Imagine you only had one sound to compose from? How much could you tweak this sound to become a living, breathing composition with a variety of different textures? Well… I decided to spend a few hours last night by using a single “clap” sound as my source material. Everything you are about to hear is derived from this one sound and manipulated through editing, filtering and a variety of FX including delays, glitching, vocoders, distortion, time stretching, time freezing and so forth.
Feel free to listen to the demos below. The first link contains the actual composition, which starts by the clap sound. You can also download the composition and my raw clap edits. You will note some high pitch sounds in the edits - these were tuned down to become basses and synths. I essentially ran them through a variety of plugins to shape and sculpt them. Then I timefreezed the chords and created more ambient drone like textures from the chords and processed the timefrozen renders through plugins again. The concept is really to dive deep into the source and keep on sculpting it through plugins until it becomes something you like. All the percussion what generated from super tiny “bleep” 10ms sounds from the clap. The bass drum was created by tuning clap 32 semi tones and cutting the attack tight. The snare was made by time stretching the clap. All percussion was processed through a vocoder. Anyway … Enough rambling …
This reel contains excerpts from some of my newest epic scores for motion picture trailers. I have had previous scores used in over 20 official trailers, including: X-Men 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Spiderman 3, The Illusionist, The Da Vinci Code, 10.000 BC, Last Mimzy etc.
So I was toying with some samples a few nights ago and came up with this strange break-beat cover of the old Depeche Mode classic: “Enjoy the Silence”. So the question remains … should I kill it or continue working on it? I have only spend an hour or so on it, but wanted to put it out there to the world. So to state it in an unnecessary melodramatic way: “Your comments will decide the fate of this piece!”
We just released up our Tomb Raider Underworld Teaser Trailer, which has been a very complicated journey, since the density of animation and FX were massive. The trailer was made by Blur studios in LA and it is - hands down - one of the best game trailers I have ever seen, since its got many subtle hints for fans of the franchise. Blur originally used Mozart’s lacrimosa as a temporary piece and when I heard it … my only comment was: “Don’t change a single note…”. Who said music supervision was hard?
This reel contains a variety of examples of game-, movie and trailer related scores using female and male vocals. The reel contains tracks from published and unpublished scores for television, trailers and video games, including examples from my Academy Award winning score for Tomb Raider Legend.
It is my humble privilege to share the upcoming Tomb Raider Underworld Main Theme with you. The theme took almost a month to write, which I have never experienced before since I generally score most tracks in a day or two. The core intention was to utilize the old Tomb Raider theme in the beginning and end of the piece, but also introduce a bran new theme communicating the journey into the Underworld.
It is pretty hard to do great and original remixes, but it happens sometimes… like Funkstars Deluxe remix of Bob Marley or JXLs remix of Elvis or Mint Royales remix of Gene Kelly. However its even more awesome when it involves motion captured garbage robots…
So I have heard this song (see video below) multiple times on the radio and its really one of my all time smooth jazz favorites. The song: “What You Won’t Do For Love” was written back in 1978 and its still - hands down - one of the most groovy pieces of music I have ever heard and for the following reasons:
1. The song fits the singer. Its obviously his song and so many beautiful subtle nuances in his performance (despite pseudo mullet, bad dress code and doubtful dance moves). Lyrics are basic, but really encapsulate the essence.
2. The baseline groove with drums/perc, rhodes, guitar and bass is extremely tempered, yet alive and sophisticated in detail. Its wonderful to see a backing group allowing space for everybody to burn through in a subtle powerful way. A very hard thing to do and something that takes years of practice and musical humbleness.
3. The underlying supporting strings generates a nice slight, soft, sadness to the piece (more audible in original piece).
4. The trumpet riff is gorgeous, soft, sexy and instantly catchy.
Feel free to listen to one of my latest personal inventions. Essentially an experiment which is a mixture of Wagner and Grieg inspired pieces. The music is divided into two main sections. The first part is a soft, swelling type of epic intro using staccato for strings and woodwinds, while also having layers sustained swells for strings and brass. The second part is a harder, syncopated type of orchestration, which combines several layers and counterpoints using staccato for strings, brass and woodwinds.
The music was composed with an upcoming sample library from ProjectSam, which is one of my favourite developers of orchestral samples.