Getting things going

Pre-Production (actually happened in week one just talking about it here)

For the project that I will be undertaking I teamed up with a fellow audio engineer Oliver Haigh-Childs to assist me with the production, orchestration, and composition of the film soundtrack. By having more than one person contribute to the project I believe the finished outcome will be able to appeal to a wider audience because it won't be dominated by one person's ideas.

From this me and Oliver started to make a Pre-Production Plan listing aspects such as, why the project is relevant, time frame and schedule for completing objectives to finish the project on time, how we will compose and bring the soundtrack together, the basic background to the project, and so on and so on, you get the picture.

As we both don't have a great deal of experience with EMP it will be good for both of us to help each other in learning and developing these production skills together rather than working out this stuff alone, one of the many advantages of group work.

Pitching the project (now in week 2)

Sooooo, start the week off with pitching the main elements/ideas of our movie soundtrack project with my group member Oliver to the SAE lecturers and other audio students. The pitch went well as we both had a good idea of what the project is about and a clear understanding of what the final outcome will be. We got some good feedback from the lecturers and students that helped to solidify our ideas and to think about potential areas in the plan that may be lacking or could do with more research, all of which will help the end product.

It was also a good experience to see what the other students are doing for their projects as it provides us with an opportunity to potentially implement other peoples ideas into our own production.

Leading on from the project pitching I started to record a few guitar tracks/riffs that will form the base of the soundtrack, these will be a rough starting point where we can make a scratch track of our main ideas. The guitar riffs will act as loops that we can mix and mingle with EMP elements. I also gave these tracks to Oliver for him to work out which ones he liked the best and to begin formulating some ideas.

This is an image of the Pro Tools session with the different guitar riff loops I have recorded, they're in the key of F# Locrian with a flat 4th (why, because it sounds metal as F&*$) and 190BPM and go for mostly 2 to 4 bars with a couple of larger one. I worked them out by listening the Killer Instinct soundtrack and Fear Factory to really get that low sounding driving guitar feel.

I will discuss my process of recording guitar tracks and why I went with this style of metal in a following blog.

Listen and listen critically

Something that was introduced to us also this week was critical listening and track teardowns. Everyone listens to music in some form throughout our lives but for us audio engineers listening and enjoying music is just not enough to expand our craft.

Critical listening is where you identify certain aspects of a track and how they come together to make the track sound the way it does.

There are many aspects that make up a track with the process of identifying and analysing them called a track teardown, which is just the formula or template that helps with the critical listening process. I will be conducting one of these on my reference track for this project as to better understand how to create my track and utilise some of it's EMP elements.