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El Accidente OST

At the beginning of 2021, I have the opportunity to work with the director Marta Cristobal due to a collaboration between Film Academy iRTVE and the institute of advanced musical studies Katarina Gurska where I was studying a master degree of Music Composition for Media. For this short movie, I collaborated with a colleague of the master degree, a good friend and good composer, Paloma Vírseda to score the film together. It was a great experience because it improves the musical ideas of both of us. It’s great to work with other composer because it makes me to feel confident having someone to discuss the different ideas.

We started to work from the script, the short movie is a drama that shows different difficulties of the immigrants so we decided to use a minimalist and modern musical template. Due to the friendship of Paloma with an excellent singer, Antía Muíño, we decided to compose an orchestral song for the credits. Also, due to Paloma is a great violist, the score includes some real viola recorded that Paloma performed. Finally, the short movie won the best score awards in the iRTVE Film Festival.

You can listen the score in the link below. I hope you like it.

Score Relief 2022 Contest

I would like to share the music that I composed for Score Relief 2022 contest. It was a challenge because the video is a trimmed montage of a short movie so the action is really fast and the music should fit every detail of the story that goes from fantasy to action with a lot of humour.

In this case, the prize of the contest is to record the music with an orchestra of 69 musicians. For this reason, I decided to compose for this size. No extra musician, overdub techniques or electronics instruments were considered.

The orchestra of the prize is the following:

3 Flute (third changes to piccolo)
3 Oboe
3 Clarinets in Bb
3 Bassoon(third changes to Contrabassoon)

3 Trumpers in Bb
4 Horns in F
3 Trombones
1 Tuba

1 Timpani
3 Percussion (cymbals, suspended cymbal, Bass Drum, chimes, Toms and others)
1 Piano
1 Harp

12 Violins 1
10 Violins 2
8 Violas
8 Chelli
4 Double Bass

I hope you like it!

Chosen for the composition residence with Harry Gregson-Williams (NGC Lab)

Last year I participated in the competition organized by the NGC Lab (“Next Generation Composers Laboratory”) whose objective was to select the best candidates to participate in a composition residency in Moscow in March 2022 with the famous Hollywood composer, Harry Gregson-Williams (IMDb).

Despite the fact that it coincided with a complicated time situation for me due to the fact that I was studying for a master’s degree in composition, working and carrying out other projects, I decided to participate since Harry is one of my favorite composers and there are many of his works that I usually often heard as the soundtrack to Metal Gear Solid 3, his animated movies Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas and Shrek or his Chronicles of Narnia movies.

The contest consisted of choosing one of 5 fragments from the steampunk fantasy film Abigail and the Lost City (2019) and composing a soundtrack (both music and score) for the following orchestra size:

1 Piccolo
2 Flutes
2 Oboes
1 English Horn
2 Clarinets in Bb
1 Bass Clarinet Bb
2 Bassoon
1 Contrabassoon

3 Trumpets in Bb
6 Horns in F
2 Tenor Trombone
1 Bass Trombone
1 Tuba

4 Percussion
1 Piano
1 Harp

12 Violins I
10 Violins II
8 Violas
6 Chelli
4 Basses

The fragment I chose was that of a confrontation between the villain and one of the heroes of the adventure with a victory of the villains. I chose this fragment because it seemed to me the most complicated, largely due to the enormous amount of pre-existing sound design that the music must respect.

Finally I was selected as one of the 16 winning composers among the many entries received from composers from all over the world. Only two Spaniards were selected. The other was a classmate of my composition master’s class, Ioné de la Cruz, a good friend and a great composer.

Here is the music I made. I hope you like it! (You can consult the orchestral score in the download section)

Playstation Talents Awards 2021

The game where I am working as a composer and sound programmer, Shadow of Babel, had a success in the Playstation Talents awards. Almost 100 videogames has applied and Shadow of Babel has been one of the 4 videogames nominated for the best game of the year price. The game has also been nominated for the best original soundtrack and won the best Art price.

It is still quite developed ahead until its publication but I assure you that you will love it. I’ll be giving more news and sharing fragments of the soundtrack soon.

Shadow of Babel reach the final stage at Playstation Talents

I would like to share that the video game that I am currently working on as a composer has reached the final of the Playstation Talents Awards. Playstation Talents is an investment and promotional initiative carried out by Sony Entertainment to support national video game developments for the Playstation platform. Of the numerous proposals received, presented as playable prototypes, only 13 video games have reached the final, the result of which will be known at the gala that will take place on December 21 and which will be broadcast live on the different Playstation Spain channels.

In my case, I am working as a team with Aléx Pastor and Alejandro Matesanz, two great musicians and good friends who were classmates of mine when I studied the Master in Composition for Audiovisual Media at the Katarina Gurska center. Together, we are making all the sound and musical material as well as its implementation in the video game Shadow of Babel of Pemperor Games.

Synopsis:

Shadow of Babel is a roguelite video game based on a future apocalyptic world in which the protagonist, Zayra, a cybernetically enhanced human, prepares to reach the top of the legendary Tower of Babel that hides an unimaginable power, a power with the one to change the fate of the world. But the path will not be easy since the tower houses creatures and beings never seen before, which is why everyone who enters the tower does not come out again.

The approach to music has been to create something new, something that has never been done and it is to mix a subgenre of metal called djent (which has always suggested to me music from the future, cyborgs, gods, space travel, aliens, ancient mysteries on lost planets, etc.) with epic orchestral music and with instruments from all over the world. Of course, a game set in the tower of babel would not be complete without the choral and vocal elements. In this case, they are mixed with the rest of the music from Bulgarian women’s choirs, traditional Western choirs to Gregorian singing ensembles.

The game is still in development but here is the first official teaser with original music composed by us and narrated by my good friend and excellent voice actor Sebastián García as well as a small gameplay teaser of the video game in the pre-early alpha phase that includes part of the music composed for the game. I hope you like it.

Official teaser

Gameplay teaser

DC Stargirl Competition 2021

I would like to share my entry for the contest organized by Spitfire Audio and the Stargirl series. The contest consisted of scoring a small fragment of an episode of the last season of the show.

My approach when approaching the scene was to look for a composition in the classic superhero style (as a personal challenge) and to compose the music for traditional orchestra without any synthesizer or electronic element.

The main difficulty was the level of the sound effects and foley. One of the things to keep in mind is that the music should not conflict with the sounds and dialogues since if this is the case, the volume level of the music will usually be lowered or it will be eliminated directly during the dubbing stage.

In this case, I resorted to different orchestration tricks to avoid conflicting with the mid and low frequencies of the sound but at the same time to give the scene energy and tension.

I leave the video here. I hope you like it.

Score Relief 2021 Contest

I would like to share the music that I composed for Score Relief 2021 contest. I decided to participate because I love animation films and it is difficult to get the opportunity to work with this genre of films.

In this case, the prize of the contest is to record the music with an ensemble of 27 musicians. For this reason, I decided to compose for this ensemble. No extra musician, overdub techniques or electronics instruments were considered.

The ensemble of the prize is the following:

1 Flute
1 Oboe
1 Bb Clarinet
1 Bassoon

1 Trumpet
2 F Horns
1 Tenor Trombone

1 Percusion (the musician change between Timpani, suspended cymbal, mark tree)
1 Piano
1 Harp

4 1st Violins
4 2nd Violins
4 Violas
3 Chellos
1 Double Bass

To compose for this ensemble, it is neccesary to be careful with the string section to balance and work with it due to the 4-4-4-3-1 configuration is a bit unbalance regarding the common orchestral rule of number two. In some moments, I divide the 2nd violins and violas to balance the open textures (doing a configuration (4+2)+(2+1)+3)

It is also neccesary to be careful with percusion and let the enough time to the musician to change of instrument. In some moments, I use the sound design of the video as an element of the soundtrack. For example, during the chase moment I use the sound of the trees to contribute to the music accents so the musician can play the cymbal instead to use the timpani for the accent (the sound design work as a Gran Cassa in this point).

And, that’s all. I hope you like it!

Global Game Jam – Pathlighter OST

During the last weekend of January, the Global Game Jam 2021 was performed. I entered without a team in the site coordinated by UCM and Voxel School. This year the event was completely online due to COVID situation but it wasn’t a problem to meet a talented development team at the beginning of the event and join with them.

To provide more details, a game jam is an event with a duration of some days where small teams of developers (6-7 person max) design and develop a videogame within a topic fixed by the organization. This year the topic was “Lost & Found” so, we decided to design a game where a lighthouse guides lost ships during the night to arrive safe to the port. The team worked so hard in every aspect (art, design, playability…) and finally we won the “most innovative game” award. It made me really happy because the work was rewarded.

I would like to share the main theme of the game that I composed. It was composed and produced during a night due to the inner limitations of a game jam.

I hope you like it

 

Little tips: Purging Kontakt memory

Today I bring you a little tip useful when we need to work with a RAM limited-computer (a laptop for example) but we at the same time we want to work with heavy size libraries.

As I mentioned before, the way that Kontakt and others samples work in real time is loading part of the sound material in RAM (generally the attack of the notes) and the rest are loaded directly from the hard drive while the attack is being played. In this way, the system is able, with minimum latency, to ‘play’ the MIDI events and play samples.

This is defined in Kontakt as “Direct from Disk” (DFD) operation. If you have the complete version of Kontakt and you open a orchestral library you can check the configuration and see that this mode is enable (you can even choose another mode and load all the instrument in RAM but I don’t recommend it because it consumes RAM memory fast). For this reason, it’s very recommendable to use SSD memory to store heavy size libraries in order to have enough data rate to avoid bottleneck when we are working with a lot of tracks.

But…. what happens with RAM? The RAM size is very important if we are working with many instances of instrument because, even if DFD is enable and almost is loaded directly from hard drive, there’s a lot of data to be loaded in RAM in order to be able to play every MIDI event in any time.

And.. How much data would be loeaded in RAM? There is no concrete answer. It depends of the library. The Libraries with more microphone positions load more than the others (it is neccesary to load data from every note, every dynamic range for each microphone position. The type of instrument also has influence, the instruments with true legate sampled needs more because it needs to load data from each interval between each pair of possible notes. On the other hand, it also depends of how the library has been scripted.

For this reason we need enough RAM in our computer to be able to work with many instances of instruments. If we are working with a laptop or a computer with limited RAM there are two possibilities. The first one is to render the MIDI tracks to audio tracks while we are working and remove the Kontakt instances. With this method we lose the possibility of modify notes or dynamics. The second option is to use the purge command of Kontakt to optimize the use of RAM.

This command free all the RAM memory of the instance. After it, if we play MIDI events Kontatk will load into the RAM only the minimum data needed to play what’s written.

This is better explained with an example. This is one project mine of a orchestral piece of two minutes of duration.

It’s not a big project, it’s only a typical orchestral configuration without non-orchestral instruments neither soloist instruments. The use of layering is minimum. The libraries are not really heavy, maybe the Cinematic Studio Strings are the instruments that consume more RAM. The project takes 22Gb of RAM. If I check a Kontakt instance I can see the RAM that an instruments loads.

In this case, the first violins of Cinematic Studio Strings take 0.77Gb of RAM and it is a lot. This is due the way of these strings have been programed with an instance of instrument for all the articulations sampled and all the microphone positions. But, at the end, we don’t need all of this for each composition. In that case we can purge and optimize RAM as I told before.

If you want to purge, then click the little arrow next to Purge option and select Purge all samples. Although it sounds terrible there is nothing to fear.

After do it, it’s possible to check that the 0.77 Gb of RAM has been released.

If I play now the entire project for the first time, I’ll notice some discrepancies of sounds (silences, jumps in the volume). This is normal because Kontakt is looking from the disk the attack samples and loading it to RAM. But the difference is that now Kontakt only loads in RAM the samples needed to play what is written in MIDI track. Kontakt won’t load the articulations, microphones positions, dynamics and notes that aren’t being used.

After play the project one time, I can replay it without any problem of silences of volumes because Kontakt already has the minimum required data in RAM. If I check the Kontakt instance again I can see that it only needs 48 Mb of RAM memory. From 770 Mb to 48 Mb it’s a great save, isn’t it?

If we do the same with each instance we can reduce the RAM considerably and play the project without problems in RAM-limited computers.

It can be also useful to reduce the loading times when we open big templates.

I hope you like the tip.

Author: Pablo del Campo

Westworld Scoring Competition 2020

During the last weeks of May I was composing for this competition that is hosted by Spitfire Audio company and HBO Westworld TV serie. The competition was about composing the soundtrack for a car chase scene of the third season. In the real episode, the producers chosed the orchestral piece The Ride of the Valkyries of Richard Wagner as music for this and I would like to say that, although this piece has been used in many films in a great way, in my opinion, it doesn’t work well for this scene because it doesn’t enchance the story and doesn’t create tension for the action. For this reason, my proposal is completely different.

My proposal for the music is darker, with a orchestration similar to films as Inception, the trilogy of Batman of Nolan and this kind of films with a dark atmosphere. In this work, I don’t use woodwinds but I use an expanded brass section with more power in the middle-low range: 9 horns, 3 trombones, 3 bass trombones, 3 tubas, 3 cimbassos and 3 trumpets that I only use in some specific moments. I also use electronic, hybrid sounds, synths and a big percussion ensemble in order to create a modern sound.

In my opinion, the biggest difficult with the video is that the electric cars are too slow so the music must provide tension to create an epic persecution and create the illusion of the cars are faster than they really are. From the point of view of the composition, there are three parts, the first one is the persecution with no melodic music that has the function of create the effect that I already mentioned, the second one is the counter attack part that has a melodic heroic music and the third one recover the tension because the counter attack was useless and I use here some leitmotivs of the main theme of Westworld  because it is what I would do if I’ll be hired to compose music for the TV series.

I hope you like it.

PS: I have included an easter egg of one of my favourite rock bands. Try to find it.