Pianobook - Octave Cascades
My favourite type of sampled instrument for theatre work lately has turned towards textures of organic instruments. Specifically the likes of Evo Grid work from Spitfire Audio which allows evolving textures all sorts of orchestral instruments to combine and make beautiful or dissonant evolving textures, something that can be very quick and simple to build in the heat of tech rehearsals!
I wanted to find a way of achieving a similar thing with the piano, inspired through the likes of Olafur Arnalds and his latest album ‘Remember’, having seen his multi felt piano set up live and loving the quality it gave.
So I had a moment in Kristiansand a few months back to record a second piano, I recorded this upright as a bit of an experiment, sampled the piano and mezzo piano layers and then went on to record a varying set of octaves randomly played, not to time, for each note I’d already sampled. I’d also tried a few other experimental things like hitting the key hard to use as a note off sample, this of course was an awful idea, so I scrapped that and kept with the octave idea. This is the kind of thing I mean….
Then I followed the normal process of editing each note and noise reducing, for both sets of samples. And decided to go the Kontakt route to package the layers into a single instrument.
Here’s the final GUI which is fairly simple in terms of what it does. The aim is to give you the ability to mix the octaves with the original single notes and switch either layer on and off. I also added a reverse function into the mix, I always love a bit of reverse piano and have struggled to find ways to usefully program that into a playable instrument, in this case I think it works quite well on the higher notes because there’s less of a decay for you to wait for until you hear the initial reversed samples, less good in the low end unless you’re holding it for a while. I might update that with less time to wait at some point… hmmm. What I like though is that reverse setting is only a reverse of the octave note textures, so again gives it a bit of a random feel to the whole texture.
The Piano book community have been amazingly putting together some brilliant demo’s I find them so inspirational to hear what different composers do with the instrument, and here they are…
Heres the link to the Piano book web page where you can download the Kontakt Instrument for free, plus a whole bunch of other free piano instruments. https://www.pianobook.co.uk/library/kristiansand-octave-cascade
The next step is to develop the idea using other instruments, hopefully allowing them to create textures in the same way. I quickly recorded an electric guitar for a show in Amsterdam and sampled it in a similar way, recording the initial notes and octaves, so I want to see if creating a new instrument is as simple as slotting in the new samples in place of the piano to create a new ‘Octave Cascade’ instrument.
More to come soon.
Sound Design Inspiration #13
PODCAST
Here’s a podcast with Steven Price, Oscar winning Composer talking a about his work on the Our Planet series of films, a little on Gravity and working with Edgar Wright.
SOUND EFFECTS
Some interesting new sounds from Hiss and Roar, continuing to bring new sounds to the table in imaginative ways!
London Marathon 2016 Recording
Last weekend was the London Marathon 2016. My girlfriend's brother ran and managed a time of 3:25:13. Awesome achievement.
In the moments when we weren't wandering around London trying to catch him, I managed to get a few short recordings.
I took the oppurtunity to take out my little portable stealth kit to see how well it performed. It consists of a Sound Devices 702 in a camera bag with two DPA4061's with mini rycote windshields strapped to either side of the bag.
Drums fuel of the atmosphere around Canary Wharf, I spent some time underneath a bridge where 2 taiko players were living.
After clambering up a railing I got a recording from slightly above the action, people with plastic hand clappers, horns in the distance, and the ever present drummers.
I think the setup performerd pretty well all told, there are some big pros and cons of it for sure.
Pro: It doesn't attract attention. Which leads to a more natural performance and causes less interruptions from interested passers by.
Con: positioning, It's difficult to be consistent with the mic positions, as there is a bag in the 30cm gap between the two mics, it's also not very natural sounding stereo image.
Next time around I might test out a different method of strapping the mics to the bag with a bit more precision and maybe some sort of stereo spacing bar involved in the bag to help.
Portable Recording Setup
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be in Lausanne for part of Complicité's 'The Encounter' tour. I took the opportunity to test out my portable recording rig thats slowly been pieced together the past few months.
Lausanne 2015
Earlier in the year I went on tour to Asia and took my Rycote Blimp and found so many places where it was just unrealistic to whip it out and start recording, the inevitable "whats that" would be all over the recordings. So in comes the portable solution, I have a bunch of portable all-in-one recorders which are much less attention grabbing. But having put money into a Sound Devices recorder I bought a set of DPA 4061's to try out with it. I've had some reasonable success with sticking these things in my ears to get binaural recordings, but wanted to mount them onto a bag that also contains the 702 so it was super inconspisuous and can just sit there when I want to put it down. A camera bag seemed like the most logical solution, there may be better ways, but I went and bought a messenger bag from a nearby camera shop.
Photo 03-09-2015 10 36 53
A customisable camera bag with multiple sized velcro panels was able to fit everything and any excess cable to sit below the 702, plus having a weird sized battery is was also fine! Heres a short recording of Lake Geneva, I stood maybe a 1.5 metres away from the shoreline and let the bag dangle in front of me...
I'm looking at other solutions to how I can attach the mics to the bag to allow for less movement noise and perhaps better stereo imaging, there seems to be a little dead spot in the centre on some recordings... Either way, the fact that no one asked "what is that" made it all worth it!!
