Sound. Part 7. Music.

Music is one of the areas we did especially well on The Payoff. My friend Simon did a great score for it. I will be definitely using him again. I knew that he worked, this time I thought we should try something different.

On The Payoff I gave Simon a brief to work to, but I didn't have much creativity over it. This time I wanted to have more control over it. I decided to try and write something myself. A friend, Luke, had been helping me with all the sound. Setting up equipment, pushing record and monitoring. Between the two of us we can play a host of instruments.

There wasn't any music on the Torture sequence. I wanted to create more of a sound scape, building up ambiences to make something that sounded horrible.

On NN we wanted the music to help with the suspense. I had it in mind to repeat the same bar of music. I hoped this would create an irritation, kind of like an alarm. I thought this would be symbolic towards the male character. He is constantly bothering the lady, becoming an irritation.

We played around with the classic orchestral instruments in garage band, but I have a real sour feeling about using pre-recorded or plugin instruments. After not long with playing with the sounds, I thought that if I wanted this sort of sound I should have arranged real people to play real instruments. I definitely want to do this for my FMP, but it would need good organising and time.

Failing that we turned to something familiar, Guitars. I've been playing guitars for many years, electric, acoustic, fretless, bass etc. Also between Luke and myself we have rather lovely equipment, which cost us a lot of money. It would be a crying shame to not use these instruments we love, for fake midi ones.

I wanted the music to sound calm, but also have sense of something wrong. We did this by the main guitar part's second route note being slightly off key. It isn't the note you would predict to follow. The tune is a 4.4 timing, and is two bars long. On the second bar instead of having four route notes, we chose to use two, which created a dragging sense. It also moves up just one note, these two elements help build the tension.

With it looping it gives you a mix feeling as the audience listening. It sounds nice, but keeps hitting a bad feeling. Much like how you feel about the male character. He comes across as a nice person, but you feel there could be something nasty about him.

We layered five guitar tracks to create the sound new wanted, (in the hand in you can listen to the individual tracks and the complete score).

I've already written about the main guitar, but to add further detail we used a capo on the fifth fret. This gave a tighter sound and a usual tuning. To help boost the route notes we record the guitar again, this time only playing the route notes like a bass guitar (file name gbass). We than again picked out the route notes much high, to create a harmony. We used a Vibrato tremolo effect, which gave the guitar a vintage spine-chilling feel (file name gvib). We also reversed that same guitar, which intensified the feeling we were going for (file name gvibrev). The last track is the bass guitar, we played the same notes as "gbass". However we detuned the bass to drop D, to give the whole track a thick underlining.

This was a tough job for the time restraint. I'm fairly pleased with the outcome.