I Tried Composing Like Hans Zimmer For 7 Days

over the past few years i've managed to get a decent little cell going there but i've never got to the point like musically speaking where i felt confident enough to make something from scratch that was my own i just thought i wasn't good enough to do it but i'm going to force myself to change that today i've set myself this challenge of making something in the style of han zimmer but not a hanzo song i can't just copy people like in the past i'm going to do a hanzo style song within the next seven days i don't know how long it's going to be i guess that depends like how well it's going it could be 20 seconds long but hopefully it'll be a bit longer and a bit more complex at the moment i really like don't know much but i know that han zimmer is famous for writing in the key of d so i've learned the notes and chords that go along with that which is a good place to start so i'll definitely be doing it in the key of d i know that um it's all going to be sort of in the box stuff uh using ableton i've got a few plugins uh the spitfire audio ones i can't afford they're like 700 pound libraries and up but i've just got some like the cheap 30 quid originals like i've got the cinematic percussion the intimate strings and i'm also going to be using just labs and i've also got the dark star one by spitfire audio and i think that should give me a good basis to do it because they are decent little plug-ins for the price and obviously labs is free so i'm gonna see what i can do with these things i'll give you a little test of what they sound like now but the challenge starts now because by the end of next weekend i've gotta have something ready and whether it's good or bad you're gonna hear it at the end of this video so there's a really specific sort of han zimmer style i wanna go for and it's like the pit scene in dark knight rises and also the docking scene in interstellar where the character has got to take a risky move but it's a really necessary move and there's a sort of build up to a climax and then it all kind of explodes and and then sort of dies down afterwards so that's the sort of thing i'm going for i'm thinking i want it to be pretty like dark knight ostinato bass where there's a repeating pattern and i'm hoping i'll be able to do a repeating pattern that somehow builds up tension to the main bit at the end i'm not sure how i'm going to do that right now but that's the plan i'm thinking maybe kind of low strings at the bottom end of the mix and then sort of a violin omit something high pitched like that a repeating austenite pattern with that so that's the plan so far and then if we just go into the plug-ins here i'll just do a quick little show of these so first of all these um well here's the precaution it sounds pretty cool you can get a sort of idea of the kind of you know underlying drum beat that i want it won't be like that i don't imagine but i'm just kind of spitballing ideas at the moment and it's sounding pretty cool so far to me and the main bit for me is the strings and if we just give this a little listen these sound really cool i think for the price [Music] i can't hear what i'm playing by the way so i just pressed anything then uh so that's the strings and they'll be the main part and that's the thing i'm always interested in cinematic music is the strings rather than the other things as you can hear here we've got this dark style one this will just add a bit of atmosphere i'm hoping i'm not sure what i'll do with that there's loads of cool sounds in there so i'll find some fun and then the brass here will be coming from the bbc symphony orchestra this is like the uh free version of it though but there's still some pretty cool like horn sounds and stuff like that as you can see it's got all sorts of things and then a very important part is the piano and with that we're going to be using good old labs which is a free plugin so that's what i'm going to be working with i'm still pretty close on what i'm going to exactly go for but well how i'm going to achieve it i mean but i was watching a lot of videos last night and stuff and i feel like i've learned a lot about specifically the brass side of things with hanziman and i'm hoping i can put it into practice but it's going to be difficult but i better get i better get back to work on it or else the performance at the end is going to be awful so i better get back to work the first few days of the challenge were actually a struggle because i was doing a lot of research and note taking but most of it was just too advanced for my level so i had to take it back to basics and just try and enjoy the process and just experiment with sounds until i found something that sounded like ganz zimmer so started this challenge on the weekend and it's now the next friday so i am running out of time and i'm going to show you how it's coming along so there's not that much length on it so as we stand i'm basically up to about this point where you can see almost bang on one minute i'm not sure how much longer it's gonna go on for but it's kind of coming up to that climax bit at this point so probably two minutes at most it'll be but i'm glad it's not a 20-second track i'm just going to go over a few of the sounds so it started off as kind of like a dark knight rises sound it was sounding way too much like it to the point where it was like a rip-off so i brought in sort of an interstellar vibe as well so hopefully it's kind of like a nice merge of the two and this is what i mean by the interstellar sound so hopefully it will sound like that to your ears as well as mine so i don't want to give away too much of the track until the end obviously but i'm going to go through a few little bits here so i do like how i've got that in early because you don't get this sort of idea that's dark night straight away that will come later when the strings come in so for the strings it comes in here and this is what i mean by the dark knight because it sounds the exact same chord progression [Music] i was i was running out of time really and had to come up with some sort of chord progression so i had to go really basic with that but i'm hoping sort of melodically it will be able to make up for it and make it a bit more interesting and less cliche but that's where we're at with the strings and there's going to be lots more strings scattered in around there which you'll hear in the final one there's some there and then in terms of the interstellar vibe it comes in sort of here if you've seen install you'll know in no time precaution when that ticking sound comes in and that like ticking clock sound to kind of build tension and these this string patch sounds like it here i'm not sure if it's even meant to sound like that but it does and it sounds really cool [Music] that definitely sounds like interstellar to me and no time for caution like docking scene and also for the interstellar thing i've got this little not so great ostinato thing but i'm hoping it'll sound okay when mixed with the other things and to go with that i've got an octave up the same pattern i'm not sure how much you'll be able to hear that in the final mix but it's kind of a cool sound i guess and in terms of percussion so it's pretty simple as of right now but i'm liking how it's coming along so what i've ended up doing is going for this sort of these drum rolls that build up and one thing i figured out to do which i'm not sure if this is a han zimmer thing but it's something i've picked up along the way is i'm using these drum rolls as little transitions so as it reaches the peak then more things will come in like extra strings or brass or something like that they sound pretty cool to me and i've also got a little bit of when the sort of interstellar thing i was talking about comes in we've got these little swells here [Music] kind of in a different way but they sound amazing to me like i was saying the issue for me is that i'm kind of running out of time on it so i don't want it to come to a climax and then be really like a letdown when it was going well but i've gotta stick to the timer on this otherwise i'll just be working on it forever and we'll just spend too much time on it but that's how it's coming along so far i finally have a general idea of like where i want to take it it's took a long time but i've learnt so much along the way and i'm really glad i've done this no matter how it turns out and even if it's not the most like original piece in the end i've learned a lot from this process so i'm really glad that i've gone ahead with this and next time you hear from me the whole thing will be done i'll just be giving some final thoughts before playing the actual thing i'm excited for it and i'm excited to play it for you so let's see how it goes i better get back to work on this now okay so it's been a few days now and i'm completely finished with the project i'd probably give it an 8 out of 10 in terms of what i was hoping to achieve so i'm quite happy with it but there is a few areas that i'm not so happy with mainly the fact that i kind of ran out of time in terms of getting to that sort of big climax i was hoping to achieve and give it that real hands in the feel but it still sounds okay it just fizzles out a bit at the end and also timing because certain plugins will have like different attacks and stuff so it was kind of sounding out of time certain bits but hopefully it's still enjoyable to listen to and also the mixing process like trying to get sound levels okay and not overly like loud at certain points but overall i've got to say i'm happy with it for a first attempt to actually making anything but let me know what you think of it when you listen to it now if you do like it give the video a like and thanks for watching let's give it a listen [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Adam Gregory

Views: 5,367

Keywords: cinematic music, orchestral music, spitfire audio, cinematic percussion

Id: FCt8GcUV3es

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021