Composing with overtones is something which is increasingly raising my interest. I recently purchased a unique metal based tongue drum. The drum was made by Larry Miller (owner of MILLTONE) and I am seriously baffled by the texture, uniqueness and overtones of these particular drums. A tongue drum (aka slit drum) is essentially a hollow, tune-based percussion instrument – usually made in bamboo or wood, which is made of internal, cut-out, tongues/slits. You normally play them with mallets, however you can also use your hands, which I prefer.
However whats even more fascinating is the amount of overtones that these drum can produce. I recorded a short little demo for the purpose of this post. The demo is just me practicing on the drum, however try to listen carefully around 1:10. You will hear how I play one note – while muting all the other tongues. I gradually release the tongues, which creates an array overtones. So essentially just playing one note, while releasing other notes as overtones. This allows me to almost sculpt an entire ambient melody out of the drum, which is deeply fascinating to me. Its fascinating because the overtones have such an emotional quality to them – and fascinating because I am literally sculpting music out of one note, while releasing surrounding overtones.
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 last part of the edits – these were looped and tuned down to become basses and synths. I essentially ran them through a variety of plugins to shape and sculpt them. The ambient drones were created by playing chords with the synths, which were then timefrozen (using timefreezer).
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.
