Sound Tracks and Sound Effects
It is amazing the amount of difference the sound track can make to a movie.
Imagine a movie about space, which actually sounded like space!
What we think of as space sounds are probably the outputs of early synthesisers with ring modulators.
For the final sequence of the Smuggler Bill movie, where Bill meets his end, which we made earlier, I used the Scorefitter feature of Pinnacle Studio to generate a score and purchased recorded clips of horses galloping, neighing, whooshes, thuds etc. I placed these at appropriate points on the movie time line, when I assembled them with the iClone video clips in Pinnacle Studio.
Sometimes we might want to make our own sound effects, or if we are musically inclined, compose our own score.
I am not a musician but have long been fascinated by synthesisers (synthesizers to some). I especially love the old analogue ones. Moog is probably one of the best known names in synthesiser technology, but of course there were many others. The EMS VCS3 was a very popular synthesiser for making spacey sounding effects like those in the BBC television series Doctor Who. Of course we won’t be needing any space sounds for our Smuggler Bill movie, but these sort of synths were also great for making sounds such as waves crashing, wind howling, rain pouring and thunder rumbling.
These old synthesisers from the 1970s and 1980s can often be found on eBay, but they cost a fortune and have several disadvantages. Often their electronics are unstable, so sounds drift when they shouldn’t. In addition most are monophonic so you can’t play chords with them.
Software emulations of some of these have been available for over a decade and they are improving all the time. These emulations generally fix the weaknesses already mentioned and more.
Arturia software versions of Mini Moog, ARP2600 & Prophet 5 synthesisers
Those shown above are ones I bought recently as part of the Arturia Collection. They can be played as stand alone instruments on your desktop (which is fine for generating sound effects), or integrated with a sequencer through a standard such as VST and RTAS (great for the budding composer).
The version I bought was a download version, because I wanted to get hold of them quickly. I soon found that because I was using an old computer for music making, which I will want to upgrade soon, it is better to also buy a USB eLicenser. This looks like a USB thumb drive. It turned out that I was able to install the software on my old Windows XP computer immediately and activate it. A few days later when the USB eLicenser arrived I was able to transfer the licenses onto that. Now I can install the Arturia synths on as many computers as I wish, but they will only play in demo mode on the computers to which the USB eLicenser is not attached.
You can download demo versions of these and others from the Arturia web site ( http://www.arturia.com/ ) if you would like to try them out. The demo versions have various restrictions and will time out after a few minutes and need to be restarted unless a license is purchased. However trying them will soon give you a feel as to how useful they may be to you.
There are also many free VST and other virtual instruments, which can be downloaded from the internet. In addition magazines such as Computer Music magazine periodically include all the software required to build a full music studio on their included DVD.
I hope you have as much fun making weird noises with synthesisers as I do.
Tony
NB: When I tried to install the eLicenser software (which incidentally is a Steinberg product) I go a message saying that it could not be installed because my operating system (Windows XP) is too old and that it is only compatible with Windows 7 upwards. However the Arturia support team responded quickly to my email and sent me a link to an older version, which worked fine on Windows XP.