Pitchbend strings

It’s not that hard to create a massed string effect which provides dramatic power, but what if you want to create a Sicario-style pitch bend?

Listen to The Beast from the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsen’s score for Sicario. Its ‘hook’ is a simple pitchbend across a minor third, which starts as a muffled, distant, brassy/stringy hybrid and grows in power. What’s so great about this sound is that it uses an orchestral pairing and yet does something inherently ‘electronic’. There’s something about the pitchbend which gives an ‘otherworldly’ sound. Through the following three steps, we’ll learn how to make a trick like this work, showing how taking orchestral sounds from a sample library, converting them to audio and then re-sampling them can allow you to spice up even conventional sounds. We’re adding effects once the sound is resampled but you could add effects such as Reverb and Delay to the source sounds, so they’re part of the re-sampling process.

> We’ll take three sounds from Spitfire Audio orchestral libraries. The first is from the ‘Masse’ library (low Strings), while sounds 2 and 3 are from Albion III: Iceni (more low Strings and Brass). We balance the mix between them and capture them as a stereo audio file. > We drag and drop the resulting audio file into Logic’s EXS24 sampler, though any sampler with pitch bend control will get you the desired result. We map the sound across the entire keyboard range, with its original pitch mapped to C3. We save the sampler instrument.

> We set the Pitch Bend range to 3, to get Sicario’s trademark ‘minor 3rd’, then play the original note and the octave below (for thickness) before drawing in a pitchbend. Add saturation, reverb and delay. Increase the Amp Envelope’s release time to stop it ending abruptly.