Creating Musical Snippets

Eddie Bazil Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound Recording & Mixing podcast channel. I am Eddie Bazil. In this podcast, I'm going to dive deep into the world of snippets. Yes, you heard it correctly, snippets. Before the nice things begin to happen, let's define what a snippet is. A snippet is a condensed version of a musical theme. If you have ever watched a Star Wars movie or anything by that deity John Williams, you'll know exactly what a theme is, as he is undoubtedly the theme master. Think of the intro music to Star Wars or the Jaws cello arrangement that prompts you to look down and recount your toes. That's a theme. To take that a step further and in time, hark back to the days of silent movies, the music provided the emotional and dramatic narrative. The difference between a theme and a snippet is not just the length of presented music, but application. More about that in a minute. There are literally no rules that govern a snippet and no guidelines to follow. A snippet is a musical idea that at some point in your life might evolve into a track. I'm known as the snippet man. I have to carry this moniker because I'm one of those guys that never finishes a track and almost immediately hates what I've created, thus retiring the idea to that folder. You know the folder. It ranks up there with your free or cheap got it on a Black Friday sale plug-ins folder. I know that I'm not alone. I regularly visit Snippets Anonymous here in my local town. Introductions like “Hi, I'm Eddie. I wrote two bars of music today” are commonplace amongst the low bar count meets. Almost all jokes apart, snippets and the creating of, serve to strengthen sound ideas, hone mixing and production skills, help to understand timing and flow, act as a testbed for song structuring ideas and are the playground for testing and mastering all manner of plug-ins. In fact, I set my students snippet projects so they can practice what I've taught them in a structured, real world musical context. But that's not all. Snippets are becoming more commonplace as backdrops for showreel resumes, affording creators another layer of impactful delivery to support their CVs. TV and movie commercials have always relied on music to support their visual narratives and marketing reels now rely more and more on well-constructed musical content to endorse their directives. It's not enough to drop in a licensed piece of safe library music. Creators and marketing strategists now want bespoke content with well constructed and produced music whose focus is to enhance their goods and or services. The internet has evolved into an instant access and disposable medium and with limited time slots to convey thought, goods or a service, the audio-visual approach has become even more integral in delivering whatever that message is. Sadly, we bore easily. Grabbing someone's attention and hanging onto it has become both an art form and a valued skill. With all the above in mind, and I don't want to put pressure on you, it is critical that your snippet is dynamic, impactful, melodic and navigates that dreaded pitfall we refer to as bubblegum music. This type of music is consumed, chewed and then spat out within weeks. Sadly, a lot of today's music is exactly that, disposable, but that's not a bad thing. It is a reflection of society nowadays and it is our job not to criticise or denounce it, but to ride the wave and take advantage of its limitations. In effect, snippets need to create or play on emotions while fulfilling whatever the required directive is. People's musical requirements have changed in that many are seeking a feel-good factor emotion rather than a structured lyrical story. The internet has exposed people to an array of wildly swinging emotions, negative and positive, and sometimes you need a musical narrative that will ground you and offer calm and hope. Enter the Snippet. If you're creating a snippet on the fly with no specific goal in mind, then go for it and enjoy yourself. You might create something that will give birth to a whole new genre. You'll be amazed how many mixing, sound design and song ideas came about through experimental accidents. However, if there is a very specific game that needs to be achieved, then planning can help you get a head start. The first thing to decide on is whether vocals are needed. In commercials and certain marketing promos, the addition of vocals or dialogue helps to highlight a product or service by turning the vocal phrase into an everyday catchy slogan. Slogans like, Every little helps, or I'm loving it, or Because you're worth it. However, vocals can also act against you. We have a tendency to focus on vocals whenever they are presented to us irrespective of musical context. In effect, the vocals become the focus of the musical piece and the music simply highlights or supports the vocal narrative. If you're trying to evoke a very specific emotion, then the vocals might steer the listener away from the desired goal and into a different emotional territory. That's not to say you can't use vocals in your snippets. Hell, whatever works is the adage I live by. So start rapping or Streisand-ing away to your heart's content. I can't sing. All my previous pets can attest to that. However, I am prone to mauling my voice and dropping it into the odd snippet. Of course the public never hear these vocal creations, simply because I am fond of keeping the few friends I have left. In the following examples I've opted to omit vocals. I've aimed for creating a sound design texture to play on emotions. I come from a sound design background and I'm really content with using bread and butter preset sounds. I'm not sure why I have this failing. My ethos has always been to provide sounds that are as interesting as the theory that constructs the actual snippet. Using the right chords and melodies with the right sounds can go a long way in achieving snippet goals. But I've always felt that each and every sound in a snippet should be emotionally powerful when played in isolation. However, sometimes bread and butter sounds are exactly what you need. But for the purposes of this podcast, I'm going to stick with sound design texture ideas. With that in mind, let me start with the first sound within the snippet that began its life in another podcast I created for Sound on Sound, the Phaser Podcast. A simple padline that has since been developed to offer a different perspective on a run of the mill theme. I suggest you wear headphones for this one as the sound design and fairy dust production tricks used are best heard with headphones. First the dry pad with no effects and now with the fairy dust. My aim is to provide a pad that moves from left to right and front to back. This is actually not as easy as it sounds to achieve. It involves a number of lanes of automation and the timing of the three effects I've used and in series. is what lends to the evolving and moving pad sound. I've used Soundtoys mighty PhaseMistress for the left to right undulating motion. PhaseMistress is a phaser on steroids. It offers a ton of parameters for the user to create all manner of worldly and unworldly phaser effects. I'm using a ramp up modulator source that cycles through four bars. The slow, rising modulation shape coupled with the scanning of the selected 12 stages gives that lovely, washy phase texture. But that's not enough. The next step is to use a delay effect in series and placed directly after the phaser. In this instance, FabFilter's Timeless 2, a delay effect plug-in that is a sound designer's dream and drop in two filters that are automated to raise and drop specific frequency ranges. The type of filters used and more importantly, the cutoff values selected, are critical. Get this wrong and you will make the next process redundant. I've chosen low-pass and high-pass filters independently which act as a band pass filter but with control over each filter to be modulated slightly out of time with each other. These variances in frequency modulation result in a more organic and fluid motion that also offers some interesting textures as the filters travel through their chosen values. I'm using a bunch of source and destination modulators to create the overall delay filter texture and these in turn are modulated via the automation lanes in Cubase. Both the phaser and delay effects are fed in-series to the gorgeous Eventide Blackhole Reverb Monster. Blackhole is one of those reverb plug-ins that is built to create immense abyss spiralling reverb effects. I'm automating the mix parameter and I've timed it to be fully wet when the timeless delay filters rise. Timing is really important here. In production, depth can be achieved in a number of ways but the most effective method is to use reverb. The smearing of frequencies that reverbs offer, coupled with automated diffusion and filter values, allows for the listener to perceive a sound that is front-to-back deep. If you then modulate this behaviour with the phaser and delay filters, you can create a sense of front-to-back motion whilst the sound moves left to right. In isolation, this evolving pad can literally sit proud on its own as a snippet. But we're not done. Let's add more emotion-inducing textures. I present to you the simplest drum beat known to man. The addition of a simple, syncopated drum beat can suddenly change the impetus of a snippet and in this example it is used to further enforce the ambient motion. Have a listen, again with headphones. I'm using Steinberg's Groove Agent, which is a really simple and intuitive drum VSTI. The drum beat I've added is as simple as it gets, but you need to take care when crafting your drum beats. Be cognitive of the fact that you're trying to evoke certain emotions and choose your sounds and patterns wisely. If your snippet is drum-driven, then rules don't apply, but if the drums are used for dynamic motion of the piece of music, or to support and enhance existing textures, then don't overcomplicate issues. Keep in mind it's the listener we're trying to impress, not us. Ok, so we now have a nice pad and a drum beat that acts to highlight the pad. But being the snippet man that I am, I have to add snippets need intros and I opted to use another pad sound, but this time with a twist. Let's first listen to the dry, untwisted version. I'm using GForce Oscar 3 VSTi. It is quite simply sublime. If you've ever been fortunate to own an Oscar synth, you'll appreciate how close this emulation is and GForce have gone a step further and thrown in wavetables for oscillators. I've used the Cape Breeze preset and conducted some basic edits to get it to sound how I like it. On its own, it's a nice ambient pad but what I've done is to use a vocoder side-chained and triggered by the kick of the drum beat. This technique allows the vocoder to highlight time driven effects and dynamics. Have a listen to the pad now with the triggered vocoder effect and now with the drum beat. Waves OVOX vocoder is an absolute beast of a vocoder, but it does far more than just robotic effects. It's a fully-fledged sound design tool that can create all manner of textures. I've covered OVOX in the vocoder podcast I created for Sound on Sound. To list what I have done with OVOX would take an entire podcast, but suffice to say the magic happens with modulating the two formant engines that are also running two sets of noise generators. The noise generators provide the wispy effect, while the formant engines provide the traditional vocoder effect, albeit heavily affected and mulled. Have a listen to the three sounds together. But it's still not enough. Let's now give the whole thing a nice tempo driven hook. Here is the hook. I'm using Steinberg's Halion Trip VSTi. This is a really fun VSTi to use. Don't be fooled by its simplistic GUI. It is quite detailed and a wonderful plug-and-play synth and comes laden with some well defined, albeit limited modulator sources. And this is where its power lies, in the modulation matrix. It took me no time to create a nice and sweet lead hook. When creating a hook for your snippets, make sure there are no conflicting frequencies. You want to avoid frequency battles in a short piece of music. In this example there are two sets of motion driven pads that encompass quite a broad frequency range. Any hook that lies in the annals of these shared frequencies can get masked quite easily. A higher frequency line will always cut through, as in this example. And now, the whole thing. I quite like this snippet. It makes me want to grab the nearest person to me and hug them. For me, I think the snippet delivers a host of emotions that, once married to text or visual content, won't detract from the message but hopefully enhance it. One of the things I find so attractive about creating snippets is that unless the context is required to be genre specific and aimed at a certain demographic, you can literally use any sound and any genre to convey your ideas. However, this doesn't mean you can use the ubiquitous 80s gated reverb snare. No, this is not allowed. In any context, on any continent and in any situation. Many a great would-be classic was destroyed because of the big-ass gated reverb snare. It is a known fact that half of the world wars dating from the 80s were directly caused by the big-ass gated reverb snare. This is fact. There's no need to fact check this. With this in mind, the next example is a modern take on an old vibe. To fully appreciate this snippet, you need to wear platform shoes, a room with flared trousers, a voile or cheesecloth shirt, an afghan gilet and big hair. You mustn't forget the big hair. Here is the whole snippet. There really is no magic processing taking place here but I will list some of the effects and dynamics used to achieve the final texture. I've literally dropped a snippet in using box standard presets from various synths, notably Rob Papin's Albino and Native Instruments Kontakt. I'll bay it with my own drum sounds using Native Instruments Battery 3. I created a ton of libraries back in the day for Battery. It's cell based, GUI and tons of shaping and processing tools makes for an easy drum sculpting experience. Albino is a well thought out sound designer's dream synth with a well defined modulation matrix that lends itself to creating sounds on the fly. Kontakt is the de-facto industry soft sampler and in my sound design days I created lots of Kontakt scripted instruments. Kontakt comes with a hefty sound library and a useful browser. To be honest, this snippet took less than an hour to put together thanks to these instantly gratifying VSTIs. The snippet is purely mood based and was created on a day when I needed a little pick-me-up. Snippets are not just there for commercial or marketing projects. They are time captured instances of emotions and can help change a mood with a simple click. Let me break things down. First, the bird keys. The sound comes from a library I created for Albina and you can hear the modulated filter married to a stereo time based delay effect. I tend to use slightly varying left and right delay values to move away from hard, syncopated rhythms. You can use something simple like a quarter note delay on the left side and a quarter note dotted on the right side. This gives a nice to and fro effect. The delay feeds into a room reverb to allow for a more spacious texture. Next up, the synth hit effect, another preset from Albino. I've used a heavily modulated volume effect, much like a decaying tremolo effect. That's literally it. Nothing too special about this sound as I wanted to keep it nice and simple. If you want your snippets to last the test of time, use bread and butter sounds as opposed to sounds of the day. I created this snippet in 2009 and it still sounds as if it was put together recently thanks to the non-genre defining sounds. Next up, the key hit. I use the same process as the bird keys but with faster delay values. It's meant to act as a layer for the club synth sound and the delay helps to extend the tremolo effect of the club synth. Have a listen to the two together and you'll quickly see the value in layering sounds to achieve a single dynamically moving texture. The layering of these two sounds allows for a lovely timing interchange between each hit. Finally, the drums, a very straightforward 4x4 sequence with a nice and deep kick and a crunchy dirty clap. They still sound good bearing in mind they were laid down 15 years ago. Like I said, a nice happy snippet to lift your mood. In the final example, I've gone for drama. It's one of those snippets that triggers tension. These types of snippets always work from a marketing standpoint when trying to couple the snippet with a fearsome dramatic statement. Have a listen. It all begins with a kick drum that, if auditioned on its own, fools the listener in thinking this is a nice, warm, thumping house track. Alas, it is but a con. Once the nervous percussive rhythms enter the equation, a twitch develops. This is then heightened with a pad sound that doesn't do anything other than foretell of an impending ominous journey. The good, the bad and the ugly watch sound tinkle takes over and stresses the listener even further. This is what is meant by triggering a mood. You can almost hear the fear-inducing advertising speak over the snippet. Do you want to protect your family from intruders? Then our WiFi camera and siren blast alarm is the only product you'll ever need. Let me run through what I've done to cause you such turmoil. I am very, very sorry. I'm using Native Instruments Maschine 2 for all the drum sounds. Have a listen to the drums in isolation. The pattern is a box standard four by four with the kick on every measure. The snare has a reverse layer preceding it which gives it that nice scrape effect and the percussion is simply there to add lift and flow to the syncopated beat. Have a listen to the percussion line on its own. For the ominous pad sound I'm using GForce's Oscar 3, which as mentioned earlier is a truly good emulation of the original and with the addition of wavetable oscillators Oscar 3 is much more than an emulation of the original. Have a listen to the ominous pad. It would take too long to list all that is happening in OSCar to generate this sound, but Pulse Width Modulation and Wavetables are used along with the iconic OSCar filters that sound simply gorgeous. The modulators are doing a sterling job of shaping the texture and the effects add the distant depth effect you can hear in isolation. For the tinkle sound, I'm using Steinberg's Halion's Trip VSTi again and a preset called Aspherical. Those that have watched Sergio Leone movies and in particular The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, will recognise this sound straight away. To be honest, it came about completely by accident. I was auditioning the presets in Halion and this sound caught my ears. It adds anticipation to this snippet because, you know, the pad wasn't stressing you enough, huh? Finally, the underbeat. I'm using Air Music Technologies Hybrid 3 Synth VSTi. It has a GUI that is not to everyone's taste, but don't let that put you off. The synth is well thought out and its simple layout helps to create sounds quickly and efficiently without having to dig into page after page of menus. The synth is packed with tons of sounds and there are free expansions available by third party users. For all EDM chores, this Synth VSTi is a must have but to be honest it is excellent for any genre thanks to a powerful and simple modulation matrix coupled with effects, arpeggiators. The under beat adds an additional rhythmic layer to the drums but also acts as another stress-driven musical line. When you add all these simple elements together you get a snippet that for me achieves its goal in affording impetus and anticipation. Snippets are great fun to create and educational in ways I've highlighted earlier. My advice is to go with your instincts, whether creating a snippet for a marketing brief, or trying to evoke an emotion, or to set a mood. Quite often our feelings get diluted over time and I find that if I go with my first thoughts and initial instincts, I achieve a snippet closer to my aims. That's not to say you can't wing it. I've often created really enjoyable snippets by going with the flow, rather than having a goal to aim at. Ultimately, snippets are meant to be enjoyable, and let's be honest, that is why we do what we do, because we enjoy it. That's it for now, thanks for listening. This has been Eddie Bazil for Sound On Sound.