# Star Wars Drones - Walkthrough Video



## Blakus (Oct 24, 2016)

Hey fellow midi tweakers! :D

Here's a potentially long and boring video that gives a behind the scenes look at my soundtrack for Corridor Digital's "Drone Star Wars".


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## Musicam (Oct 24, 2016)

WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!


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## Musicam (Oct 24, 2016)

What choir library?


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## gsilbers (Oct 24, 2016)

very good


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## Musicam (Oct 24, 2016)

I watch that you use b2 reverb, is better than lexicon?


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## desert (Oct 24, 2016)

so that's what you look like


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## R.Cato (Oct 24, 2016)

Musicam said:


> What choir library?



StormChoir 2 according to the tracks shown around 44:34. Also pretty much sounds like StormChoir.


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## karelpsota (Oct 24, 2016)

Cool tip about using the ensemble for the top of the chords and the solo instruments for the remaining voices.


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## Blakus (Oct 24, 2016)

R.Cato said:


> StormChoir 2 according to the tracks shown around 44:34. Also pretty much sounds like StormChoir.


Storm choir 2 Indeed! Love that library


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## Blakus (Oct 25, 2016)

desert said:


> so that's what you look like


Hahaha! Maybe I should remove the camera aye?


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## Florian_W (Oct 25, 2016)

Finally Blakus!!! I


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## Niel (Oct 25, 2016)

Very well done! Personally I find the first part much more interesting, than the second, but according to the reaction of the other listeners, I'm in the minority. Anyway, the most important is that you've perfectly fulfilled the client's requirements.

Where did you study orchestration?


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## Saxer (Oct 25, 2016)

Thanks for sharing the knowledge! Really nice to have a look into the mockup and your workspace (including yourself). Also very entertaining!


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## calebfaith (Oct 25, 2016)

Thanks for the video! What brass sample libraries are you using in this video?


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## Musicam (Oct 25, 2016)

Blakus, do you prefer B2 reverb or Lexcicon? Your knowdlege is important.


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## Thorsten Meyer (Oct 25, 2016)

Blakus said:


> Hey fellow midi tweakers! :D
> 
> Here's a potentially long and boring video that gives a behind the scenes look at my soundtrack for Corridor Digital's "Drone Star Wars".



Thank you so much for sharing your BST


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## Blakus (Oct 25, 2016)

karelpsota said:


> Cool tip about using the ensemble for the top of the chords and the solo instruments for the remaining voices.


I find this works works well for me! Glad you found it useful!



Musicam said:


> Blakus, do you prefer B2 reverb or Lexcicon? Your knowdlege is important.


I really love both! I find B2 a little too CPU heavy so I find myself using it less these days. Lexicon is nice, but I'd check out Exponential Audio Nimbus and a Valhalla Room. These are my favourites at the moment.


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## Musicam (Oct 25, 2016)

Nmbus has a good price an also Valhalla. Thank you! I am your fan. :_)


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## Fab (Oct 25, 2016)

youtu.be/vhR4QEEa5dw?t=16m14s

The Sam and Nico video, must be a pretty good feeling.


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## novaburst (Oct 25, 2016)

Thanks for posting, and your time @Blakus


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## Blakus (Oct 25, 2016)

Musicam said:


> Nmbus has a good price an also Valhalla. Thank you! I am your fan. :_)


It's funny really. I'm learning that in the plugin world, the price of a product definitely doesn't determine it's quality 



Fab said:


> The Sam and Nico video, must be a pretty good feeling.




His reaction really is hilarious, I love it!


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## NoamL (Oct 25, 2016)

Great video as always @Blakus

totally agree about the "journey from known to unknown." The setup really propels your track. I think people having goosebump moments are responding to hearing those familiar themes reharmonized to create new emotional contexts. It's tons of fun to hear you do stuff that never happened in the movies... when you think about it there's relatively few opportunities even inside a 3-4 minute track to really catch people by surprise with a reharmonization because you have to set it up. I think you really chose your angles of attack wisely here and that's the key to the track. Way more important than the VIs or mix.

*0:55* linking the Rebel theme and Han's theme - don't think we ever heard this in the movies
*
1:08* setting up the Force theme and then immediately redirecting away with a modulation up a m3

*1:38* combines the two previous tricks - set up Han's theme then modulate by linking it to the Rebel theme

*2:03* straightahead treatment of the Force theme, but we haven't ever heard it with this strained/frantic orchestration

*2:27* the big moment, straightforward treatment of the first part of the Force theme (i IV) until...

*2:44 *the horns come in - the key here is going to bVI sooner than Williams does (he goes i to bIII 6/4 then bVI at the top of the horn arpeggio). The bVI is the really powerful chord of that theme (just like in many other Williams themes, the ET flying theme for instance).

*3:00* second statement of the Force theme, using the same trick taken to its logical conclusion... you've now moved bVI right to the front to reharmonize the first note of the melody (as the third of bVI M7 if I hear correctly). And the landing note of the first half of the Force theme, instead of being the root of IV you interpret it as the flat 7 of V7. Cool stuff, very accessible but we haven't heard it in the movies.

*3:18* again reharmonizing the tonic note using bVI instead of i. Now comes the Williams leaping upwards arpeggio that usually _ends_ on bVI so what can you do? The options for harmonizing that top note are:

root of i - boring and retrograde
third of bVI - can't do this one because you already used bVI and this is Williams' choice
fifth of IV or iv - already did it earlier in the track
b7 of V/V
add9 of bVII
#11 of #IV? LOL
M7 of bII
*b7 of ii m7b5!*
Now _that's_ a cool choice. It's also a great signpost that says we're done with trailer track harmonies and going back to Williams-Land.

Really cool track all around


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## Blakus (Oct 26, 2016)

@NoamL - Really cool harmony break down. I feel violated, get out of my head  j/k
I was half tempted to talk about some of this in the video, but was worried I was long-winded enough already hahah!

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, appreciate the kind words!


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## byzantium (Oct 26, 2016)

Yep I was thinking (perhaps something similar) that the thing that impresses me most about this (and there's a lot) is your mastery of harmony - where to go next, what notes to hit. The orchestration is superlative of course but I think the effect of this orchestration is then multiplied and amplified by the choices of the notes and rhythms - i.e. the underlying harmony/song and evolution of the musical story (and weaving in and out of the Williams motifs). It's an amazing skill to have such harmonic fluency, that people like Williams have in bucketloads. 

One unrelated thing I was curious about (technical) - there seems to be a serious amount of reverb - whenever you stop the play, the reverb sounds on for ages... it sounds way way too much then, on its own, but yet it doesn't seem to muddy things up too much in play. Maybe that long reverb is a factor in getting samples to give that 'live' sound, I don't know. 

Kudos again and thanks so much for taking time out to help us all and the craft!


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## gsilbers (Oct 26, 2016)

same here.
it would be great to know all that boring and long winded harmony/theory stuff!


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## Blakus (Oct 27, 2016)

byzantium said:


> One unrelated thing I was curious about (technical) - there seems to be a serious amount of reverb - whenever you stop the play, the reverb sounds on for ages... it sounds way way too much then, on its own, but yet it doesn't seem to muddy things up too much in play. Maybe that long reverb is a factor in getting samples to give that 'live' sound, I don't know.



You're probably only hearing that in the last section? I think what you're hearing is just a quiet pad sound that I sit behind everything, that seems to have a lot of effects haha. My orchestra doesn't have a super long tail.


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## Blakus (Dec 20, 2016)

Hey guys. Rogue One has been released, Christmas is nearly here!! Enjoy this free HQ download of this 'Drone Star Wars' track, if you're interested! (Set 'buy' price to $0) Merry Christmas!

http://bit.ly/2hm7D1n


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## Musicam (Dec 20, 2016)

Hello, Blakus, how are you? can you offer any course of OST please? Please friends, support this question  I Love your soundtracks!


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## jamwerks (Dec 20, 2016)

stephen court said:


> Thanks for taking the time to post this. It sounds awesome! Can't believe you did this in 4 days!
> 
> A few questions if you don't mind. I believe John Williams generally uses only 4 Fhorns whereas I see you chose to use a 6 Fhorns patch. I know you talked about this briefly where you used a solo horn to reinforce the melody of the horn section but were you worried that using the 6 Fhorns would upset the orchestral balance and be overpowering? Also, I see you use the 6Fhorns patch throughout the piece..


Just thought I'd mention that whereas the JW scores available for purchase seem to all have 4 horns, every time I see videos of him conducting his works, there's 6 French horns on stage....


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## Blakus (Dec 20, 2016)

stephen court said:


> Thanks for taking the time to post this. It sounds awesome! Can't believe you did this in 4 days!
> 
> A few questions if you don't mind. I believe John Williams generally uses only 4 Fhorns whereas I see you chose to use a 6 Fhorns patch. I know you talked about this briefly where you used a solo horn to reinforce the melody of the horn section but were you worried that using the 6 Fhorns would upset the orchestral balance and be overpowering? Also, I see you use the 6Fhorns patch throughout the piece. Why not use a two 2 Fhorns parts or 4 x solo horns to divide the horns for harmony in certain parts?
> 
> ...


I used to be very particular about this exact thing. I used SM brass very carefully, I used divisi strings meticulously with LASS etc. Until one day it clicked for me - "_none of it ACTUALLY matters"_.

The sample world is very different from the real world. It's all about the "illusion" of a real orchestra. I often use triple, sometimes quadruple the amount of 'real-world' players (with layering etc). But even those very familiar with how an orchestra should sound would hardly identify that. Samples do not "stack" in the way you might think. I *never *think about it in terms of real-world numbers anymore. Trust your ears, sometimes you might need to do some EQ adjustments to prevent buildup of certain frequencies to make it sound more natural.

On the particular issue of 6 vs 4 horns - lower your 6horn patch by a tiny bit, boom, you have roughly 4 horns. LOL. In the sample world, we have enough battles in front of us - matching real player count has no real benefits, and strips a lot of flexibility.


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## tokatila (Dec 20, 2016)

Yeah, cool track. I'm with Noam that the reharmonizations are the meat here. Truth to be told, to my ears I think it would be even better with a little more sparser orchestration. Though I might imagine that wouldn't be what client preferred 

One question though, do you use piano to compose or do you compose and orchestrate straight away into the DAW?


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## Mithrandir (Dec 20, 2016)

stephen court said:


> Thanks for taking the time to post this. It sounds awesome! Can't believe you did this in 4 days!
> 
> A few questions if you don't mind. I believe John Williams generally uses only 4 Fhorns whereas I see you chose to use a 6 Fhorns patch. I know you talked about this briefly where you used a solo horn to reinforce the melody of the horn section but were you worried that using the 6 Fhorns would upset the orchestral balance and be overpowering? Also, I see you use the 6Fhorns patch throughout the piece. Why not use a two 2 Fhorns parts or 4 x solo horns to divide the horns for harmony in certain parts?
> 
> ...



Hal Leonard scores are 4.3.3.1 reductions. The actual brass section used in most Williams scores is 6.4.4.1 (reference scores AOTC, ESB, even 1941), sometimes extended to 6.4.4.2 (ROTS), 8.4.4.2 (ROTS) 12.4.6.2 (War of the Worlds), etc.

Woodwinds are usually in 3's, sometimes 4's (e.g. 2 piccolos and 2 flutes).

Whilst I agree with Blake on realism, I'd like to stress it's a good idea to set your goal somewhat in between your current setup and an "unrealistic" section-type ensemble. Color the divisi libraries with some section patches (if possible from a different library) here and there. It helps to create a unique sound, too.


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## Mithrandir (Dec 20, 2016)

stephen court said:


> Wow I didn't realize that. Thanks for bringing that to my attention. I guess I have to re think my template....yet again :(



It's an endless quest. :D


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## Mithrandir (Dec 20, 2016)

To be honest I'm a Sample Modeling/Orchestral Tools-type OCD composer (it makes sense from an intellectual and aesthetic point of view), but it doesn't hurt to sacrifice realism in terms of number of players for realism in terms of tone/timbre/character. There's a huge difference between the performance of a horn player sampled as a soloist vs. a section of 6 horn players performing together.


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## Blakus (Dec 20, 2016)

stephen court said:


> I don't mind using the 6 horns patch for unison but for dividing the harmony between the horn players I would think it would be better to use the solo patches for that


I use combinations of both. Solo samples don't sound quite right by themselves in chord situations either. But then again, nothing sounds _quite right_. Haha!


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## erica-grace (Dec 21, 2016)

quick question - those sw melodies, do they have permission to use them, or are you hoping to get lucky


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