Dyed Hair Boys Score
This month I worked on two film scores. This one being the first to be officially released. I was very proud of the work I have done with this project. It’s the first film score I have done in exactly a year and it is interesting to see how my voice developed in that time. Definitely compared to my previous film score (A Friendly Game of Darts, 2020) I have clearly taken a completely different approach. Partly because of the completely different style of films but also where I am as a composer at this point in time. You will see that when this other film gets published sometime this month. The music of both are in a very similar style yet the films themselves are very, very different. Would I have written something different if I took up this project 3 months from now? 6 months? A year? Maybe.
The entire score is built of a sample from an old digital alarm clock. All the synths and more experimental elements of the score are derived from that single sample. It was interesting to see how much material I could create from a single sample. I felt like I got a wide variety of timbres from just that single sound. I barely used any effects either, just a chorus effect on the screeching sound before the shooter is revealed.
Ableton Live was revolutionary in terms of the flexibility of the software. This was the first score I have done with the program and I had so much more control over each and every sound compared to Logic. An effect I used was changing the pitch of every instance of the alarm towards the end by microtones. In Logic this would have nightmare to do because every audio region of a file refers to the same file. So a change in one region would effect every other instance. The way to get the same microtonal effect in logic would be to bounce in place every audio region of the alarm and then retune those newly created files. Ableton allows you to change the volume and tuning of the same region of audio from a single audio file by just moving a single dial.
The main purpose of me getting Ableton was to have access to Max for Live. I found myself in with Logic often reaching into Max for unique sounds and recording them by using a virtual audio device. Having Max existing as an instrument in Ableton drastically reduces the headache of my methods with Logic. With this score I built a Max for Live Device that is a simple granulator that loops a selected portion of a sample loaded into the patch. The sample is time-stretched so the pitch does not change. Using the alarm sample created an eerie liminal space where the length of each alarm beep is constantly changing. I do not know if I will like the patch with any other sample. However sample speed manipulation is a heavily used source of musical expression in laptop music. Doing something like that in a DAW is very hard to do but child’s play in Max. It is something I do a lot and because of Max for Live in Ableton I can now bring it into my film score work.
Overall, I was very happy with how the score turned out. With Ableton I was able to create a sound world that would have been near impossible in a standard DAW. My goals with my film scores have always tried to create something unique, not just emulating the “in” style of the day but creating a new and unique world of sound every step of the way.