Trailer Music And How I Write it: Part 2
This is Part 2 of a series entitled 'Trailer Music And How I Write It'. In the previous part of this series, I focused on telling you about my musical education, history and career.
So now that I am done with my life story, let me tell you about my template (boring, no?) Don't worry, I'll do my best to keep you interested.
Template in a Nutshell...
So a template is extremely important. So important, that you would be a fool to try and make music regularly without one. Whether you're writing metal music, pop, EDM or like me, orchestral music you need a template.
Once upon a time, I was young and naive and would boot up my Mac, load up Logic and look at the empty project and think, 'hmm, where should I start?' Then I might have thought, a piano might sound nice and I would find then dig through all of Logic's wonderful software instruments, try to find one I liked the sound of, load it in, and finally play what I wanted to play, if I remembered it at all. Now, because I am not so young and naive, I have nearly every instrument that I could possibly want, ready and loaded in for me to start composing for.
If you set up your templates properly, you can save yourself literally hours of digging through folders, stacks and lists to find instruments. If you're especially clever, you can even pre-mix your music with your template, but we'll get on to that later.
The Template
As you can see in the two images above (I had to take two screenshots, even my Macs high retina resolution couldn't fit all my instruments on one image), my template has approximately 92 instruments ready to be used to make my awesome music. Now you're thinking, but it says exactly 92 tracks at the bottom. Indeed it does. The reason I say approximately is that a template will almost never be perfect, but short of becoming God or some other deity, that's fine. Any template, including this one, is a workflow boosting technique. I might decide, 'Oh, I really need a different synth here,' or 'I have some vocal audio tracks for this track' and then I'll add them to my project.
Point being, the template is flexible and you need to remember that. If you don't let yourself experiment, add stuff, take stuff away from your template, eventually your music will sound like your other music, in much the same way as if a fine artist only used 4 colours, eventually, he'd hit a creative wall.
So let's dive in!
Woodwinds
So the woodwinds section is a staple of the classic orchestra. At a minimum, we typically have flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, in an orchestra. The amount of each instrument in the section can vary depending on the size of the orchestra. Now, for me, I am not exactly the most adept at writing for winds. I avoided them for the longest time when I only had access to my Albion One library.
N.B. If you're looking for versatile and flexible winds, don't purchase the Albion One library from Spitfire Audio. Even if you combine their legacy versions with the updated versions, you only have access to a 'Winds High' and a 'Winds low' patch. You also have access to an arranged version of each patch, but that is it. Spitfire Audio do, however, have very good Wind libraries, they're just separate.
When I purchased my subscription to East West's Composer Cloud package, one of the libraries I got was the Symphonic Orchestra package, which includes a Winds library. Surprisingly, for an all-in-one library, the winds in this library are very good, with solo patches for every member of the winds section, including piccolos, English horn etc.
So the way I have the winds laid out in my template is an individual articulation on an individual track. I have the most common articulations, that I use, permanently in my template, Flutes long, flutes short, etc.
Brass
The brass section is a little more diverse. I like the brass. The brass section is fun. And the brass section is a great section to use to carry the melody, provide power and give the track to its genre, with epicness.
The brass section is fun because you can make interesting combinations. Typically your brass section will have trumpets, french horns, trombones, and tubas. These instruments have mutes, can be played long, short, double tongue, etc. And they sound massive. In my template, I have some different patches from East West, solo French Horns, solo Trumpets but also 2 French Horn patches, a '6 French Horns patch' and so on.
Like I might have already mentioned, the brass section is fun, but you have to remember, to not neglect the other sections, because they're all useful and some are even more versatile.
Percussion
Percussion is an interesting section of the orchestra. When you build a sample library template, you typically divide the tuned and non-tuned percussion up, making your template a little more flexible.
If you look at the image above, what you'll hopefully notice is that there are several tracks with similar instruments, within the section. This is where using sample libraries gets clever, interesting and dare I say layered. Literally. A sample of a Pearl snare will obviously sound different, to that of say, East West's Antique Snare. This is good because we can use both the patches, playing the same part usually, to layer the overall part. What this does, is gives us a multi-timbre part, effectively giving us a more interesting dynamic.
So that is layering, in the sense of sample library layering. But there is another type of layering. When you're creating building sections, like that of my last track, 'Here Come The Drums' for example, you might want the percussion section to be prominent in the mix. If you have only used part of the entire frequency spectrum for most of the track, what you can and probably should do is layer the frequencies. So this means making sure you find, within the percussion, instruments to play parts that have sub-bass frequencies, all the way up to 5k Hz and beyond.
N.B. The human ear can hear anywhere between 20-20k Hz of the frequency spectrum, although most humans, especially adults and older, will have considerably decreased hearing and may only be able to hear between 200-15k Hz, for example. But as always, aim for the best, and even those with non-optimal hearing will still have a good experience.
Tuned Percussion
The tuned percussion section of my template serves two purposes. It makes things clearer, by separating the huge array of instruments that I might use from the percussion section. But it also gives me more control over processing and mixing, later down the road.
But also don't forget, these seemingly separate sections of percussion are still just percussion instruments, one way or another, so they all can be used to achieve the same layering principle I talked about previously. The one about the frequency layering, mind you.
Choirs
Now the choirs are really fun. They're also very complicated. and really important too. Have you ever listened to the climax of an action-adventure or fantasy (Lord of the Rings, for example) and not heard choirs? Maybe, but not often. The human voice is very capable, especially when you have large full choirs, including Sopranos, Altos, Tenors and Basses.
The choirs are complicated, for two reasons. The technology required to create realistic choirs, in the sample library template is incredibly clever, complicated stuff, using various technologies, like scripting, to create the illusion of real choirs.The other reason that the choir is complicated, is because each section within the choir can be given different parts to play, creating a complex texture that stands out to the listener. But this is all fun when you get things the way you want them, and they sound amazing.
Pianos & Harps
Pianos are super useful instruments. Most composers believe that if any element of the orchestral composition you've made, doesn't work on the piano, or if all parts of the composition don't work together when all played on the piano, then they won't work. Or at least, they won't sound great.
Now, I have two pianos in my template. This is, perhaps, a little greedy but hey, it's my template. I have two pianos because they're both very different, they're samples from not only two different brands of a piano but two very different Sounding Pianos.
I have a Yamaha and a Bechstein. The Yamaha, is a very bright (timbrel) instrument, with much more attack (stabbier sounding notes) and the Bechstein is a much mellower sounding instrument. Both of these instruments are great for various situations and combination can be texturally more interesting than just one.
So you might be asking, why only two then Well, they're extremely large instruments, in terms of a number of samples and scripting to make them work, with a standard high-quality piano having at least 88 keys, with versions recorded with pedals and without, with the lid up and down and so on. This makes them very resource heavy, even to have just sitting around in my template, waiting for me to push buttons.
So I have two, and I am glad that I can even have two in my template.
Guitars
As you may know from some of my other posts, I am a guitarist. I've been playing for almost 12 years now. I have audio tracks, waiting, ready to for me to add some guitar part to my tracks when I feel it is necessary, appropriate or just fun.
There is a bonus benefit to playing the guitar and adding a real live performed guitar part to whatever track I am working on. Even if I play with a DI (Direct Inject) the fact that I don't play perfect, like a machine or like the MIDI regions should play, I infuse a bit of realism into the piece simply by playing it myself.
I have two audio tracks and a software instrument track for the guitars part of my template. Basically, I have two audio tracks, one for electric guitars and one for acoustic guitars. The software instrument is for bass guitar, sometimes it is nice to use different types of instrumentation, other than the huge array of instruments in the orchestra. For example, if I added bass, drums etc, I might add a rock flare to the track.
Long Strings
Long strings and short strings for that matter are separate due to the same reasons that the tuned and non-tuned percussion sections are separate. I have much greater control over the instruments and I can keep things simpler in terms of knowing what parts are playing when. I have individual tracks for instrument of the string section and with using East Wests samples, I don't need to give, say, muted strings their own patches, which would essentially double the amount of tracks needed for the Long STrings section of my template (I needed to do this before with Spitfire's Albion One library, though this was more of a computer resource issue than necessarily theirs).
Something worth noting with this setup is that I can control the different instruments of the entire section, especially in terms of panning, EQ etc. This is good because although East Wests strings, especially their Hollywood Strings library, come already panned due to the way they were recorded, you can further accentuate this effect, essentially making the stereo mix wider, which you might want.
Short Strings
Short strings are a different ball game to that of their longer, sustained counter-parts. I have ready and waiting, the most common patches I might use, for example, staccato, spiccato and pizzicato strings. This again just makes things much easier to deal with in terms of editing/processing and mixing as the pizz strings overall sound quality might need different treatment to that of their staccato equivalent.
Synthesizers (Synths)
Finally, we have the synths part of my template. This is usually the most flexible and therefore most interesting part of my templates. I usually have the same few synth elements from Spitfire's 'Stevenson Steam' library, which are essentially a bunch of their orchestral samples, recorded and processed to sound different. They're great, they're unique and not very popular, in that, not every other composer uses them. Which gives me an edge.
But like I said, this section is the most interesting because I change it in almost every track I work on. I might have one project where I barely use synths and one project where I use synths to play the main line, create rhythm, building risers and so on.
This is how I have it set up, usually.
Mixer
So the Mixer is a very important part of any Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), in my case, Logic Pro X. Thanks to modern technology, I can use these mixers to do interesting things, and with the advent of 64x systems, I can have anywhere up to 256 channels/auxes which give me huge theoretical control over my music, workflow, sub-mixes and mixes.
I typically have my mixer laid out from left to right as follows. First I have all my instrument sections.
As you can hopefully see, I have them colour coded. Really, this colour coding doesn't necessarily work for me In the conventional sense but it does serve the purpose regardless. I might not know that my strings are blue but I do know by looking that they're not Green and therefore I can find them much easier in the arrange window.
I also have all the MIDI regions in the arrange window colour coded, corresponding to their tracks and then, of course, their track stacks or groups.
I then have each section of my template (not the orchestra) going to different auxiliary tracks in the mixer. What this does is gives me control and makes it far easier to do sub-mixes and general mixes when it comes time to do that. I can easily balance the entire mix with only 8-10 faders, instead of trying to manage potentially anywhere between 50-100 tracks.
I then have all of my instruments using SENDS to send part of the instruments to another group of auxiliaries, with Reverbs on each track. I usually have it set up so that the same type of reverb is on each aux track but then each instrument sends differing amounts of the signal to the reverb, creating the illusion of depth in my mix. I do this because if I feel the need to do something interesting and not use the same reverb on every reverb aux, I can, without screwing up the entire project.
Stems
Now Stems. What are Stems? Well, Stems are these little technical things that you need to consider when you're creating material hopefully suitable for a commissioned project. A director might want to hear the entire mix which would be your standard stereo mix, but they might want to hear it without all the loud and epic brass. There are, of course, many reasons the director might want to or need to do this, for example, the dialogue in a TV ad might not be audible through or over the brass and large string ensemble, so providing them with Stems that separate all these elements of your mix is a good idea. They can either turn the whole thing up or down, edit it with EQ's or remove it entirely. Either way, you're giving that flexibility which is very important.
In my templates, I have 2-5 audio tracks, right at the bottom of my template, that receives signal from 2-5 auxes, that in turn receive their signals from the reverb and group auxes. For example, I might send the Wind's Reverb Aux and the Wind's Group Aux to Stem A, which then, in turn, gets outputted to the stereo output.
You can then have greater control. If you're someone like me that can call a track finished one day, then feel the need to tweak things the next day, you can still do this, by simply completing your tweak, and arming the stems to record and have them record the entire track. Then you have distinct tracks, called Stems, ready to be used if necessary.
I hope you've stuck with me so far and if you're still interested you might want to check out some of my other blog posts. There will be more to come in this series, so keep an eye out for that content. For now, thank you for reading and feel free to leave any comments below. Also, don't forget to share this content with people you think might find it interesting.