Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt)

[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

 

Edited September 2 by Amberwolf

[jack c.]

well done.jack c

[Wookiee]

Sounds like a mix of Celtic and North American native drum and pipe.  Works.

[Amberwolf]

  

On 9/7/2024 at 5:52 AM, Wookiee said:

Sounds like a mix of Celtic and North American native drum and pipe.  Works.

 

On 9/1/2024 at 6:34 AM, jack c. said:

well done.jack c

 

 

Thanks!

 

Funny about how you've said it sounds, because the pipe/wind sound is a synth (Rapture), originally starting out as a patch called "Analog Nights", IIRC.  I've had to futz around quite a bit with the step sequencers for pitch and amp in each of the E1-3 parts, and generate several separate tracks from it, in order to get those parts as far along as they are.  The fancy flute/pipe sounding part starting around five minutes in is mostly just really short notes to play only the inital synth attack.  Most of the rest plays most or all of the sequence, some of it has the first part muted and plays the rest.    I'm not perfectly happy with the results of all that work, but...for now, it is what it is.

There will be a future version that will use MiniDizi's Chinee Winds patch for certain bits, either to replace or to augment, but I haven't done all the work to get that sounding right yet. 

 

There are three "drummers"; one is a regular drumkit (built out of the MisfitKit rebussed and panned with various fx on the channels, with some added specific drumsample bits like Moon Tambourine), and the other main drums are from one of DimensionPro's patches.  I don't know which specific drums they are, but I think they are one or more of the type such as doumbeks, darbukas, dofs, tars, doiras, bendirs riqs, djembes, etc.   There are some sections that also use some taiko; I don't know which of the taiko they are (these are audio clips in a track that I edited for various hits and such, out of four long buildups from a free "cinematic" sample library from somewhere.   

I have several times more work in the percussion than the rest of it; I'm trying to learn how to build different kinds of "cinematic scenes"; how to evoke different feelings.  I'm sure I still have a long way to go....half of it is timing, half of it is tempo (which I am still learning how to use at all, much less effectively, partly because I hate the way the tempo view works), and half of it is which sounds when. 

 

There's another patch that I called Electronicalized Banjo in my track but it's actually Z3TA2+ Edgy Baritone XS...depending on where it is in the song, what octave it's played in, and what else is going on, it can sound banjoey or synbassy, etc.  It's the picked lead in the various sections, like in the initial "appalachian (?) chase" section and the "middle eastern chase" sections later on.

 

The strings are the Detache patch from SI Strings, minus any patterns SI tries to use with them. 

 

The two basslines are different Z3TA2+ patches; don't recall which ones. 

Edited September 8 by Amberwolf

[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:

 https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/ookami-no-kari-no-yume-wolfs-dream-of-the-hunt

 

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.  

[Amberwolf]

@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).  

 https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/ookami-no-kari-no-yume-wolfs-dream-of-the-hunt