Writing Icelandic Style Music with Ólafur Arnalds Stratus

hey this is lucy from spitfire audio and today i'm going to be showing you my new piece which i've written using oliver arnold's stratus which is october's monthly highlight and have thrown in some icelandic church bells some sampled voices and some of oliver arnold's other spitfire libraries we'll be chatting along the way about the icelandic music scene some key ingredients for making bold and emotional soundtracks and some cool features hidden within stratus too i'll be breaking down the piece in terms of motion timbre and shape growing up i was always really obsessed with icelandic music siguras is like my go-to relaxation music and i'm crazy about bjork and when i was 18 i went to iceland on a sort of more personal pilgrimage i climbed some mountains bumped into some fairies and it was really cool to hear icelandic music within the context of iceland so i'm going to play my piece now which is called me fatten which was an area where i camped and iceland and saw the northern lights and listen out for the quite distinct timbres of stratus and also those church bells [Music] [Music] to [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so that was my piece me button and i really like watching the piece zoomed out because you really see the building blocks of the piece uh sort of like an icelandic skyline or yeah mountain range almost i think being bold is a kind of icelandic quality in terms of structure you hear that in pieces like remember by all the four arnolds where it takes around four minutes for the drums to kick in so when they do it it makes that moment really sweet and the music's sort of like passing clouds things just come and go when when they do and nothing's forced and stratus has that quality as well things really unfold in their own time and that's the magic of it so i guess quite a nice feature in this piece are these floating sections where the listener loses sense of time a bit and i've even actually changed the tempo in these areas too to really give that dreamy quality what's cool about stratus is you've got these driving loop rhythms and then you've got these pads which are really textural and these are really cool to alternate between which i've done a bit in the piece with my floating sections and but they also blend beautifully together so let me break some of these textures down for you so in this float area we're layering up loads of different warps so here's bouncer for you to have a listen [Music] [Applause] and i'm panning this from left to right as well to really help add some more movement as well if you don't know how to do that you can select a on your keyboard and then choose the type of automation you want to do volume or panning for instance on top of this i'm layering more dreamy textures so this is dusty tape which is a sort of detuned fluttery piano [Music] and here's choir fifths [Music] and i'm panning these sounds to different areas of the stereo field and then we've got these iconic bells that i mentioned so when i was in iceland um in accurary i heard this church bells ringing and i ran after them down the street to try and find the sound and it was super windy as it always seems to be in iceland and i'll play the original sound so you can hear what that was [Music] [Music] and i've changed those sounds slightly by adding some delay and reverb and cleaning them up a little so this is how they sound [Music] and in the context of the whole texture [Music] and you can hear i've also recorded uh some vocals actually my own voice which i'll isolate for you to hear [Music] [Applause] i always think it's cool if you can add a little something of your own uh into your piece and you'll also hear that i've used these chamber string evolutions of oliver arnold's which are really dynamic and give a lot of motion [Music] there's lovely motion in those strings and i think motion is a real key ingredient in oliver's music when i start getting into film music i noticed that his music was reference loads and temp tracks and i think there's a real cinematic quality there something really elemental and i suppose that the constant motion of the weather outside must be hugely influential i think the most important thing about creating satisfying motion is thinking about how the harmony and the melody are working with the rhythm if i play the melody of my piece you'll hear how the melody becomes pushed and syncopated and plays a bit with the listeners expectation [Music] so we've got rather than which is nice too but i think having it pushed um adds that element of intrigue to the melody i think if we're sustaining something it's really satisfying to change something underneath it so at the beginning i've got this matrix piano so this is the matrix in the interface and you can see that basically you've got different voices or different notes and you can assign different rhythms to those notes so for instance if i play a g [Music] but i could change the rhythm [Music] then i'm going to add another voice [Music] [Music] so it gives you loads and loads of possibilities to create these webs of sound so at the beginning i've got this inverted pedal which is like a pedal up high and which i'm using the matrix to create and then i'm adjusting the chords with the static piano [Music] [Music] so a little hidden gem within stratus is if you go in the advanced folder you can actually find the static piano under pianos so you've got center left and right which is a really useful little tool to have but the matrix of stratis create these instantly inspiring options for you to play with i think the satisfying thing with some of oliver's music is that he's not afraid to repeat things but he adds these subtle changes which really add light and shade to the music you can hear that in his theme and remember [Music] but he alternates this chord sequence a lot in the piece [Music] this a flattened version and this f minor there are similarities there with songs by bjork like unravel where she repeats the same chord progression throughout the whole song [Music] it's as if gravity keeps pulling us back to the same chord and her voice is the dynamic uh changing element it's quite a mesmerizing quality this repetition and we see that in oliver's music as well and in the stratus library and the matrices themselves they're quite addictive to use so another feature of motion in this piece is this heartbeat pulse which i've added in my final section i've taken the mondo bass which is a warped sound within the stratus library and i've bounced it in place so i've made it into an audio file and then i've cut it up and pitch shifted it down to create a sort of kick drum so this is the original sound and then this is what i've done to it by cutting it up and manipulating it a bit of a diy approach but it creates this sort of disco in the sky northern lights vibe [Music] oliver is a real soundsmith and he tends to focus on the sound itself rather than having loads of different voices take his piano for instance which has that rolled off high end and quite a percussive touch [Music] it really draws you in and oliver says something really cool in his video about making loom um which was sizes equal to characteristic not volume and he's certainly not afraid to be quiet in some of his tracks which i think is really bold and it also gives the image loads of space to breathe so rather than just adding layers i think it's a lot about balancing between different sections taking out certain things and this is what i've done actually between my different sections in my a section i've got these looped piano rhythms and strings and then when we get into the b section which builds up to the end of the piece we've got these more electronic warped sounds let me break some of those down so this is the synth matrix looped rhythms [Music] and then i'm punctuating those with some synth shorts i'll play those together so you can hear [Music] and then i'm creating a pulse using the sub bass patch which is in the warped sounds again and i'm actually using the extreme end of the register of the instrument to create this noise effect which is actually kind of percussive in quality [Music] i'm doing a similar thing with one of the looped matrices where i'm using the extreme end of the register and it creates a sort of percussive loop then as the section builds the live voices enter and the strings which adds this crispness to the texture i think it's really important to think about verticality in your music not just thinking about the horizontal the linear form of your piece but thinking about how you can create depth within the music by using texture [Music] [Music] and to thicken out the texture i've added some more warp sounds this is one i absolutely love uh called synth waves and this is evolution three [Music] it's such a warm scent sound it's almost human and actually i think that's what's really cool about stratus is you've got these really cool colder sounds and then these warmer sounds maybe even with icelandic music there's something there about icelandic music having warmer chord progressions using colder timbres who knows that's just a theory and then there's this patch which i've used quite a lot in the piece called moonship which reminds me of a cold whistling wind and i've used this at the very end of my piece along with this unresolved string chord to create this kind of tension and enigmatic quality at the end [Music] so within the warps you can adjust in real time some of these effects parameters by assigning them to something called the yoke so here i've got my delay as x and the feedback and i've got my delay activated here so i play a chord fee you'll see what i mean [Music] and what's more if you command click on the parameter you can further adjust it here which is really helpful so perhaps my piece is a bit too active to be truly icelandic and that's probably my scottish side coming out but you can see how adaptable stratus is as a tool and you can really make it your own but it's a great palette of really intimate sounds and instantly gratifying looped rhythms so thanks so much for tuning in if you liked the video hit like if you want to subscribe and see more hit subscribe and let us know your favorite sound in the comments below happy composing be bold you

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 7,058

Rating: 4.9243698 out of 5

Keywords: icelandic music 2021, icelandic music sigur ros, icelandic music pop, icelandic music folk, icelandic music traditional, film music channel, how to, film music orchestra, bjork, olafur arnalds, composer, composing music for beginners, composing music, spitfire audio, native instruments

Id: e-LDDzUm-yg

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021