How I Did It
Trust (2.12am)by AT
Tools I Used
Roland XV5050 module.
Dimension Pro soft synth.
Sonar Studio.
Process
Trust seems to have bought on many “how i did it” questions so I thought I would put up just that. Now before going any further understand that I really have not the faintest idea about what I’m doing, I’m still quite an amateur in all this electronic music making thing and tend to just put in effects, sounds, treatments just to see what the outcome is, some times I get lucky!
So anything you read take with a grain of salt and forgive any technical errors, I’m sure theres many here that have a better way of doing it.
1. make click track
2. placed Anchors vocal track over click track, cut up where needed. No rhyme or reason at this point just what I thought were natural breaks in the vocals.
3. Played around with chords and basic harmonies using a piano sound and recorded midi track.
4. Played and recorded Violin Pizzicato strings over piano track.
5. delete piano track.
6. Set up XV5050 module -it has four tones- set Tone 1+2 to pizzicato violin, set Tone 3+4 to spiccato violin. Adjusted the velocity so that spiccato strings came in around velocity 100.
Adjusted panning and volume of each tone so that the overall sound was nice a full and the spiccato strings had that nice raspy (?) bow sound. All done in within the sound module so when I played back the pizzicato strings midi track through the module I just adjusted the velocity of certain notes so the spiccato strings came in when I wanted them to.
I then went and added a second midi track over the top of the first to get the really spiccato violin effect at the end.
7. chose a preset sound in dimension pro soft synth that was close to what I wanted, basically something with strings and woodwind. Again just recorded a midi track and then adjusted the velocities within the synth and on the track so that each tone came in when I wanted it to.
I wanted a nice deep orchestral string sound to balance out the spiccato and fill it out a bit and a wood wind to give a little melody.
8. I thought I still needed more at the end so I added another woodwind track that starts at 2.37, again XV5050 was source.
A lot of the sound adjustments were done at the source of the sound, at this point id recorded everything in midi and was just playing it over and over and adjusting sounds as I went.
Once I was happy I just bounced midi to audio tracks. So ended up with just three instrument audio tracks.
Track one-pizz/spic strings–added reverb (tiny little bit more Hall type), and modulator fx (a preset was called Fat String Ensemble so thought that was good place to start) slight adjustments made in the delay, mix,
Track two-orch strings/woodwind-no audio fx added to this one-any reverb, modulation, etc was done within the soft synth.
Track Three-woodwind, added a little bit of delay just to soften it out a bit.
Listened to all three tracks together–eq the pizz/spic track just to get as much “stab” as I could on the spiccato strings.
I ended up doing two vocal tracks, could nt get the sound I wanted with just one.
Vocals track one- added short reverb, delay, compressor, EQ (increased the mid/high)
Vocals track two-added EQ (bought up the high a lot!!!) reverb- again started with a preset called Central Station because its name seemed to imply it would give what I wanted and just tweaked here and there.
I found if I buried vocal track two way under vocal track one I could get Anchors voice to be where I needed it. With one track I just could not get the eq balance right.
Thats basically it, just went through and made panning/volume envelopes here and there and then made my final track. So I hate to say it but it was only four tracks of audio, once I got them it was quite easy to make those four tracks work together.
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