Thanks!
I usually know I have made something good "to me" when I get the shivers hearing parts of it. That doesn't happen very often, but this is one that gives me that thrill that I "really did something". I know that nobody else is going to get that feeling from it, of course.
The intro I visualise that the initial vocal you see a planet (mars) close enough up it is only partly visible to one side, and open space, and a ship on the other side of the screen rapidly moving toward the planet. As the vocals change into the rising synth, you see the ship start glowing as it enters the atmosphere and descending in a way that leaves you uncertain as to how many pieces it might land in.
What is "pedaltone"?
You'll probably hate this, but there is only one MIDI-driven VST in there--The piano is Truepiano that came with Sonar at some point. I hand-drew in the MIDI driving it based on what I could hear in the tracks I'd already built, to accent things in them I thought better brought up.
Everything else is mangled and mutated samples that I've chopped up, retuned, stretched / squeezed in time, fx'd, etc.
I've been collecting the "dollar" (or two or three) packs of samples from various places on their "really big sales" the last couple of years or so since discovering them, and just the little bit I have used so far has changed some of the things I was making from "ok" to "amazing", as far as my own ears are concerned.
I want to use Z3TA2+ to recreate the sounds in the primary synth lines (which I've been told is a 3/4 8-bar part, vs the rest of the track that is 4/4 at the same time; I don't really "hear" time signature thingies), so I can completely customize it. So far I've only done it the rough way, using a stem-splitter to get the two major parts out and then be able to mangle them separately, and mix them separately. To hear the unsplit version, go to the "original" version over at soundclick It's prominent in the first section especially.
The percussion is several layers of things, some individual hits, some mutated sections, etc.. The synthetic-sounding percussion parts I deliberately "damaged" by time stretching part of it out twice as long as it started out--there were too many things going on, so I halved them that way, and it grainied up the audio for that part nicely at the same time.
It also made things line up much more interestingly especially for one of the middle parts where the high synth comes in. That percussion bit was perfectly normal drums before I did that....and very boring.As I can't even remotely play fancy bits like the guitar parts
those bits came originally from a "Funky Disco Pop" bassline bit in a WA Productions set of sounds (about 60gb) I got for a few bucks on their laborday sale. It's a cleantone "loop", which I cut up, retimed, repitched, and stuck into my usual LittleGreenAmp + delay "bass guitar ornaments" track, using the "brit" amp tone it has. (I liked it because some of the fancier bits have "Edge" feel to them when in this fx; those fancy bits are almost intact from the sample, other than fitting them to the song in the spots they're in, pitch shifting them, etc.)There are some sections with a few string parts, and there's a violin/viola/etc bit where I choppped up something repetititititive to make that few final measures fuller, and it ended up nearly a lead there. Two different parts of those came from WA Production's Electro Bass Launch "kit"; can't say I like much of anything in the "style" of that kind of music but the pieces are certainly useful for mutations.
I have some Country Fiddle sounds I wanted to use in there but there was no room for them....I'm still working on figuring out how to fit them into the inprogress last section. (or further expand the track.... ).
The primary vocals throughout were modified from bits of Black Octopus Sound - VocalKitchen - A Taste Of Heaven. The secondary stuff for the intro was modified from bits of Ghosthack - Origin - Arctic - Aurora Borealis and Archive - Security Risk and Shymer 2 - Vocal FX. The "pulsing" breathiness underlying one of the middle sections were modifed from bits of Security Breach.
As with my other ones that use vocals like this does, I take some parts from some vocal sounds, trim them, then fade them into other vocal sounds (usually from the same vocalist but not always), trim those and fade into yet another bit, etc. Some vocalizations could be made of as many as five or six separate segments to create the sound, overlapping and fading into each other.
I have to do this in most cases because they don't have the exact thing I want, so I build what I want from what's there, often enough by using parts of one sample from one pack, and parts of samples from other packs, to build each little part, and various automation and effects to blend them all together. I'm no expert at it, but it isn't terribly tough--just time-consuming.
A more drastic / obvious example is the "elven rock" section of Behind You Lie Many Unseen where it's not just the vocals comped togehter it's also all the other parts in there.
I even do it to the percussion in some cases, where the sound I want doesn't exist in anything I have, so I take two or more sounds to create the hit I want, and blend them together, etc..
To find the pieces I want I'll just "randomly" listen to bits of the type I'm looking for in the many sample packs I've got, then anytrhing that remotely sounds like what I want I dump a copy into the song folder. Then I'll start dropping them into SONAR and experimenting with placement, mix, etc.; about half the time they just aren't right for what I want in there and half of that time I can't make them fit anyway. The ohter half of the time they just need mangling to work out.
The process gets pickier as the project progresses, which is why the last section is very unfinished--I'm stil finding the bits that do what I want there.
Oh, and on this one, I kept watching the clipping inspector and riding via automation the bus gains and the output compression to keep it pushed right to the edge without clipping, and without losing all the dynamics since this track has a lot of those.
If I actually knew how to play, to compose, etc., by "rules", or I was physically capable of playing the things I hear in my head on instruments, I'd just play all this stuff in, or draw it all in as MIDI into synths. But I can't understand/use the "rules", they don't make sense to me as sound (neither does music notation, etc), and that is the only thing that music is for me--it is the actual sound itself, and that's all I can work with. (the waveforms I see on the screen and the automation /fade /etc curves also make sense visually for the most part, but they are not abstract concepts and make direct representation I can translate "without thought" in my head into sound or changes in the sound, instant by instant as I watch and hear).
(I guess I have the same issue with math, and programming...they're abstract things that I can't visualize, feel, hear, etc., so while I can "do" them, I don't "understand" them, every step is hard work and I don't always do things right and figuring out what I did wrong is often difficult).
