Amberwolf

The Moon, It Read To Me, And It Was Bright https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-moon-it-read-to-me-and-it-was-bright This one started out purely electronic, a bit after making Neotenous Chordata, but while editing it, evolution thru experimentation occured, and I ended up with this odd soundscape. I left both versions up on Bandcamp, because they're really different songs at this point. All constructive criticism welcome. (I'm no professional; it's just a (very important to me) hobby, so improvement is always possible, and easier with help from others. Heck, I'm not even a musician, or a real composer, etc.) Song notes: Extended orchestral vocal version of a song whose name woke me from a dream to make me write it down; there's a movie scene out there waiting for this one: The first vocals you hear are built and modified from a collection called Gaelic Voices by the BBC called LABS, played using Spitfire Audio (they also have several versions of the BBC Discover Symphony Orchestra; I only have the most basic one). I played these in with MIDI notes to get full vocalizations from the library, then cut them up and adjusted pitches and volumes for the segments I wanted until they fit in the mix. Because of the way they designed the library, these sound pretty good the way they are, since it's intended to be played like this. But the operatic vocals are built and modified from a free sample collection by MusicRadar that includes a few bits from each of several of their full collections. This required manually importing each sound I wanted to use, then cutting them up into separate vocalizations and adjusting volume envelopes and pitches manually for many hours until they sounded something like what I wanted. In the mix, it's pretty good--by themselves they sound terrible, very unnatural. The orchestral percussion was going to be from the BBC DSO but I ran into trouble with the virtual audio cable used to connect it to SONAR crashing repeatedly (after working perfectly for days to do the Gaelic Voices stuff), so I ended up using some BigFishAudio free sample collection pieces to build things like the Taiko crescendos, kettle drum bits, etc from. Like the operatic vocals, these were much more tedious since I couldn't just play it in, and instead had to import the wave files and manually set them up and modify them for each sound used in the song. Additional backing vocal effects from Spellsinger (a vocal sampler kit by Hunter Rogerson), using DecentSampler. Almost all the rest of the sounds come from synths built into ancient SONAR from close to two decades ago, as with the effects used to process them, mostly Dimension and Z3TA+2. More of various styles at https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com with older and more experimental / unfinished work at http://soundclick.com/amberwolf

Neotenous Chordata https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/neotenous-chordata EDM-ish track. Bass-heavy according to previous listeners. All constructive criticism welcome. (I'm no professional; it's just a (very important to me) hobby, so improvement is always possible, and easier with help from others. Heck, I'm not even a musician, or a real composer, etc.) More of various styles at https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com with older and more experimental / unfinished work at http://soundclick.com/amberwolf

Current WIP is: Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt) https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/ookami-no-kari-no-yume Like most of my stuff, this one is more of a soundtrack to a visual, what i call "Motion Picture Scenes", rather than a typical song. *** While listening, imagine a wolf having a dream of being in a pack of wolves that spot something and chase it thru snowy hilly terrain with small clusters of trees (and no, wolves wouldn't howl, yip, or make other noises while chasing, but some artistic license was taken so the listener can better get into the visualization). (if you're bored with a section, wait a moment and things will change....then tell me why you were bored with a part and which part it is) All constructive criticism welcome. (I'm no professional; it's just a (very important to me) hobby, so improvement is always possible, and easier with help from others. Heck, I'm not even a musician, or a real composer, etc.) Song notes This one is much faster than most of my stuff, 130bpm vs the usual 100-110, and was a lot harder to create all of but especially the percussion tracks for than usual, since it's too fast for me to play along with (and speeding it up after playing doesn't get the same feel from my recording); the sections of each drum/etc were all manually drawn in note by note (then sections copied and edited to build the track from as needed). Because of the complexity, I started working on it with When the Dark Closed In and Night Eclipsed Day amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/when-the-dark-closed-in-and-night-eclipsed-day and then The Silent Uncounted amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-silent-uncounted to being the pattern creation process, so parts of WtDCIaNED's and TSU's percussion tracks are similar (precursors) to the ones in Ookami. It's still in-progress, so there are a fair number of repetitive lead / etc sections that I am still "variating", and I am still working on the tension-breaks (the synthflute part requires building whole new sounds to create the track as it needs to be, and that is a complicated process), but it is listenable as it is. (EDIT: most of the synflute parts are completed) Not all the segments of each track are the same length, so as they are overlaid, they overlap--some track's sections are 7 bars, some are 8, some are 6 or 5 or 4. So there are multiple different things interacting, which hopefully conveys a pack of wolves chasing something down along separate but parallel paths in the snow.... I also used some (modified) samples of JellyBeanThePerfectlyNormalSchmoo's panting in a few places. I don't yet have any good recordings of her yipping (which she only does in her "puppydreams") and and being a St Bernard rather than a wolf, she (thankfully) doesn't howl, so those I will have to record the yips, and build the howls and/or other types of sounds (snarls, etc) out of other sounds she makes or that I can make (I haven't found anything licensed as free-to-use online that's what I really want, so the wolf sounds in it are temporary until I can create (or less likely find) what I want). "Cover art" image was generated from the AI Test Kitchen at Google, minimally edited afterwards by me to add my name and the track and/or album name. Uses pixabay.com/sound-effects/coyotes-of-pelham-2-55522/ by Rgrgreig; labelled as "Coyotes, Howling, Yipping sound effect. Free for use." Also uses pixabay.com/sound-effects/wolves-fighting-227005/ by Alex_Jauk; labelled as "Wolves, Fighting, Dominance sound effect. Free for use." Also uses modified samples of my own dog's panting, as well as some other wolf sounds I already had stored locally but do not have tag information for, originally sourced from publicly available wolf videos on YT. More of various styles at https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com with older and more experimental / unfinished work at http://soundclick.com/amberwolf @jack c.@Wookiee (and anyone else following the thread that hasn't posted) It's been updated with some general edits and additional backing sounds. Same link: There will be more updates as time goes on and I figure out how to do various things (every song is a learning and discovery process). Still working on the wind-instrument parts to augment the synflute-like sections, they're difficult to work with to get the sound i want, so none of those are in there yet. @jack c.@Wookiee (and anyone else following the thread that hasn't posted) Apparently when I rendered this out last time, (version 200283V) it broke the volume automation on wolf sounds tracks and made them all more than twice as loud as they should be, so after some further edits I rerendered it out as version 200289Y and verified it didn't do it again this time. (weird intermittent bug, I guess). New version 082424 000001 200327Af with some mix changes, various detail percussion edits (taking out various notes interfering with things, some timing changes in hand perc), added a new string section (Dimension Pro's GPO full strings short bows, tweaked for much shorter release time) for better bass and cello in various sections, since I couldn't get a good fast attack on any of the SI Strings in the bass or cello, regardless of settings. https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/ookami-no-kari-no-yume-wolfs-dream-of-the-hunt

Thank you very much for creating these plugins; several of them would be very useful in my "music" creation process...but first I have to get them to show up in SONAR, so I need a bit of help. 😳 I can install the MFX without any errors, but they do not show up in any of the menus with other MFX, nor do they show up in the Cakewalk Plugin Manager window's MFX list (even in the excluded or permanently excluded lists). I am still using an ancient version of SONAR, on a non-updatable early-Win10 machine (if I update anything, it screws things up so things I need to work in a specific exact way don't work that way anymore, or don't work at all, etc). I tried to put CbB on there at one time and had to do a restore of the machine to the point before I did that in order to get things working again, so I can't use newer versions. (so if these plugins require a newer version, I can't use them; I hope that is not the case). I have been able to manually register other MFX (like TenCrazy's stuff), and even certain DX effects that come as registerable dlls. (this process still works; I verified that I can unregister a TenCrazy MFX, open SONAR and see that it isn't there, then close SONAR, reregister the dll, reopen SONAR, and see that it is now back and works when inserted into a MIDI track effects bin (or clip fx bin). I get no errors (just the success dialog as expected) when registering or unregistering the Variorum MFX, using either the provided install routines and batch files, or using the simple manual regsvr32 process (which I long ago added to my SendTo folder so I only have to right click on a dll to reg/unreg it--I can post that trick if anyone needs it). Each is placed in it's own folder inside the C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Shared MFX\Variorum\ subfolder, since the readmes and bat files are all identically named, and I didn't want to go thru and rename them all (so they can all be in one folder) and debug anything that might cause problems with. If it won't cause problems, and would fix the issue, I will rename those files and place all of them inside the root Shared MFX subfolder instead. (or wherever is necessary to make them work--what I have seen posted indicates it shouldn't matter where they are as long as they stay where they were sucessfully registered from). I'd like to do more to thank you for making these (whether they can be made to work on my system or not), but all I can offer is the music that may be improved (or made less tedious to create), such as the present work-in-progress Ookami no Kari no Yume /track/ookami-no-kari-no-yume (while listening, imagine a wolf having a dream of being in a pack of wolves that spot something and chase it thru snowy hilly terrain with small clusters of trees (and no, wolves wouldn't howl while chasing, but some artistic license was taken so the listener can better get into the visualization. ) More of various styles at https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com