|
|
|
||
|
|||
|
The Making Waves Demosong is intended to demonstrate how versatile Making
Waves can be, and what can be achieved with it in a home studio setup. The
different styles of music within the piece have been approached in
different ways: some sequenced notes; some use of samples; some recording
of real instruments. The entire piece was recorded in a home environment with a very limited equipment budget and no acoustic treatment was present in any of the rooms used. It was mixed using a combination of budget studio monitors and headphones. The only software processing came courtesy of Making Waves and the included reverb and compression plugins. The piece begins with a ‘drum n bass’ section constructed mainly from Loopmasters samples, which can be found on the Making Waves v5 installer CD. There are also two virtual instrument parts based on the AlphaWaves VSTi which was kindly made for Making Waves by synth gurus LinPlug. Automation is exploited in this section, for example on the synth pad and the filter effect on the drum loop. All the audio samples in the funk section were recorded with microphones straight into Making Waves. Some, such as the bongos are used in their original form. Others, such as the bass guitar and cowbell, were recorded as single hits and then sequenced. Note the use of ‘cut-off’ sequences to create momentary silence in certain bars. The strings in the classical section were sequenced in Making Waves and triggered on a hardware sampler. We were lucky to be granted access to quality string samples, but good string sounds are also available as virtual instruments for those with a suitable budget. Once sequenced, the strings were recorded back into Making Waves as audio so they could be included in the demosong. The rock section, as you might guess, was constructed entirely from recorded instruments. The drums were multi-tracked and the guitars and bass were then overdubbed. Each instrument was mixed down to a single stereo or mono track. We also split each section as they were decided to be too long. This made it easy to rearrange the structure (order of verses, chorus etc.) to suit the demo as a whole. The main effect used in this section is the compressor, to make everything sound as big as possible. The final section was made entirely from sounds used previously in the piece. Note the drum loop from the first section, which has been edited using the ‘beat splicer’ mode in Making Waves. The strings reappear half an octave lower to match the key of the rock guitar and bass. |
|||
