Scoring with Synths

hello everybody today we're going to be looking at working with synthesizers electronic music and things like that for writing for film and television i'm in the middle of a project at the moment uh where everything's pretty much synthetic and it's really good fun and i'm aware that on this channel a lot of the time we look at orchestral samples and orchestral this and of course the other but it doesn't matter because it's all music and actually more and more there's this sort of blend not just of orchestral and electronic but of sound design of sound effects the world is a fascinating sonic place filled with possibilities and today we're going to explore some of them right after i've got my breakfast [Music] i love working with electronic instruments with synthesizers sound design plug-ins all those kind of things it's it's just so liberating and because there's so much possibility um but the basic approach uh if you're working on a film television game project when you're scoring with uh electronic instruments is exactly the same as if you were using casual ones or um whatever else it's you need you know you need an approach you need a template um and it's just you're not limiting yourself to just orchestral instruments but the function of the music in the picture and everything else is exactly the same so you've got the same skills you just need a different sound set different palette of sounds okay let's go back to the studio and find out what a lovely morning that was a great breakfast it was super you're not fooled are you you've noticed that i've had a haircut and i'm wearing a different shirt and it's a different day yes okay okay but nonetheless the topic is the same um actually i'm the reason i'm redoing this because i did it the other day and i just wrote a piece of editor on me it wasn't really scoring and i thought actually what you deserve is to it's the combination of how you go about doing the um the uh scoring to picture thing at the same time as you know not using you know any old electronic instruments uh synthesizers a bit of sound design all that kind of thing um so what we got here is we got a little bit of film uh it's a trailer for a shark film i may have used this before i mean it'll do fine because it's it's got a kind of little structure to it so i can show you how okay so what i'm going to try and show you is that actually the whole process of scoring using electronic instruments and sound design is no different to using orchestral stuff a lot of people think oh film scoring equals um you know people with violins and of course it's not and if you listen to almost anything out there at the moment you'll see um you know either hybrid using the orchestral stuff plus the electronic and sound design and things like that or just the electronic and sound design or this kind of crossover between what is sound effects and what is score um so there's lots of interesting stuff going on so if you're an electronic musician and you've always thought well there's film scoring thing's not really for me yes it is listen up here we go okay um so what we got uh moody looking sharks crash zoom out thousands of them thousands of sharks that looks like flora i know it's florida very nice underwater stuff black tip reef shark i think um all right and here's the guy and he's out doing some survey finding out what's happened to all the missing sharks and so what we want is to build this in intensity so we've got it's a slight mystery sort of thing so look it's this is a sort of it's like a murder mystery where did the sharks go okay and um where did the sharks go that it works better with sunglasses doesn't it i need that plug-in on my voice anyway um so we're going to start building this up we're going to build up the excitement build up the tension a bit of foreboding bit of mystery and see how we get on so the first thing we're going to do uh this okay what i think i've defaulted when i oh 135 bpm there you go 135 is shark tempo no don't get sued okay um right so let's press on with this um so i've got my little keyboard i've got controllers which we can be using lots of got stuff going on up there it's all going to be great first thing we need to do is come up with a sort of basic kind of low party sort of thing um i'm going to use quite a lot of june i'll tell you okay let me just talk you through i'm going to use a couple of bits of technology here and we're going to use june quite a lot because i liked you and it's great from synapse audio um it's a fantastic sounding synth um but i'm also going to try and throw in some retro bits and we're going to use a brand new thing called emulator 2 from uvi uh emulator 2 was the world when i when i was a young musician in the 80s it was what everybody oh nobody could begin to imagine affording these things called fair lights and sing claviers and things which were literally six figures hundreds of thousands of pounds but the emulator it was just tantalizingly out of reach because it was still eye-wateringly expensive but not as expensive the others and i thought wow this sampler sounds incredible it sounds so lifelike it doesn't it doesn't sound so lifelike at all but it does sound very cool and so now people are coming back to these um these instruments and going hey this is an interesting sound and particularly in the context of things like this where we're trying to do sort of you know electronic scoring um we don't what we're trying to avoid here is um anything which sounds like um you know a traditional orchestral instrument so here we have emulation2 plus and what you get is all the factory sounds from the drumulator emulator one emulator to an emulator three that would have cost unbelievable amounts of money in the 1980s but we're not in the 80s anymore thank god anyway um but look no i mean in all seriousness if you are into the sort of cool retro sounds uh i really like the emulator one sounds because they are the least realistic okay so i'll give you an example and and this is why it's useful here's pizzicato so it sort of sounds like pizzagato but not so if you're looking for an alternative which is sort of quite a cool sound which started out as something and it's all got that slightly gritty how much what was an emulator was it 8-bit or 12-bit it definitely wasn't 16 as you can hear loud and clear so yeah and then you can sort of come forward in time with the emanation two uh and some of these uh famous hits i know i think famous hits were [Laughter] i like it i think it's quite cool anyway what we're going to be going for is um i want a classic orchestral here i want a classic orchestral head so we're going to go for something like okay so it's sound it's more of a piece of sound design than it is a sort of a sort of a musical event type thing but anyway that's what we're gonna go with right let's let's let's get on with uh doing that what i'm gonna okay i'll do it now i'm gonna make turn it into audio it's not going there it's going somewhere else um but we're gonna put we're gonna render it out and we're gonna use that at an appropriate moment with lots of reverb on it and some delay and stuff like that so let me just leave him to i'm going to park that idea for one moment but we're going to use our emulator friend a bit but let's start with june and get him up her up right we're going to build a patch this is dune so do we want a triangle wave no i'm going to go for a pulse wave one of them um i'm gonna have now the one thing june does well is it has layers up multiple oscillators and it sounds enormous right so let's now take the edge off the attack spread it out a bit [Music] now i can maybe shall i add a bit of lfo to this okay so we take low frequency oscillator one and it's going to control the filter [Music] now let's find low frequency oscillator 1 where has it gone i want it where's my where's my lfo gone all these different synths oh here we go should we have right maybe that's the wrong shape [Music] i'm not averse to that [Music] just we're looking for a little bit of movement in it example on hold that's better okay so and that i'm now going to attach a controller to the amount button down there so good so now i can make it nothing there you go perfectly nice synth patch built in seconds same patch as shock bass right and we're going to add some of the fateful reverbs and things like that to that but okay right now meanwhile back meanwhile back with the picture so we're going to start with a um and then we're just it's a bit loud at the moment isn't it we're gonna then just ease in our what shall i write this in g okay here we go okay start with no none of that one [Music] [Music] so i'm just using this as a pedal really it's not going to be this boring at the end trust me [Music] okay that'll do even i've got bored now render it out so now we've got something basic going on at the bottom and we're going to have something else going on on the top so we turn that off uh i'm not going to bring this in yet i mean did i play this in g that doesn't matter okay so let me go back to my uvi workstation [Music] okay right let's just do a little bit of work here where's me okay sends i'm gonna send it to the reverb lots of it um and i'm going to put some delay on it as well i think probably am i going to put some delay on it tell me what i am tempted to go for i'm going to to go the full algorithmic and have super long [Music] algorithic reverb you can just whack it up you can have 20 second reverb [Music] whoa okay that might sound a bit extreme because it is okay no problem there [Music] um when it bounced out it didn't do what i thought it was going to do which is a bit of a shame so i have to go back to that it didn't bring it in it didn't record the bit i thought it was going to record okay come on baby you can do it [Music] where are we going to use these hits i like these stylized hits i think they're great and um with that super long reverb on about there yeah midway through bar six he says hitting the hitting is hitting the keyboard did anything happen [Music] [Music] [Music] no that's fine because we're gonna chop these up wow you gotta love that river so so to make sure it bounces the whole thing i'm gonna turn add some tail on then we're gonna go ree ender and then we can move it around and make it fit okay so that is such a cool sound um okay so the other thing i might do uh yeah this is not a bad idea um is copy it on there and reverse it [Music] i'm not quite so clean on that yet um i was gonna put maybe something else needs to go on there maybe i need a bit of a choppy thing going on there um let's put some trance gate on it i use transcript all the time as regular viewers of the channel will know and it's really cool it comes from killer hearts i think [Music] that works i like that i'm just going to move it so it lines up with the hits at the top and then we're in business this is a bit rough and ready but you get the gist right we need another layer we need another layer of um something um arpeggiated um so i'm going back to my friend june um because he has a great arpeggiator uh let's build another one am i going to take a existing sound or start from scratch go on guys start from scratch all right give it a bit of breath [Music] let's make it a bit of a [Music] spread that's what you like right now let's design a arpeggiator [Music] [Music] [Music] okay patch done that'll do so that patch as shark that's it [Music] now it's not completely done because what we're going to use [Music] we're going to go bonkers with the delays here and somebody was whinging the other day that i didn't use the built-in delay i mean it's perfectly all right um and we're gonna use i tend to like where is it dotted courses [Music] and once we've done that we now need to send it to the bonkers reverb [Music] okay let's see how that works [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah that's as far as we're going um i think that's working all right and what it needs now though is something oh don't tell me it didn't record oh i did thank you retro [Music] right get ready to render how's it going 50 50. slight slight okay i'm going to keep the sunglasses out on my forehead because i might need them um what okay well you speak come on pick up the pace guys it's getting a bit dull oh no it's not it's fascinating okay right look so we built a patch we got this going it's gonna [Music] [Music] why am i not hearing anything uh oh maybe i froze the wrong one i did i praised the wrong one there we go render render render could do some percussion in this now that's what i'm thinking [Music] [Laughter] okay so why don't we kick up okay let's say there's more which needs to come in here then we're gonna put some we're gonna put some uh percussion in some form of beat um so i'm gonna put some layers of audio i'm then going to put in i don't know what are we going to do simple little kick something like that maybe to start with um [Music] shall we try and find a more characterful kick this is splice it's an online service which you subscribe for the month and [Music] um [Music] how many do you want [Music] so we goes it's a simple oppo 808 kick [Music] that's the one well that'll do that'll help it's also in the same key which is never a bad thing right snap to grid [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so both of those are actually upper a minor third so i'm going to transpose them because the thing with 808 kicks is they are tonal so uh if you just stick them in they won't be in tune so we're not going to correct the time [Music] now i want a top loop so we go back here find the top loop and what we got uh how about something vaguely ethnic [Music] i like that that's it you see just been look i've got 500 credits left i just like that particular sound i thought that was quite fun so i'm going to pull it in [Music] this is the second half i like of it [Music] what i could do i could take it line it up like that then [Music] no no just note [Music] not sure i'm not sure about that idea we'll see um let's get back to finding a decent top loop uh take the kicks off that's why i was gonna add nice as mr oliver is let's move on [Music] how about what happens if you do i think such a loaded word but uh okay let's try world i'm looking for something non-english really no not that [Music] do you know a bit busy but i quite like it i might [Music] okay 146 bpm get it in time um what i might do is shall we chop it up into let's chop it up where's my scissors gone scissors scissors hold down alt click chops it into whatever the um [Music] just taking these some of these big hits out [Music] do i know what i'm doing today i'm not absolutely sure um but i quite like some of this stuff [Music] is this working i'm not sure i'm not at all sure i'm trying to find a way of doing something which is so rhythmic and pulsy without it sounding cliche it's not working it's not working at all goodbye you are the weakest link simpler simpler simpler so just go for let's find some no no not that [Music] it wasn't what i was looking for and it's a lot slower but [Music] okay that might work [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay uh this is starting to work don't always get their first time but we get there eventually [Music] [Music] 126. that's it line it up let's go [Music] oh that wasn't the one i thought i was putting in complete idiot guy um it's fiddly isn't it it is fiddly it's taking a while okay that's let's see how that works [Music] okay that's going to work now we've got to do some work on it though because it's currently sounding a bit well not very good so [Music] it sounds alright [Music] but it needs an eq [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay that's not bad [Music] now a certain amount of stuff is not completely lining up look it's all over the shop the timing of this um so some of these things and the reason is of course i've got i was using a triangle wave to um to modulate the sound so it's not going to fit [Music] okay we're getting there now um right sorry this is taking a bit longer than anticipation let's go back to the beginning um let's [Music] [Laughter] so [Music] right well there's all kinds of things going on which need to be sorted out that needs to come in more slowly um why is it not automating properly and let's have a look i know why oh no i don't know why i was gonna say because probably there was nothing at the beginning that should be the thing which opens up and it's not opening up properly let's try one more time bouncing it out because that's irritating oh it's done it now [Music] [Music] okay we're getting there beginning with everybody okay so that's got to come down quite a lot because it's a bit on the uh shouty side at the moment and it's got to come in at the right place all that's in the wrong place so we're going to move it back so it doesn't matter that it's not on the downbeat of the bar to be absolutely honest [Music] i just need to line up with these hits actually that it's just too much bottom end going on there and so where are we going to bring in these where are we going to bring in this hat we're going to bring them in on that hit there [Music] [Music] [Music] are we nearly done are we nearly done yet are we nearly done yet i don't know i mean is this only going already i don't know i'm just getting there it's not it's not a world classic is it but um okay what's wrong with it let's have a look it needs more man to start okay um that start is weak it needs something else in there let's go back to my friend e2 because i think the good old emulator too may come to the rescue here if we find the right sound okay so let me find it right okay so what are we going to go for percussions conga love menu conga love menu [Music] [Music] okay i think metallic cloud [Music] okay what happens if i put that in see what i mean they don't sound realistic but they sound great [Music] bounce you saw that coming didn't you and [Music] we're going to epically drag it out and then we're going to dupe it and run one of them backwards and the other one will go over there and this can come in slowly here relax [Music] [Music] like that um we could put that onto a sampler track and and play it [Music] yep [Music] so [Music] okay i need i need something other than when it first comes in i need something other than just that drone what am i going to go for i could go with put another one of those in just want a simple uh little bubbly thing so we go for that's not simple that's not bad is that gonna be all right straight out the pack it's gonna i really actually i'm not sure it's gonna work with i need simple i need simple this is not simple [Music] second okay shall we see what that sounds like [Music] [Music] [Music] that's the one [Music] [Music] that sounds that started well and then turned into a mess okay right i'm going to tidy this up and then we're going to say it's done see in a minute um we're done and um what i've done i've done a couple of other bits i've just i've done a little bit of tweaking a little tiny bit of tweaking um i put in a couple more hits uh which tidy things up up a bit i've played with the um synced picture which frankly it wasn't really that good but i wasn't really i was concentrating on the music and not concentrating on the picture which is a really silly thing to do anyway it's a bit better than it was it's still not perfect but it's a bit better than it was um we got all kinds of bits and pieces going on i've uh with this uh top loop and the kick down there i've uh i've put some sidechain compression on it so that uh there we go so this now uh is all uh the top loop is sidetrain compressed and that all works i hope um anyway it sounds all right i think it sounds all right look um are we ready for a performance here i should i should say actually one other thing there was on the original there was voiceover explaining what this was all about it's not just my going for it so you gotta imagine a man in a world where sharks anyway look so it's sort of fine so let's have a little play through and see what you think of it in a world where thousands of sharks inhabit the inner waters of florida achieving mass of life the black checkmate then one mysterious day they all disappeared and this man in a plane is looking for them one or two remain but under the water these dark mysterious creatures are hell bent on destruction flitting about playing in the water eating fish spinning and stuff and even worse shark on shark action what more do you want maybe a man with a drone going up to see if he can see the sharks they catch them they put little tanks on them to find out where these mysterious sharks have gone the 10 000 missing sharks okay that's sort of my friend bernard doesn't speak like that oh dear i'm sorry bernard anyway look um i hope you've enjoyed this little trip into the world of electronica and you found it useful um if you like this kind of thing there's free stuff to download if you look underneath this in the comments and you can always subscribe to the channel you'd be welcome to do that um so i'm going to leave you with you know a play out of the final movie uh and we'll be back very soon with yet more stuff so stay tuned see you very soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 27,146

Rating: 4.8865051 out of 5

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education, music education, electronic scoring, electronic music, uvi workstation, dune 3 vst, splice, emulator 2+, emulator from UVI, UVI emulator, Dune 3, synapse audio dune 3, dune 3 tutorial

Id: HfZ6oazD2v0

Length: 49min 38sec (2978 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021