The Moon, It Read To Me, And It Was Bright

[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 SONAR 8.5.3 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

 

Edited September 2 by Amberwolf

[jack c.]

cool.jack c

[Amberwolf]

On 9/1/2024 at 6:32 AM, jack c. said:

cool.jack c

Thanks!

 

I convinced the ai art program to give me something closer to what I wanted for cover art, but it's not whimsical enough, it kept taking too many things literally, so i have a couple hundred junk images.   So this is the new art for this one. 

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-moon-it-read-to-me-and-it-was-bright

 

and this is the new art for the original all-electronic version

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-moon-it-read-to-me-and-it-was-bright-original-electronic-version