I've been contemplating for a while what upgrade to my arsenal I will acquire before the start of second semester, new monitors, hardware instruments (Akai's MPC drum machines and Korg's Electribe caught my eye) new software (Pro Tools), but I think I've found a winner.
Linked Above is Sonic Couture's Glass works, a software instrument that combines the ethereal tones of Le Cristal Baschet, the Glass Armonica and a set of Crystal Bowls, all exceedingly rare but beautiful instruments.
Some of the other soft/hardware synths I've looked at with an eye geared more towards music production than film composition, but this is ideally suited to creating celestial, haunting cinematic textures.
It offers the kind of ambient crystalline quality I'd had in mind for my score for our horror film next semester, at times comforting and at others extremely unnerving.
I cannot stress enough how much I love the haunting moods Cliff Martinez sows into his Solaris (2002), Drive (2011) and Only God Forgives (2013) scores, and his influence is sure to continue to carry into my future works. All of the above films feature the use of Le Cristal Baschet, an instrument played by running wet fingertips over glass rods amplified by fibreglass cones, creating a gentle tambre that can quickly become ominous when the bass octaves are projected. This and the Glass Armonica were so rare that they were recorded by seemingly the only man to own them, French musician Thomas Bloch, seen below demonstrating what the Baschet can do. The softly-tuned percussive Crystal bowls proved so rare to find (they were originally used in laboratories to track subatomic particles apparently!) that the samplers had to build their own set for use in this software.
I'm very excited at the prospect of being able to incorporate sounds like this into my work, and that thankfully a midi keyboard doesn't require the refined complexity necessary to master the real thing.
Update: I managed to download a version but sadly its only a demo and times out after 15 minutes or so. It looks promising enough to invest in the full thing however.
No comments:
Post a Comment