As an old skool synth junkie, I’m disappointed in so much of what I hear on television and in film. A fellow film composer once used the term “smash and grab” as short-hand for throwing a few sample loops together with a well-known synth preset to create a cue. Everyone hears it every day – it’s sonic wallpaper – and when I hear it I get sucked right out of the program I’m watching – a serious disappointment. One of my mantras from studying electronic music in school was “friends don’t let friends use factory presets”.
So one of the exercises I go through when prepping for a session is to review the sounds I’ve previously cataloged, and check out some new tones along the way too. Sometimes it’s to ensure that I’m not repeating myself (smashing and grabbing from my own previous work), and in other situations it’s to break down a useful sound to its seed and then take it into a new direction. Along those lines I spent some time this weekend auditioning drum and percussion loops. I pulled some of the snappier tracks into Steinberg’s Loopmash plugin to see how that tool re-arranges the beat in the context with the other loops assembled. It can be inspiring, but it’s also easy to wander off too far and forget what you were looking for. The trick is to spend the right amount of time in prep work, but not suffer analysis paralysis – a common affliction in electronic music circles – lots of sound emerges but not much music is made.
To springboard into new sonic territory with purpose I often start with VIs like Native Instruments Kore Player. It has the ability to draw from any of NI’s other synth engines (Reaktor, Absynth, etc.) and also has some significant sound mangling potential on its own. Many times I’ll find a preset for one of the “parent” softsynths in the Kore Player browser, and then open the preset in the “full” synthesizer to break down the sound – either to use one piece of a larger preset, or completely rebuild things from the ground up.
Native Instruments Kore Player
Sometimes I’ll stumble on an idea and simply riff while the sequencer is recording, and will save the audio event on a separate track as a one-shot effect to process within the track arrangement. It’s a lot of fun – a great way to add texture while keeping things fresh (and keeping the track moving forward). Much of the work from this weekend will show up on this first project, but there’s not quite enough meat on the bone to share examples just yet. For now, I’ve got to move on to a few other sources and put together that critical mass of sound, trying to tread somewhere in that vast area between smash and grab and analysis paralysis.
The tracking will continue until morale improves.
