I am proud, humbled and excited to announce I composed a music piece for tonehammer using a variety of alternative instruments. The piece features Steven Tavaglione on EWI. I am simply shocked by his gifts as a musician, sound designer and general approach to music. So please enjoy and head to tonehammer if you wanna to know more about the demo.
Download: mp3 demo
Demo by Troels Folmann and Steven Tavaglione
The main site www.troelsfolmann.com finally got updated. The new site contains news on a variety of my works, including a variety of trailer works for movies like the upcoming Valkyrie, 10.000 BC, The Illusionist, Xmen 3 and a variety of other works. I wish you all a great Xmas and happy New Year. I need a new year soon!
I just got news that the GDC (Game Developers Conference) Board has accepted my submission for GDC 2009. The topic of the lecture is: “Shaping Ones Musical Identity” and is essentially a boundless journey into experimental scoring for games, trailers and commercials. The journey provides deep insight into how composers can create highly unique type of sounds-, textures and virtual instruments, which ultimately allows them to stand out and reinforce their musical identity.
The great thing about composition is … the older we get … the better we get … Well for the most part that is …
Tonehammer.com will be releasing two new libraries (Anti-Drum and Rust) on 15th of December 2008.
The libraries are a compilation of highly unconventional percussive instruments ranging from soda-can ensemble to bowed saw, from stomp ensemble, water cooler ensemble to stairwell percussion, from monkey balls to baby toys. Anti-Drum and Rust contain 38 unique instruments with a total of +5.000 samples.
Anti-Drum and Rust will be both be priced at $39 and many of the instruments follows the “deep-sampling” techniques we introduced in our initial libraries.
We wanted to give you all a sneak peak at the libraries and listen to some of the demos.
Anti-Drum Demo 1 (by Troels Folmann):
Featuring: Water Cooler Ensemble, Drum Circle, Stomp Ensemble, Clap Ensemble, Baby Toys, Evil Male Voices, Shouts, Ukelele Drum, Shock Mount.
Anti-Drum Demo 2 (by Troels Folmann):
Featuring: Clicky Toy, Guitar Drum, Handball Court Drums, Shockmount, Ukelele Drum, Wall Ball, Water Cool and Tonehammer Hang Drum and Vocals.
Rust Demo 1 (by Troels Folmann):
Featuring: Paint Can Drum, Soda-Can Ensemble, Monkey Balls, Brass Rails, Ukelele Drum, Baby Toys, Solo Clap, Shock Mount, Black Diamond Airshaft, Bowed Saw, Stairwell Railing, UMSI Observatory, Handball Court Drums and Tonehammer Hang Drum.
Rust Demo 2 (by Troels Folmann):
Featuring: Bottles and Chairs, Black Diamond Shaft, City Museum, Dumpster / Junk Yard Percussion, Paint Can, Soda-Can Ensemble, Willow Bridge and Tonehammer Tom Ensemble Vol. 1 and 2.
Rust Demo 3 (by Mike Peaslee):
Featuring: Monkey Balls, Stairwell Railing, Brass Rail, Solo Claps.
It is my great pleasure to present a recent interview between my dear friend Colin O’ Malley and myself. The interview goes in-depth on our collaboration on Tomb Raider Underworld and the general process between audio director and composers.
You can download by clicking here:
Source and courtesy: http://www.tracksounds.com/
I frequently get asked: “What sound/samples libraries do you use?” and my question is always between commercial and custom sample libraries, however leaning towards the custom ones, since they tend to have a more expressive nature. I have been recording my personal libraries for many years, but lately also been thinking about releasing them for commercial consumption, since many of the samples will allow other composers more unique- and crazy sounding means for expression.
In other words… Welcome to Tonehammer…
Tonehammer™ concept:
Essentially Tonehammer™ is about creating innovative, affordable, high quality and instant downloadable samples for composers. We believe that composers should be able to pick individual instruments instead of buying massive libraries and only use a fraction of the samples. All our instruments are priced between $29-49 and we only sell instruments that we use ourselves for multi award-winning soundtracks, commercials and trailers.
Tonehammer™ November 2008 launch:
We are releasing eight different instruments for our November 15th Launch:
1. Epic Tom Ensemble Vol. 1
2. Epic Tom Ensemble Vol. 2
3. Hang Drum
4. Marching Band / Drum Corpse
5. Old Busted Granny Piano
6. Frendo (custom designed instrument)
7. Emotional Drones Vol. 1
8. Whale Drum
All the instruments are recorded in painful detail and we typically record at 8-10 velocities and 8-10 repetitions (RR) pr. note, including all imaginable- and unimaginable articulations. The majority of our instruments are recorded in a dedicated orchestral hall with state-of-the-art Neumann microphones.
Tonehammer™ founders:
The company was founded in August 2008 by British Academy Award Winning (BAFTA) Composer, Troels Folmann and Mix Foundation / TEC Awarded Sound Designer and Musician, Mike Peaslee.
Tonehammer™ Teaser Trailer:
We will be releasing individual instrument demos over the course of November, however we invite you to take a look- and listen to our pre-launch teaser trailer. The teaser is 100% made from our eight upcoming instruments:
• Flash version
• HD (.mov) version
• Youtube version
• Mp3 version
Thanks for listening.
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.
You can download by clicking here:
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 …
Enjoy.
You can download composition by clicking here:
You can download source material by clicking here:
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.
You can download by clicking here:
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!”
