Just wanted to share
Got the chance to do the soundtrack for a short film about a journey of surfing river waves. A friend of a friend did the film
I used a drone recording as starting point of my eurorack which I already sold 2 years ago.
Always good to hit record, you never know if you pick it up again The main module here was MI clouds.
The main synth line that enters in the second half of the video is my beloved Analog four. The bassline is Uhe Repro 1.
The rest is filled with small samples and loops from output arcade.
Really great. would you be comfortable running down the process of writing to picture a bit? Curious to hear what kind of workflow is involved for scoring something like this.
I got the film already cut like this finished version but only with voice and no sound at all. But the film maker gave me little instructions or guidelines as subtitles. He couldn’t express it in musical terms though, he just wrote something like: "slow calm down, fade out, the sound should almost disappear, sudden impact, emotions, movement, fade out again, main theme, emotion etc etc…
First I let the film run over and over and just played many of old recording of a folder with gear demos I made while watching the pictures. Mainly modular drony stuff, or digitone ambient and picked some favorites where the mood seemed to fit.
I showed him 3 demos, and he picked one. Then I took the film to ableton, imported the modular drone and just worked from picture to picture, from instruction to instruction and added little stuff, completely free from the timeline in ableton, just guided by the pace of the pictures changing. When something should happen, or emotions should appear, I included little samples, or sound fx. Then I quickly worked out a theme with the A4. It’s a patch I usually use to imitate Aphex SAW 2 like pad sounds.
I kept it it very ambient and minimalistic cause I felt the film was very calm and hypnotic. But the film maker wanted more emotions, he felt more excitement and tension, which was cool to have his input and clear instructions what he wanted. So I added the eighth notes bassline that gets louder and opens the cutoff more and more, and I added two drumloops that get increasingly louder and choral voices and stuff that feel emotional and movie like…
That’s about it Most work was finding sounds that fit, and the volume automations. I automated each single stem and it was a lot about fading in fading out, cut the sounds, getting increasingly louder, creating tension etc.
A sound designer added little sound effects later and did the mixing of my track and the spoken voice.
Anyway, hope that was not too detailed.
I did something like that for the first time, and loved it. I would really like to do it more often. It was really great fun.
I once did the soundtrack for a little snowboard movie, but that was all hip hop boom bap beats from me, that I mixed together. So totally different, but also fun.
The main module here was MI clouds.
this seemed to fit you perfectly.