Animation X Audio project Update 1 - The Journey Begins

So project two has finally begun! I said in my intro to project two blog that I would updating you guys regularly with my projects and that the first one would come this Sunday so here it is! I must say, for the first day in the studio, Jackson and I have made some serious ground in terms of starting the project. But enough beating around the bush! Let's jump right in!

The session

At first, Jackson and I had no idea what to do as neither of us had created sounds to a specific theme before. However, we were not just going to sit around twiddling our thumbs and wasting time. If there's one thing I've learnt from all of my projects, its that if you're ever stuck in a jam, YouTube is probably your best bet and that's exactly what we did. Surprisingly, searching 'how to make space synths in N.I's Massive' gave us an instant result which was exactly what we were hoping for! Below I've linked the video we used to guide us through our sound creation for anybody who is interested in making this sort of stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ShijnVrslI&t=63s

Screenshot from today's studio session in Ableton Live

After experimenting with different keys for a while, we finally settled on B minor, at least for now anyway. We didn't want to be wasting any more time than we needed to so we immediately began creating the melody!

Making 'Spacey' melodies

Now on to the interesting stuff, the creation of the 'space' melody. Below you'll find a screenshot of the wavetable used to create our melody. The first thing to note is that although we had 3 oscillators running, we only wound up using and routing the first two of them to the actual filter. Speaking of filter's only one of them was necessary for this sound unlike the chords, which I will get to in a minute. For this specific sound, we used a simple Lowpass 4 filter with an envelope attached to the cutoff, giving it that 'plucky' kind of sound instead of basic glide notes. From this, we decided to throw some reverb on it to give it some more width in the mix and to make it even wider we also added a dimension expander! We found that this sound was exactly what we were going for and that it will sound really nice as a top line melody throughout the course of the soundtrack.

Screenshot of the wavetable for the melody synth in N.I's Massive

Next up - the Chords

For the chords of the song, we felt as though they should be long, smooth and light. Therefore, by taking some notes out of my previous project, I created a soft, future bass style chord progression to sit at the back of the mix. In order to do this, I opened two of the 3 oscillators in massive and assigned a standard square-saw wave to both of them. You'll notice immediately that I tuned one of the waves up by almost an entire octave. Whereas, the other has only slightly been tuned up. This was purposefully done to create just enough harmonisation between the two waves to really bring out that future style sound. As mentioned earlier, both filters in Massive were utilised in creating this sound as filter 1 was set to Daft and filter 2 was set to Highpass 4. However, filter 2 was only used to bring out a very small amount of high frequencies, just enough to make them shine in the synth. On the other hand, filter 1 was creating most of the sound with much less of a cutoff. However, please note that this is only one of the multiple chord layers that is yet to come in this project.

the bass

Since we had the chords and melody down, we figured it was time for the bass to come in. Funnily enough, even though the bass is probably one of the easiest sounds to create in a mix, we seemed to struggle in finding the right one and just couldn't pin point it on our own. I then found myself resorting to something I didn't think I would do, but desperate times call for desperate measures... presets here we come! Considering the fact that Massive has a ridiculous amount of presets sounds to choose from, we figured that we'd just start with the first one. Luckily, we hit the jackpot right off the bat with the '1991' preset. However, there were certain traits to this sound that were rather annoying such as it's initial trigger or 'start'. This made the sound a little too intense for us to use however, we came to realise quickly after mucking around with waves for a bit that there was a fair amount of bright noise in the mix. Once we cranked that bad boy down the bass smoothed out and we were home free!

finally - the kick

Now, granted, this one needs some work. After getting most of the key elements into the track, we decided to experiment with different kick drums to see if we could liven up the mix a little bit. I quickly came to realise that the same kick drums that we used in the last project weren't going to work for this one as they didn't mix well together and simply don't suit this theme. We then decided to go hunting through the Ableton stock kick samples until we eventually found this one. With the help of a little EQ, it seemed to be punching through the mix just enough not to overpower anything. I seem to forget sometimes that I'm not just making another banger! However, this is not exactly a vital part of the mix as it is still in the experimentation phase. I would like for it to be part of the final soundtrack and it most likely will be, it's just a matter of finding the absolute right one for the job.

but... we've only just begun

Overall, I believe the session today was a success given the fact that we have only just begun. Once we get a hold of some animations from Cam we can really get the ball rolling! Can't wait to bring you guys more updates on this projects very soon! Until then, I'll seeya in the next one!

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