For this chapter of the soundscape  take a much more darker tone to the soundscape and think with a much more formalist approach.

through this chapter I create a lot of atmospheres and textures by using some of the sounds I have already got constructed and morphed them with the use of FX, filters and automation.

(Tuba Automation)

I used a lot of dark tonalities and low frequencies to really build upon the dark characteristics within the soundscape. Give it a very dissonant and disruptive tonality to it. Most of this automation was to do with filters such as this.

(Logics Auto Filter)

I automated the filter cut-off point so that I could bleed in the dark elements of the tuba how I wished, this also gave the soundscape more movement overall, and stops the rolling undertones becoming repetitive and somewhat dull.

My main element in this chapter though, is by far the Gunfire.

 (Gun Fire Audio)

To carefully represent and replicate gunfire, I couldn’t actually sample or record any actual gunfire, so I had to improvise a bit.

I used drum hits and FX from the sample Library ‘Damage’ by Heavyocity.

(Damage)

Through this plug in it offers a wide range of distorted hits, fx, loops and interchangeable samples which you can manipulate.

Through Damage I took a range of Kicks, high hats, Metal fx to create all my sound effects for the gunfire in the war chapter.

 

Creating Gunfire.

To create the Gunfire I took a range of kicks from damage’s library and bounced them down into audio to give me a raw waveform that would be easier to work with. Then I placed them individually across the timeline so that I could construct my own rhythm of gunfire. This took a long time.

 

To distinguish the two different types of gunfire I focused more on the narrative point of view. One I panned to the left side of the stereo field whilst the other I panned to the right, I also added filters onto them to give the perspective of the fighting being in the distance, yet I kept the left side of the gunfire to be the closer side as we normally associate the things with the left side of our brain as ‘good’.

I heavily filtered out the kicks on the right side to make them sound distanced and also added quite and intense reverb. The reverb I used was the Valhalla Vintage Verb, in my opinion one of the best reverbs available. I also used Logics Pitch Shifter on the left side of the gunfire, after experimentation I quickly learned that it heavily distinguished some of the lower tones really well, this was down to trial and error in sound design mostly.

 

It as a large rich tonal sound to it and is very easy to manipulate, unfortunately, for this project I also had to use the demo version due to my Mac being unavailable as in the middle of creating this chapter. The hard drive crashed and I had to borrow a Mac from my University to complete this project, which was really frustrating. The demo works almost the same as the full version but every 40 seconds it cuts out the wetness of the reverb for a moment.

 

After constructing and placing the gunfire I also used Hi Hats to simulate the sounds of speeding bullets. I took the hi hats and reversed them, then added some slight reverb to give them the ambience, panned them to their significant side and then placed one under each gun shot that it referred to. Once I had a hi hat under each gunshot for this section I highlighted them all and moved them a bar along so thats there’s a delay between the gunshot, then the speeding bullet.

 

For the left side, I layered these high hats with metal hits from damage, to add a more personal touch and to make the listener feel ‘closer’ to the action itself. I used different metal hits with slight changes in their tonality, because of course you don’t constantly hear something at the same pitch… These were also bounced from damage.

(Metal FX Hits)

 

The Explosions and heavy artillery were also processed and constructed in the same way, but they were EQ’d to have their low end boosted so that they had more power and prominence over the regular gunfire.

Also a key note that I picked up on, was that as I was using kicks to replicate gunfire, this clashed with my rhythmic kicks from the start of the soundscape, so for which I added a compressor and sidechined the gunfire to the rhythmic pattern so it’s still audible through the “Chaos”.