I've Got A New Job

if i was to cite one thing that makes my job as a media composer possible that would be the humble project template something i have honed over the decades i think the japanese call it kaizen constant gradual improvements in this video i'm about to start a big new job and talk you through how i build these templates why i think they're important and why i think it's important to create a new template for every show that you undertake because you may be stuck with these things for years right let's take it to the shed so for those of you who haven't seen any of my template tutorials there are three reasons i use templates one is to restrict your choices so that you're not trawling through terabytes and terabytes of sounds that you may have on your drives the second in so doing you create a cohesive sound and way of working stroke composing for a project instead of kind of going i need to make this scary i'll just grab a sound from that drive over there you're going well this is what i've created as my template my virtual band if you will and so what i need to do is find a compositional way of achieving that amount of scariness so instead of being kind of lazy and just reaching for different sonics what you're doing is working with the band that you've got the third and most vital part of templates is simply it makes it possible to do what we do as media composers so this is a project that's going to be a minimum of 24 half-hour episodes i imagine there's going to be a lot of cues so i will be duplicating my working environment over not tens not hundreds but potentially thousands of iterations and in so doing if there are any gripes or things that i have to do that are repetitive that add on time this will have a profound effect on the amount of time i've got to actually do my best work it also is a nose-to-tail way of maintaining a hyper detailed sense of consistency so that if anything goes wrong it becomes very easy to troubleshoot so let's have a look here and you'll see at the top here we have pro tools my main door my sequencer if you will is logic and this handles each individual cue so one logic file per cue a moment of music a start to a finish whether that be a stab or an entire action sequence or a part of an action sequence pro tools is the all seeing eye sauron if you will this is the one that handles the arc of the entire show and indeed i may decide to do multiple shows on the same timeline and simply go from hour one for show one hour two for show two so that i can cross reference different cues as i get further on through the blocks i will develop a shorthand a quick way of working and i want to cross-reference cues from all over the season it doesn't have to just be the all-seeing arc for this particular episode it can because it can handle multiple quick times be the all-seeing eye for the entire season of 24 episodes i think worth trying out anyway so let's just focus in on how i've prepared this logic template every job i do i start from scratch new template with a hope yeah there'll be some old favorites in there but it's it's about building different environments to work in so you're not going back to your your old tricks every time what's more i find that you will get little corruptions that will creep into logic files that then get multiplied and corrupted further throughout the running of a series so i like to just go back to a blank screen clear of any bugs or little quirks and start from scratch but more importantly each show's workflow is different whether you're working on computer games or films on tv materials you have to provide different departments will differ so the way that you root everything up set everything up will change so we've got our main edit page here and you'll see that my tracks are organized into logic stacks now i don't want to focus in too much on the logic-centric stuff these ideas should apply to whatever daw you're working in okay so let's open the string stacks now you may ask two questions why do you put individual articulations onto individual tracks and don't just key switch this is because if you have a look here we've got strings long are in their own stack and strings short are in their own stack the reason for this is each stack has to contain its own reverb but also short samples are more reverberant than long samples many reasons for this which i've explained in previous videos so therefore the amount of reverbs that you send or receive from them should differ what i've done in this instance is actually reattenuate the return of the reverb so the reverb still being entertained nice signal to noise ratio but it's just ducked back from the return so it doesn't get too swampy a little less reverb than for the shorts and maybe a little bit more reverb for our effects and trams here so we're back to zero there and let's have a look at the loops again we've reattenuated that back so it just doesn't get too mushy now if i was using a mix engineer i would output all of these stacks as my multi-tracks that is is as deep as i think i'd like to go otherwise what you find yourself doing is breaking your mix in order for them to spend 75 just remaking what you had before improving on it and i've just done a feature film where this was the depth of the multi-tracks and jake jackson was very happy with that but because i'm currently thinking that i'm not going to be outputting all of these multis i've got the verbs in each stack if i was going to output the multis i would probably do it in a slightly different way or place the verbs in a slightly different part of the signal chain so they weren't automatically printed that's the one thing i would take off for a mix engineer so we've got winds long and i've got a mixture of symphonics and then we've got some big old album one which is great for just sketching stuff out with and then i'm a massive fan of albion neo i love tundra which is this kind of cold library that we've got but i just find it a bit big whereas neo is not only a great chamber ensembles library it's also got some of those very tender tundra e techniques but it's just a little bit more defined where you can hear each individual instrument so i've got winds and then i've got some winds off albion solstice as well and again because they're not recorded in the same room i want independent control of the reverbs might need to over compensate in solstice for the wins recorded in the hall of air studios we've got brass and this is really everything i'm likely to use you'll see that we've got legatos longs and then atu legato's longs and if there is a cuivre i'll use those then we've got our brass short and stuff like multi-tongues really helpful alongside rips there's going to be lots of action cues and again folk brass long short but in separate stems because i may need to compensate and reattenuate the reverb levels accordingly i've got folk bellows lots of drones i've got shorts plucks and again most this is albin solstice and guitars the strings i haven't named where they're coming from unless they're coming from somewhere other than our chamber strings so again i mainly focus on ensembles and then use legatos to pick out individual lines this just keeps the template to a manageable level and again you'll see that we've got the shorts and all of those different types of shorts there and again this may grow as i build up stuff and then again some solstice stuff i think that this is going to be okay i can always just adjust the send levels so you see bus 27 in bus 27 and i'm using fat filter pro r concert hall vienna on everything so it's a unified reverb even if there are multiple instances of it now why aren't i using my outboard well this is all to do with stemming and this is why we have to have individual reverbs for individual well i'm using it for individual stacks but certainly for each individual stems you don't want your string reverb coming out of your brass reverb in your stems i'll get to the stems in a minute and the reason why i prefer fabfilter it doesn't require a dongle and the reason why i've organized the whole of this template in this manner with everything loading into each logic cue is because i want to be able to take this anywhere what i will do is once i'm really happy with the template is i will load onto a portable drive all of the libraries that i'm using in this template so that i can instantly switch to my laptop or indeed say one of the machines down at spitfire in london that doesn't mean to say that i will be writing all over the world but it's just so that if something needs to be fixed quick and i am traveling i can attend to my clients needs so we've got string short arms and trams and then motions loops and stuff like that in fact i made some really cool dedicated samples with a 24 piece band for this project that are being chopped up for me i've then got folk perk and loops the reason why i've stuck these on separate stacks is it's highly likely that i'm going to want to produce these kind of things possibly on the stack header i can add in compressor low-pass filters that kind of stuff to give it a real produce sound but i hate over-compressing really big drums like the darwin percussion and the easter island stuff it just sounds terrible when you absolutely smash it with compression well i'm really excited about combining the solstice loops with charlie klaus's hammers loops as well so we've got a huge perk we've got our more traditional uh untuned perk like temple blocks wood block untuned metal is basically stuff like mock trees tan tan some symbols a lot of people don't realize that albion one in its legacy folder has uh the biggest symbol ensemble we've ever recorded i believe it's four players and it's got that really hyped sound then tuned percussion is just timpani and i've got uh the spitfire audio percussion timpani and hans zimmer timpani which is three players mallets including the nursery in albion solstice and then the more traditional ones and again if i really want to up the amount of reverb i'll adjust the send value and i think that that's going to work nicely then since all albion solstice they're kind of for me i made these presets and they're really on the zeitgeist i hope belief that's that now a lot of you ask well surely how does your machine handle that well as you can see nothing is on nothing is loaded in and it's very very unlikely that i'm going to load everything in at any given point but i imagine with the slightly more kind of demanding action sequences i expect to do my laptop will probably grunt i'll have to freeze tracks this that and the other but theoretically on this unit this should work just fine this is a very powerful machine indeed if you have a look there it's got 28 2.5 gigahertz cores and 384 gigabytes and what am i currently running at i'm running at 128 buffer sizes nice and responsive i may need to up that if it gets a little bit streaming bus problems but we'll see so finally we've got soloists just made a provision for some audio going there probably won't be recording here be recording around the corner in castle sound and there's a provision for that there we're monitoring through our auxiliaries so these are a live auxiliary so you'll see that all of the stacks bust to different stems and you'll see these woodwinds all bust to the same stem so that we've just got a wind stem terminating there brass bellows plucks strings perk mallets synth stem soloist stem and that hopefully one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten stems is a i'd say around the average number of stems that they'll want in the dub hopefully that'll give them the separation they need they may not like me having all of the percussion summed together i'd like to keep it together because i find it's quite easy to just disrupt how percussion interlinks with itself so i'm hoping that'll be enough but again what may happen is deliver the first show they request broader stems i'll have to adjust all of the cues for that episode and then resave a new template for the show and then you'll see that everything is outputting into the last bus that logic has bus 256 and there you go is a sum that's made inside logic and that's what's fundamentally important is the sum must be a sun not something created from a different set of uh auxiliaries or anything like that and this is why we can't use stuff like bus compression and we've got to be careful about the amount that we push this sum you know basically if i'm seeing this create cherries what's happening is logic will be limiting it compressing it so it doesn't clip horrifically and then what will then happen is the mix engineer at the other end is not going to be able to recreate the compression or limiting or whatever happens at the brick wall end of logic when he switches off the sun and actually starts monitoring from stems so these are all on a group but for some reason groups don't seem to be working on this iteration of logic so let's just do that so when i've finished a cue what i do is go into record with a duplicate set of not auxiliaries but tracks and then i monitor through that so again it's just literally a duplication of the auxiliaries but their tracks stems all the way to summon you'll notice these are numbered and that's absolutely fundamental for our pro tools sessions so my workflow would be to do that there i'll leave it in the logic file and then i'll also export to the pro tools file and just leave it as the region name you'll see that that will all be maintained there export that there i will also at some point organize my finder window so they're all ergonomically make me happy and so what we simply do then is pull those into here and i haven't yet created these tracks so this would be me completing my uh pro tools file so we've got dialog effects temp and the video track i have the frame switched off because the redraws can be a little bit cumbersome for the system and then i will simply put those in there those are nicely created for me and then what i'm going to do is duplicate those tracks the way that we've numbered it we've got the sum at the top and that's the one we really want the engineers to first listen to so what i'm going to do is mute all of these another great reason for using pro tools is our sauron and there's a video linked above about why i use it as this overseeing i is that when i then work on the next queue i can review that queue or maybe this queue and the next queue may overlap so i'll be listening to the sum of that whilst i maybe write the next bit and how do i synchronize well we just do it by ic bus one i'd like to do a bit of mtc and then again with synchronization we've got our incoming time code which is correct and in it goes and the reason we have two sets of these stems and sums is so that we can check a board if things are overlapping say for example in action sequences if you're a logic user and you're interested in checking out this template i've made a stripped back version without the contacts or the reverb so you can get loads of prompts um that way you can look at the routing and all of that kind of stuff if you have any comments on the way i've created this template and ways in which i could improve it please put them in the comments down below alongside any things that you do with your templates thanks as always for watching one of those always much appreciated do subscribe if you haven't done already and ding that bell to be notified the next time i put a video up see you soon and check out how i've done the routing little bastards actually said bumblebee they're fine aren't they

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 22,127

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: crA9ooMmazw

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021