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Project 4, Session Diary 2: Sound design and foley

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Week 2, Monday 1st of May
Goals:
Work on the instrumental backing track, find out which instruments I want to record live and jam with Jonny who is a very talented guitarist
to possibly create an additional a top line or backing melody
Resources:
Electric guitar, Kemper, Guitar pedals, Midi keyboard, DAW (FL Studio, Logic), YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify, Microsoft Word
Diary:
This week I’ve almost completely finished the instrumental backing track, I am very happy with it and I’ve shown it to Lauren and Callum who gave me really positive feedback. I still need to change some minor things, for example, I’m not quite happy yet with the breakdown after the first chorus and additionally, I want to slightly alter the second chorus to make it a little bit more different from the first one.
I’ll probably do this by adding a live recorded guitar to it and possibly another synth layer.
Even though I’m well on schedule, I unfortunately, did not complete one of my weekly goals which was to jam with Jonny and write a guitar melody for the recording session in Week 4 (15th May). I am a bit disappointed in myself for not holding in this deadline but I will catch up on it to stay on time with my time plan.
I’ve worked a lot on sound design this week and have experimented a lot in Serum to try to create distorted leads that sound kind of like a distant violin. These sounds help to create a melancholy/sad vibe because they remind of distant cries and howls of agony which psychologically remind the brain of sad events.
Serum is my favorite synth only Harmor can compete with it in my opinion and it’s incredibly versatile. One of my favorite features is that it can take samples and resynthesize them to create even crazier sounds.
This week I also downloaded a massive amount of samples from Splice because my membership runs out on the 25th of May and I still had a bunch of credits to spend.
I was particularly interested in the foley section and delved deep into cinematic soundscapes and I’ve now decided to try to combine some cinematic elements into my compositions by using foley to enrich some of the parts that have less instruments in them. In my Project 4 instrumental I utilized foley in the intro in form of a sample of rain hitting the ground which slowly fades out as it goes into the chorus and additionally another sample of water dripping in a cave for the breakdown.
These samples help create an ambiance and add more depth to the track.


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