Comic Composer

Some tracks are challenging, others can just be downright infuriating. However, The Unknown was neither of these. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was an easy track to compose, though one may think that given the repetitive nature and the structure of the song. I had several ideas of how to continue the theme of survival horror through this now being the second track I’ve composed based on the comic Scurry by @macblorg.  It didn’t take me long before I realized that the driving baseline of the first version was pushing my track from being about exploration into just being a straight adventure track. So I quickly shifted tools, and that opened up the song to align with my vision for it.

For all the other tracks I’ve been doing, I’ve almost exclusively used Cubse with whatever Kontact instruments I fancy at the time. However, after playing with some of the instruments that come in Kontact ultimate, I realized that any of the electronic sounds I was getting just didn’t seem to fit the style. I was having a hard time getting the right sound out of the instruments. So I fell back to my old faithful, Reason 8. To be honest, I love Reasons workflow, the UI and the sound that I get out of it more than any other digital audio workstation I’ve worked with. It’s just so easy to sit in create, and to get really good sounds really quickly. But, there’s always limitations, and the limitation that I found with Reason is that doing any sort of orchestral work is a real pain in the neck.  I’ve had several different orchestral libraries and sounds over the years (though I’ve not kept current on the last couple of years of developments in that area). Each time I use when these libraries I could get something approximating a good sound, but something always just felt like it was missing. Now, when I compare the SoundIron libraries I’m using to Reason, I can see why I have so many issues. It just seems to me that the depth of sound I’m looking for  in the versatility of instrumentation that I desire isn’t available in Reason when it relates to orchestral style instruments. But if you’re talking about creating some synth melodies or some ambient background, it performs really well.

So after the false start with Cubase and moving the synths to Reason, I found that the choir lines filling quite naturally and easily. As always, SoundIrons libraries take a bit of tweaking to get right. I wanted to spend more hours just perfecting each little piece of the track, but I sent myself a hard limit of one week to make sure that I don’t spend so much time trying to tweak each individual word in or phrasing and stop making music. One of the highlights, was being able to pull in a brand-new library called Ethera. This is a awesome library which gave such presence to the high end vocals that they could just cut through the top part of the track. And while I find so many instruments that I have to be inspiring, this provides a layer which is been missing in my library. Most of all, I can’t wait to show off the track that I have for this coming week where it’s much more exclusively featured.

Overall, I’ll be interested to see where the compositions for scurry leads. While my mouse guard tracks have basically settled on a few different instrumentation, I can see Scurry running the gamut of different expressions and styles while still staying somewhat in that down tempo/ambient style of electronic music. But for now, I look to the coming weekend when I’ll have another track based on Nimona.

Composition Notes: The Mouse and the Moon

Recently I got the legends of the guard volume 3 from the @mouseguard comic book series by @davidpetersenart. I was a bit skeptical at first knowing that multiple comics had written the different works and I wasn’t sure if I would really enjoy it all that much. But given that mouse guard has been an inspiration for over half the tracks of compose so far each week, I figured what the heck I’m sure I’ll enjoy at least part of it.

So as I was reading through, each story seem to unfold in a new and unique way. I was impressed at the world that was ever-expanding duty each of the creators unique art style and vision for the stories that may or may not have happened in the world. However, the first time I read the mouse and the moon by @skottieyoung I thought it was a good story that I want to share with my children someday, but the art style seemed…odd. While I can tell the artist was someone who was accomplished, I just couldn’t seem to get into the style.

Then this past week, I was looking  for a story to compose a song about. I was flipping through the stories and realized that there was a lot in the art, and in the story that I had just brushed over the first time. The interplay between the father and the son and the book ending of the story Made me realize that this could provide a real challenge in  composing something which fit.

The more I started looking at it, the more I could hear how the son would ask the father question, and the father would reply. I tried to model this at the beginning where you have an instrument do a call in the next instrument responds.This is even continued as the instruments shift, and you can follow the melody being passed from the son, to the father when he was younger as he tells the story. I don’t think I’ve perfectly accomplished what I wanted to, but it was really fun to be able to challenge myself to think differently of how music can represent communication.

https://soundcloud.com/levi-siebens/heros-and-villains

This week’s track has been a labor of love, pain and frustration. I’ve really been enjoying making new music inspired by different comics and other pieces of artwork, so I thought I’d move to the next level and attempt a more epic sounding piece than I had done previously. Sketching out the basic ideas was much harder this time as I kept wondering if I should base the song off Nimona or all three of the main characters. My first thought was to come up with instruments for each one, and they settled on brass representing Nimona and the strings and other elements representing our other main characters. But… That lasted as long as it took me to come up with a theme.  Once I started working in the song, I found that it was best when all three were working together.  I moved then from focusing on creating a song either just around one of the characters or all three to trying to depict the adventure that I feel as are two main characters attempt to subvert those in power. The slow start the song  really represented to me the preparation that goes into their actions and as the drums make an audible differentiation and movement into a wall of sound, so also the characters in the story begin their attack.

Also, if you read nothing else or don’t even listen to my song go check out  the comic this is based upon. It’s been one of the few times where I’ve picked up a comic, said “Hey, I’ll put that down a little bit”, and finished reading the entire thing.

http://gingerhaze.com/NIMONA by @gingerhaze​,

Sound Design

I struggled a lot with this track in trying to find the right characteristics to represent any or all of the characters. Should Nimona Be represented is only one aspect of her character or in full? Should the music attempt to tell the absolute depths of who she is, or simply focus on one aspect of her and let leader pieces tell the other parts of her story? I’m not sure I have even answered those questions yet,  so I settled for a musical piece  that represents the movement in the story.

This track was also more of a challenge as I’ve added several new libraries that I’m now using. I knew for this track I need some kind of epic choir and was stuck between two different ones. After a lot of deliberation, I went with SoundIron’s choir collection and I have to say that I was not disappointed. If anything, some of their audio demos do not do justice to the sheer breath of expression that you have with the choirs.

Virtual instruments used on the track:

Session Strings Pro

Action Drums

Symphonic Series Brass Ensemble library by @soundiron

Mars and Venus Choir libraries  by @soundiron​

There may be a couple other small instruments I use that I’m not remembering off the top of my head, but these made up the core of the music. All of these libraries worked well together to quickly get some results that allowed me to get a general feeling and understanding of how the music should flow. However, it took a lot of tweaking with the choirs to get them even close to what I wanted and I still find small things that I would like to tweak depending on what speaker system I’m listening to the music on. I don’t think this is a deficiency in the libraries, it’s more showing the depth of skill that one must have to really mastered them as each of the libraries is a really expressive instrument.

I also enjoyed the simplicity of the brass library, though I think I still have some learning to do as I felt like the demos showed a depth of sound that I didn’t quite get out of the different instruments on this track. That being said, this wasn’t a limiting factor as the brass were used as a larger part of the entire song which meant I didn’t need the same depth of expression. I’m looking forward to using them on future tracks and perhaps even a brass only track when the right time arises.

Final thoughts

Overall, I didn’t really enjoy doing this track and it was quite the challenge to integrate several new libraries simultaneously while also making the most epic sounding  track I have done so far. It does make me want to do something with a much smaller arrangement for my next track, which I’m working on currently. But it also reminds me that my own perfectionism and desire for each sound to be exactly as I wanted to be can be a hindrance to making music. Time and time again I spent so long attempting to perfect a transition or align notes, only to find that I didn’t even necessarily like the sound of a specific section. I realized it wasn’t just a desire to make the music better, but to try to make the music perfect. There is no perfect piece of music, as I can only produce and create based on where I am today, not where I will be in the future. So I’m at least attempting to let this track go instead of chasing the impossible dream of perfection in composing.

  This week's track comes from a web comic that I stumbled upon from Reddit, which has to be some of the best art I've seen in a while. As I've been reading Scurry by @macblorg (http://bit.ly/1U8YPHg), I come to more and more feel like there is a darkness surrounding the mice who inhabit this world. When I first thought of creating a track, had all sorts of ideas from an epic score, to something much simpler which would represent these mice you almost seem as heroes. But each time I looked at doing a piece, it just didn't seem to fit. Through some time, and some contemplation, I realized that the genre I was looking for was something akin to survival horror and that may concepts of heroes versus villains, or the good always winning out didn't necessarily fit this world.

Thus the following track was born, a mixture of some ethereal choir and dark drones which is punctuated by the chimes of what I imagine to be a music box. I can imagine the mouse darting through the house, bumping the child's toy open which begins to play with a slow, but building melody. Unbeknownst to him, he is being followed by one who has nothing on his mind but ensuring he gets his next meal. And thus the dissonance between the mouse who is trying to help his colony survive, and the cat who is trying to just survive himself begins.

I'm hoping in the future to compose more for Scurry, as I don't think that I've perfectly captured what I wanted to about the comic. There is so much more that I wanted to layer in (guitars, orchestral instruments, etc.) but it just didn't fit this track. To be honest, it was one of those times where the track itself took on a life of its own and many times I felt like I had to do whatever I could just to get it to fit back in to the world that I was inspired by.

I hope you the listener find this track enjoyable, even if it is a different style than what I have done previously. Now, I have to go make the hard decision either working more on tracks for the Mouse Guard compositions I've been doing, starting on a new Scurry composition or working on another comic which I have been inspired by but has its own feature film coming out (so I've been avoiding it for that reason as I know someone else will be setting the tone for the world).

If you like what you hear, feel free to subscribe to me on Sound Cloud or YouTube!

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/levi-siebens

YouTube: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/levisiebens