I'm in need of some practical advice. I've attached a link to a little ambient interlude idea I had. It's nothing but a quick idea yet, but I'm shooting for a sort of ambient interlude that is more atmosphere than song, and what I have represented here is essentially an exercise in the "sparseness" that I'm going for.
The idea is that there is a sort of intentionally fake "cosmic sea" or "wind" noise that eats up most of the space, and then some percussion. The sea/wind is Synth1 run through Valhalla Vintage Verb and is supposed to be the most "vast" sounding part, while the taiko and ewe / toke metals are just my attempt to add some color and depth (what I would like to try is a clunky, atonal windchime, but I don't have any samples of one yet). They are running into Valhalla Room with a rather short, "roomy" setting that I think might be a bit too wide sounding for what I'm going for. My thought is that these elements need to be drier than the synth, otherwise they don't give the impression of being out in some open space, though leaving them totally dry doesn't really do it for me, either.
So this is a bit outside the usual VO conversation, but I'm looking for thoughts and tips on the same core stuff--panning, reverb, etc. Thoughts on how to make it an interesting ambient track are encouraged, too. This is basically just me screwing around right now.
I noticed it's a bit quiet (which explains why the waveform isn't showing up, maybe?) so you might have to crank it (sorry).
After finally getting my hands on a classic Roland SC-88 sound module and getting to experiment a little bit with its sounds and interface, the first thing that came to my mind was of course to compose a track in the style of the game music of the DOS era!
I had to do some serious digging in the user manual (yes, it came with the original manual too) in order to make this thing run smoothly using Reaper but in the end I was very happy with the result.
For extra authenticity I used the SC-55 sound map which in my opinion has less realistic but more "balanced" sounds.
So check it out and please let me know of your opinion!
Remembered I had new site and this thing called Kontakt and a buddy named Sam who keeps recording lots of things that make noise. So I finally got around to start The Second Sound Library for Kontakt which will eventually replace my somewhat unwieldy GM soundset for Kontakt page on the old blog. Also lots of brass and wind CC0 instruments from David Healey.
I split this off from the Lore thread since I'm about to go even more off-topic here.
I know this is probably not the place for stuff like this, but I don't know where else to post it TBH. I haven't done any serious fictional writing in years and I'm not a member of any writing forums -- in fact I'm not even aware of any. So I'll just throw this out here and see where it goes.
When I wrote Greater things, I was fully aware that while it does work as a self-contained little yarn, it also felt like the first chapter of a bigger story. Writing about locations and briefly mentioned characters (Olvan and Jedd in particular) I got a lot of ideas for expanding on what was in there. For fun, I started writing a second chapter. And came up with even more details that I wanted to expand upon. And then a third. And now I'm at the point where I think I could actually make a small novel out of this.
The working title is Strands of Darkness and it's an oldschool sword and sorcery romp, inspired by pen & paper roleplaying games, the gamebooks of the 1980's, and the pulp stories of the early 1900's. Actually, there's a little bit of Western in there as well, with its frontier settlements, lawless regions, ghost towns and whatnot. The first three five chapters can be found here:
I'm probably deluding myself here, thinking that I could write something in a second language that someone would want to read, but hey. It's mostly for a bit of fun. It's not meant to be a highbrow fantasy epic.
Taking a break from the mixing and tweaking for a few days because heat is killing me, I wrote a short story called Greater things. Kind of [edit: not kind of, directly] inspired by the theme and song titles of Lore. PDF version here, EPUB version here. If you're interested in checking it out (it's just 12 pages long), let me know how it looks on your end and if you spot any grammatical errors or other language blunders.
Flamestudio instruments are licensed under GPL, so why not make an SFZ version because the format's supposed to be more capable than SF2 (which the version was more limited than the original Gigasampler versions)? The original intention is to make a more accessible version that matches the original .gig files in terms of functionality and features.
Eventually all Gigastudio presets should carry over to every instrument without having to download Linuxsampler (which the plugin could not load on my Mac).
For the rest I just used Polyphone 1.9 to convert the SF2 versions to SFZ. I think I'd rather put out an incomplete beta version first and let someone finish the original Gigastudio programming ported over to sfz. Kinwie's not active as of 2018, so anyone else can help?
Note the instruments still have some problems. I really wish I could fix that but it would take some time to learn the workings of the SFZ format. Otherwise someone should step in and help complete this collection.
For example the last setting with the FS instrument name could not control the reverb tail and LFO no matter what setting I use. Only the vibrato and release...
I've been working on a new article about retro-style virtual orchestration the latest days (the inspiration came from doing this). But I'm kind of stuck as I can't come up with a) a good way of finishing it (I'm thinking maybe some mention of actually getting hold of the hardware itself?) and b) a fitting title. I know it's lengthy and maybe not very interesting for the majority of VO-minded people, but if you feel inclined and have the time I'd appreciate if you'd give this a look. I'll be posting it on my site once it's done, and it'll have some images to break up the wall of text (yay)!
