to work briefly because i'm having to make make up the story or understand the context it's not unheard of not to receive a brief but very unusual again this is a low pass filter again into space and that's basically it at the very end i tend to add a little standard bit of um eq that i like i find using samples you tend to get a build up around this area which can be quite bit dentist drill in the ears type stuff so i put a tiny smile in there a bit of gentle compression and some sausage making loudness here even though the sausage making wars are over when i run this down just show that all working together and this is just really to make it work as well as possible on a variety of different speakers i think um keeping stuff nice and bright for media is really important because again what i've been mentioning here a lot is the the sound effects aren't on and if there's one thing that room atmos or dialogue will do with with your music sitting behind it is suck all the top end out and what happens when you suck all the top end out is all the reverb appears to disappear which is why this will be a lot sploshier a lot wetter than than your standard kind of pop or dance track but i guess the important thing here is a sense of flowing narrative that is dynamic using your expression controllers to turn and change with the pictures in front of us and to give a sense of purpose reason behind why he's going on this journey but also a sense of maybe not all is what it seems so i'm going to play this down and thanks as always for watching till the end if you have any questions for me put them in the comments down below and i will endeavor to answer them i think what's really interesting about this was that so often i'll be pitching for something against other composers and this wasn't a pitch scenario it was just an opportunity to see how different composers would approach it that video from andrews linked above by the way and it was just kind of fun because we weren't in competition it was just fun to see how differently but also how similar certain aspects of our composition were especially considering we weren't given a brief and as for using free sounds and free plugins to create this piece well something i've always said on my vlog is if you starve yourself of resources you become more resourceful and what i felt myself doing was just being more creative with the sounds that i had available to me and i'm really pleased with the results and very proud that these the quality of sounds that composers have access to for free now doesn't mean that your financial situation puts you in any lesser opportunity as someone else starting out on their journey so all of the things that i've used today are linked in the video description down below and this channel is all about me sharing my experience of media composition with the 30 years of doing it behind me so if you haven't subscribed uh please do and ding that bell to be notified the next time i put a video up one of those for andrew thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to work on this and here's my entry [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 91,257

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: 7Q_MgT92erw

Length: 36min 50sec (2210 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021