#comiccomposition

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

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