Pastel Castle

Castle of Samples

I like this one but it took a lot of work.  I found some really great vocal samples that I could chop up and make into a kind of a capella.  Not only that, I think the violins remind me of the intro to one of my favourite songs, Your Woman by White Town. Finally I somehow managed to make a ska-like horn bit near the end which just feels good.

Clearly much credit goes to the vocalist here but you'd be surprised how varied the feel of the music can be depending on how you mix and match the individual samples.  Being able to play a human voice like a piano was super fun; I probably spent a couple hours just playing around without really recording anything.

Cover Art: Work Smarter

Something I have been meaning to do when drawing is to delegate very detailed drafting to a 3D program then draw over the result to get more accurate perspective, etc.  Drawing detailed buildings or other technical things can be very time-consuming even if you do it all by "hand" with rulers.  There's a reason there were many skilled draftspeople before computer assisted drawing became prevalent.

For this cover, I put together a very quick, soft-edged castle and simple terrain.  I used Blender for this part and I must admit that software just keeps getting more impressive.  Of course, I am using it for pretty simple modelling but its capabilities are becoming mind-boggling.  I rendered out the wireframes and used them as a guide when "inking" the cover drawing.

Having done illustrations with meticulous perspective, so many things are hard to get right.  There's lots of techniques one can employ but when doing these I am constantly referring back to my drafting books to work through ways to achieve on paper what can be done in 3D with ease.   I am definitely going to use this more often in the future.

Core Learnings

Wind Sound Synthesis

Most of what I applied in this song I've covered in other learnings.  However, I tried my hand at synthesizing the sound of wind you hear at the beginning, bridge, and end.  To my surprise, the first attempt turned out pretty well.

I used a combination of white noise and pink noise while passing a randomly shifting band-pass filter on both channels of each sound.  Splitting the motion of the filter on the left and right really makes it feel like the wind is moving around you.  The synth I used for this is Vital and luckily has a few random oscillators; I opted for the Perlin noise partly because it worked and partly because I am fond of it having written my own implementation a few times for graphics purposes (thank you Ken!)

What I didn't expect to have to figure out was how to get a "true" white and pink noise.  Vital is a wavetable synth which means the periodic waveform can be complex and evolve over time.  In Vital, each of the noise wavetables have a set of frames that are that evolution.  By default, Vital will play the note on the same frame.  So if you just use plain white noise without changing the frame, it is tonal because the waveform is periodic.

What I had to do was add a super-fast oscillator that changes the frame rapidly over time.  This results in a quasi-random frame at any given time which makes the noise sound correct (atonal and random).  Oddly, the fastest oscillation you can get with Vital is a 1/64 note; I couldn't find a way to speed it up.  Thus at higher frequencies there is a mild tonal aspect to the sound.

Samples Used

From landr.com:

• drop [one shot] crash keyFmaj 180bpm
• SI AG 100 vocals phrases female solo bright bittersweet Fmaj
• SI CD 100 Vocals Female Solo Bright ghostly Fmaj
• SI CD 100 Vocals Female Solo Bright haunting Fmaj
• SI CD 100 Vocals Female Solo Bright smooth Fmaj