What Genre?
Despite the orchestral sound of the final piece, I actually started this project off with liquid drums in mind. Being my favorite type of chill electronic music, I thought composing my own would also help me appreciate my favorite genre even more.
Yet the first roadblock did not take long; after looking through freesound.org and the Imagina drum loops, I was unable to find a satisfying drum loop that fit what I was trying to create (reasonably understandable, liquid drums is not very popular). The few that did have the percussion loop which I desired unfortunately also had their own harmony, which would then limit my create freedom over the piece. Plan B was to create my own drum loop, and then use that loop within the track. However, two more roadblocks arose. First, my continued search on freesound.org and Imagina, this time for just percussion sound effects (kicks, hihats, and snares), also resulted in disappointment: many had too much background noise, or the timbre of the percussion did not fit the liquid drums style. In addition, I was also unable to figure exactly how to use the multisampler plugin to make a drum loop.
Thus, with neither option of finding a loop nor making my own, I decided to move on to another option: emulating orchestral music through electronic music. I was luckily able to find an orchestral instrument sample pack online, “Virtual-Playing-Orchestra3-1-wave-files” accessed from http://virtualplaying.com/virtual-playing-orchestra/, which had suitable samples of almost every orchestral instrument, among which I picked the trumpet, flute, and trombone. Though I was also keen on perhaps adding some vocals, my singing sounds like a horse dying. Instead, I chose to whistle. Luckily, my residential college (Saybrook) has a small room next to our common room with outstanding acoustics.
Recording Whistles
Creating a melody for me to whistle was the easy part; I ran in to the most trouble trying to perfect the sound quality of my whistles. As a consequence of outstanding reverb in this room, the airy sound that accompanies whistling was also amplified. When listening to my 1st take recording, the airy sound almost overpowered the whistle itself. On my second try, I decided to move further away from the microphone (with respect to the image above, I placed my phone on the left armrest of the black bench in the bottom left corner, and whistled from the position of the camera). Unfortunately, the airy sound still had not been reduced to a satisfactory level. In addition, the microphone was oriented such that I sang from one side of the microphone, producing a panned audio recording. On take 3, I placed the microphone at the position of the camera while I ran to the 3rd step of the stairs and whistled facing away from the microphone. This time, I made sure to have the microphone facing my direction. Though there was still was noticeable airiness in the recording, facing away from the microphone did help reduce much of the noise; the remaining airiness was minimized using filter plugins in Waveform.
Playing with Waveform
As Bob Ross once said, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.” Turns out my stereo pan error in my Take 2 recording became an inspiration. After replaying the Take 2 track Waveform along with some ambient sounds I found on freesound.org, the stereo pan created the atmosphere of a very large room mimicking that of a concert hall. Since the Take 2 track still had the airy sound, I decided instead to use the Take 4 track as I had intended, but this time also utilize the stereo pan plugin to pan the sound to the left. Then, I used an automation track so that the whistle would slowly move towards the center through the introduction.
After the high-pitched whistling then came the juxtaposing low frequency bass and kicks. I was able to create a very deep bass by using a combination of the 4OSC plugin to generate the sound, then using a low-pass filter on top of that to only allow the low frequencies to pass. Along with the low-frequency bass, I also was able to use the low-pass filter on a previously unsatisfying kick sample. The low-pass filter was able to remove most of the noise on the kick, resulting in a very clean kick.
After the whistle and the bass, it was time for the orchestra. After learning how to use the filters and automation in class, I was able actually able to modify and clean up many of the percussion samples that I had previously ruled out. In particular: I fell in love with a timpani sound after applying a rapid stereo-pan left-to-right. I decided to use a roll of the timpani as part of the buildup to the orchestral melody. Within this orchestral movement, I used trumpet as the main melody, flute as supporting melody, and trombone as the harmony/ bass. While both brass instruments were panned center, the flute was panned to one side to add more character to both the room and the orchestra: since the flute’s timbre had a texture that contrasted well against the brass timbre, panning the flute to only one side seemed to make the contrast even more appreciable.
Below is the mp3 of my final composition:
Concluding thoughts:
With respect to the original liquid drum composition that I had in mind in the very beginning, the only idea that actually made it into the final track was the ambient background sound. Beyond that, all the other sounds (the whistles, timpanis, trumpets, trombones, and flutes,) were all the products of happy accidents. In particular, the implementation of the panned whistling would not even have happened should I not had made the mistake of not orienting the microphone towards me. As I did not fully master how to utilize the pan, filters, and automation capabilities until near the deadline of the musical composition, I was unable to explore the potential applications of these plugins to the extent which I’d have wished to do. With our next Waveform Project coming up soon, I’ll certainly be using more plugins to enhance my music productions.
I thought that you had really great usage of audio panning to better paint a picture of the “room” that this whole piece takes place in. From the airy whistle to the ambiance in the beginning, it just makes it seem just like you described, in a concert hall. I found it so intriguing how the whistling and drums and flute were angled and moved around, which just gave my head such a pleasant feeling I cannot describe.
As for possible improvements, I feel like the middle section transitioning to the orchestral part is a bit convoluted. Regardless, I enjoyed reading about your process and listening to your piece!