New worlds of SONIC colour
The ‘pillars’ of writing music are long established, regardless of whether you see yourself as a music-forpicture composer, a songwriter, or a dance music producer. Irrespective of musical genre, if you write music, you’re reliant on melody, harmony and rhythm as the main columns to support your musical ideas, with instrumentation – which instruments you choose, whether electronic or acoustic in nature – coming next.
But as music technology has developed, a range of sounds which fall outside of these pillars have become increasingly popular. These are sounds with no obvious melody, no fixed harmonic centre and no defined sense of rhythm. They might be floating drones, which shimmer ethereally or menacingly, or ‘found sounds’; abstract recordings brought into a DAW to be honed, refined, looped, reversed or treated in some other way to become part of the musical landscape of your track. If a single name could be used to summarise all of the ways in which supporting, surrounding sounds might be incorporated we’d refer to them as texture; sounds rich in a certain spirit which nevertheless aren’t easily defined by traditional musical terminology.
Through the following pages, we’re going to explore texture in a number of ways. Most specifically, we’re going to see how we can use textural sounds to transition between different sections of pieces of music, whether we’re looking to build trailer or horror-soundtrack risers into specific hit points, or if we’re looking to move an club track onwards, through a few bars where our tracks are clearly heading through some kind of a musical tunnel or passageway, to emerge from the other side, richer for that journey. Modern soundtracks are awash with such textural sounds. They’re there, lurking behind the more traditional instruments, providing a broad, rich sonic canvas onto which other musical parts are painted. Great examples lie in the soundtracks of Hans Zimmer; listen to the floating sonic cloud which opens the Man Of Steel soundtrack, or listen to the peripheral sounds behind the organs and rhythms of Interstellar. Alternatively, wrap your ears around the lush opening titles theme for Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack for
The Revenant. Between those washed-out string chords, you’ll find hovering, dusty textures which seem to provide a heartbreaking backdrop to the narrative playing out onscreen from the very beginning. If you want more powerful examples of textural manipulation, look no further than the ‘turn it up to 11’ nature of many modern trailer tracks, where monster acoustic slams and bangs are supplemented with electronic sounds and treatments to build to staggering and speaker-melting conclusions.
So, through the following walkthroughs and in this month’s videos, we’re looking at finessing the textural sounds you might want to bring to your productions, seeking to make them an even better fit for your track. We’ll look at personalizing white noise risers for dance music tracks, build a trailer riser from violin recordings and even put microphones in front of a dishwasher to turn it into a rusty, deep space texture. With imagination and technical know-how, you can go a long way. know how to twist the sound of a household object into something which sounds like it could blow up the next Death Star, but you might well have no idea about where to even begin. Some sound designers like working with audio recordings of ‘real’ objects as starting points, while others favour electronic sounds, mining these for their sonic potential. Or there’s the even more common scenario where sound designers will combine both approaches, which is where the notion of ‘hybrid sound design’ starts; this term refers to blending acoustic and electronic sounds to offer up the best sounds from both worlds.
When you’re first starting out, the truth is that it almost doesn’t matter where you begin, so long as your launchpad is a sound that inspires you. Maybe you like the sound of a particular machine in your house, or your boiler makes a great, deep and satisfying noise when it fires up every morning. Maybe there’s an object in your house with an old mechanism which clanks or grates as it’s operated. Or maybe you like experimenting with plugins which generate seemingly random or uncontrollable sounds. The moment you have a sound of any description which gets your creative juices flowing, you’re away.
What happens next is entirely determined by what you want that sound to be. Is it going to be a quiet backdrop to a range of more traditional sounds? Or is going to be front and centre, ripping a hole through your mix? The next steps you take will either seek to maximise or minimise the role of that sound, so it’s best to talk in general terms about the kinds of processes which will prove useful to you in terms of honing raw sonic data into something more sophisticated. If you’re working with audio, basic offline functions like reversing, timestretching, pitch-shifting and gain changing will come first. It’s amazing how powerful it can be to make multiple copies of an audio file (make sure you know how to do this too; some DAWs don’t create unique new audio files when you make copies, so any processing you carry out on one region will also affect other copies), timestretch or pitch-shift each one individually and then play them all back at once, to generate increased weight and power. Add in a unique pan position for each sound and you’ll feel the benefit to stereo presence too.
If you’re working with sounds triggered over MIDI, you’ll need other skills. By manipulating the envelope shape of the sound, you can control its volume, tone and pitch over time. By drawing automation curves, you can manipulate key parameters as you take your sound on an undulating sonic journey. The approach which links these two separate worlds is sampling, and becoming familiar with the capabilities of your sampler of choice will be forever useful. With samplers, you can map recorded sounds over wide key ranges, triggering higher/faster sounds, or lower/slower ones. You can reverse some sounds whilst keeping others playing forwards, or you can select sections to loop. Samplers benefit from the same modulation options as sophisticated synthesisers, with LFOs and envelopes aplenty, whilst others delve deeper into exploration, with granular synthesis options and/or other manipulation approaches.
Last but by no means least, effects plugins are ready to shape your sounds in dramatic new ways. You can completely reimagine a sound by dramatically changing its tonal base, place it in a reverberant space, add biting overtones via distortion effects, manipulate stereo width with auto-panning or stereo enhancement tools… the options are limitless. It’s high time we got started.