My Process: Making 'Cloud' — Jake Gaule
Sound designer and Composer Jake Gaule breaks down how he made his most recent piece of composition, commissioned as part of Rising's Creative Content Commissions, and shares some free resources.
WHAT LOCKDOWN SOUNDS LIKE TO ME
When I was pitching for this commission, my response to this question was that it sounds like “solo piano music”. In the end this isn’t quite the style that I wrote in, but the reason for this being the starting point was twofold.
Firstly, I’m currently (like most freelance folks) working from home and unable to access some of my usual go-to tools for writing, so I’ve ended up writing a lot with free tools that I have available on my laptop.
Secondly, I really believe in the power of arbitrary restrictions to help focus the “creative process” and to encourage people who might be afraid to try composing, or any art form, to have a go anyway, since it can be much less daunting if you’ve said to yourself “I’m only going to use x in this composition” before even starting.
With that in mind, I settled on the arbitrary restriction of only using free tools for this composition (I cheated slightly for the mastering, see the links at the bottom of the page), if you’d like to see a full list of the free tools that I used, I’ll put links to them all at the bottom, otherwise read on for a quick breakdown of my process and some more resources for free composition tools.
It’s a bit beyond the scope of this article to go into a detailed explanation of writing music on a computer but I’ll try and lay out an overview in simple terms and then describe what I used. If you’re reading this and you’d like a more in-depth explanation of anything (or if you spot any mistakes or disagree with my descriptions) feel free to email or tweet me and we can chat!
THE PROCESS
So, there’s two main types of software needed to make music on computers, a DAW and plugins. DAW stands for “digital audio workstation” and this software is essentially your virtual studio. You can create tracks for different instruments, vocals etc and plug things into other things. There’s a lot more to what can be done in a DAW than that, but essentially this is the program that you work within and then you can bring in plugins, which function as instruments and effects to write your song/compose your opera/score your radio play/whatever!
The DAW I used is called Reaper and is freely available, if you’re interested in getting into music or sound design, I highly recommend checking it out. It may be free, but it’s extremely powerful and used by pros all over the world! For plugins I settled on three (links at the bottom of the page) which are all free and do different things. I wanted a piano, some synthesisers and some orchestral instruments (oboe, clarinet, trombone etc).
What I came up with a fairly simple, melody driven and quite sombre piece of music that I was pretty happy with! I don’t feel like the sound of lockdown is particularly cheery to be honest, but I didn’t want to write something too dark and depressing either, so I hope this strikes a reasonable balance! This is pretty outside my normal writing style; I come from a background of writing dark electronic, ambient and noise music and so it’s quite a recent thing for me to try writing some more “normal” (ie. melodic!) music.
If you’re more interested in the tools I used and/or writing music & sound check out the links below and feel free to hit me up via email or socials to talk more. If not, that’s ok too! I hope you enjoy what I wrote and hopefully something I’ve written here applies to your own creative work too.
I strongly believe that composition and music should be accessible to anyone, and I’m pleased to see that some companies are starting to offer free tools that are high quality and hope that reflects this ethos somewhat. If you make something using the tools below, get in touch, I’d love to hear it!
TOOLS LIST
DAW
Reaper – This is freely available, but they encourage you to buy if you can. Licenses are much more reasonably priced than many other popular DAW’s and it’s an extremely powerful bit of pro level software. The interface can be a bit daunting at first, but there’s a ton of great resources out there for learning the software.
PLUGINS
Valhalla Supermassive, Spitfire Audio LABS, Spitfire Audio BBC SO Discover – These are all seriously high quality, professional tools and I recommend picking them up to anyone interested in dabbling with sound design, composition or digital audio in general. All of them are freely available, you have to fill out a survey and wait 14 days for BBCSO Discover, but this is well worth it for such a great tool and you can upgrade to one of their more fully featured tools later on if you find yourself making money from your music ☺
MASTERING
Okay, so here is where I cheated slightly! I have a standard set of plugins I use for mastering and I just set it up without thinking when I started! So, rather than pretending I didn’t do this, I thought I’d be honest and provide links to where I got these plugins, I picked them all up for under £30 each and if you’re starting to take writing music or sound design more seriously I recommend them all a lot.
I used – Soundspot MSW2, Izotope Ozone Elements, vladgsound Limiter No 6,
Youlean Loudness Meter (in that order). – The limiter and loudness meter are both free (the meter has a pro version, but I use the free version and it works just fine). The other two are both paid for but well worth picking up again if you’re getting seriously into composition, I’m not particularly interested in telling people to buy plugins and I think this composition would have sounded just fine without these but this is just my go to way of working and so I thought I’d mention it. If you are at a stage where you are buying tools for work here’s a few sites I recommend to get the most for your hard earned cash, as well as some resources for more free stuff!
Don’t Crack – Also has a great list of free stuff!
Production Expert – Again, has a great list of free stuff, also if you sign up to their newsletter, they send out free plugins every Friday.
Thank you Jake! You can follow his work:
submergedtapes.com
sbmrgd.bandcamp.com
twitter