The Boom Box Post blog provides insights into the creative sound design process of Boom Box Post's owners and employees.
Viewing entries tagged
music
Picking up where Kate left off back in 2015, I decided to try my hand at crafting a soundtrack that evoked the spirit of slasher movies! Including all the cliche hits like chainsaws, blood curdling screams, jump-scares and spooky forests. Take a listen!
When done right, the music montage is a wonderful thing. The right song or classic bit of score can bring an audience to an entirely new emotional level. If you don’t believe me, go watch the first ten minutes of Pixar’s “Up,” some incredibly devastating filmmaking; a master course in montage.
So how do you approach music montages in your mix? What are some of the basic techniques and rules to follow? Below, I lay out my best practices.
As a mixer of a lot of Disney content, I have years of experience mixing musical numbers (or songs, as we call them). As someone who came into post-production sound mixing from a classical music and music engineering and mixing background, this is one of my favorite parts of the job. It brings me so much joy to have the privilege to integrate amazing Broadway-style musical numbers and carefully crafted pop songs of all genres into the stories that kids consume. A great song can be a wonderful extension of the story–not just adding a little pizzazz, but bringing the entire story to new depths.
This month, the Comic-Con Museum in San Diego held a one-day symposium titled Storytelling Across Media which provided professional panels geared toward aspiring writers, artists, musicians, and media professionals interested in the art of storytelling. I had the pleasure of being invited to be a panelist on the topic of “Storytelling in Music and Sound.” They invited an array of industry professionals and asked us each to invite a collaborator of our choosing in order to delve into our collaborative processes of using music and sound to further our storytelling. I was ecstatic to have been invited, and immediately thought of bringing Greg Nicolett, the underscore composer on Pupstruction, to join me.
Tim was recently challenged with designing ambiences for a series of shorts that had a lot of action. The clients very smartly requested these builds have a rhythmic quality to them, allowing them to play in the background without distracting too much from what was happening on-screen. Check out how this was accomplished!
One of the biggest challenges in sound design is creating unique and beautiful design work that will work with the musical score rather than against it. Because television schedules are tight, composers often need absolutely every moment they can get, and the music goes directly to the mix stage without the sound design team ever hearing it. In a dream world, we would be constantly collaborating with the composers and music departments. But unfortunately, we’re often on two secluded islands, trying to create something fantastic on our own, and just hoping that it will work when it’s all put together in the mix.
As I get more and more experience as the re-recording mixer, I’ve come to intuitively understand what will work and what will never work in a sound design build once the music is added, no matter how cool it sounds in the sound effects preview.
The key to designing sound that will work flawlessly with any musical score hinges greatly on the use of inharmonic elements rather than harmonic ones. But to understand what will work and when, we need to dive deep into the concept of harmonic versus inharmonic elements.
On occasion, a sound editor’s musical skills are put to the test when they are asked to recreate a tune or song for a specific sound effect. For example, in the second episode of Yuki 7, the alarm clock that goes off matches the theme song of the show, which you can listen to starting at 1:11 in the video below. For sound editors with no musical training, this task can be particularly challenging. So for this blog, I’m going to teach you how to recreate a melody to use with any sound effect just by listening to it!
Over at our other company, Boom Box Library, we recently released “Magic Chimes,” a library of mark tree and bell tree recordings for sound design and music applications. The library has been a big success thus far, clearly filling a need in the sound library community. Creating it from scratch was very fun, so I thought it would be interesting to share the process with you.
Before audio post-production was even a possibility, composers would incorporate the emotion and the action of what they saw on the screen into their musical scores. They played the role of sound FX editor and composer, with a technique referred to as “Mickey-Mousing” where the composer would exaggerate a character’s movements with specific orchestration and musical motives. Now that sound FX editors have taken this role in post-production, Mickey-Mousing is less common, so it’s key for sound FX editors to make cuts that work with the music in the overall mix for a film or tv-show. Here are some considerations and tips that our team shared on their approach to editing with music in mind.
If you’re anything like me, music can be a useful tool to help keep you motivated and focused during times like these. So for today’s post, I have put together a playlist of songs that contain sound effects. My hope is that this list will lift your spirits and bring some fun to your day.
During the first week of November, my alma mater, the DePaul University School of Music, held an 11-day music festival with numerous masterclasses, panel discussions, and concerts to commemorate the unveiling of its new Holtschneider Performance Center. I was asked to take part in the panel discussion sponsored by the Sound Recording Technology department titled Women in Audio Engineering. The panel sought to bring to light the fact that although women are a minority in music production and audio engineering (according to Women’s Audio Mission, women make up five percent of all audio professions), there are many notable women contributing in these fields.
