The Sound Board

I assume this looks "epic" to laypeople.... but I couldn't help busting a laugh at this guy nearly spraining his fingers "playing" one-shot, one-layer samples.

It is funny and their walkthrough is a bit painful with such a drab delivery. I am not much into trailer products but for 8 gbs of content, this seems and sounds pretty cool. Let me know if there is anything better out there.

I skimmed through Don Bodin's walkthrough of Atlantica (the library in the vid). IMO, these sounds tend to either the "generic," or worse "mild." Keep in mind I couldn't design a bramm like these to save my life but throughout his walkthrough I was thinking "Yep, that's what a bramm sounds like. What else you got?" Trailer kit sounds need to be visceral, impactful and have some uniqueness. Just IMO, I'd say that Audio Imperia & 8Dio are a cut above what KeepForest are providing, and then Heavyocity and Project Alpha/Bravo are a cut above that. I always feel silly with such libraries because, as the vid demonstrates, no matter how hard you headbang or how viciously you smash the keys, what you're really doing is dropping someone else's sound design WAV into your project. The Heavyocity and Alpha/Bravo libraries at least are focused on giving the composer good grist for their own sound design / pulse design efforts with some very clean, powerful controls.

Odd that I almost never see Audio Imperia discussed on VIC while Heavyocity is very well liked there. Perhaps I'm alone in liking AI's products.

Oh my dear lord.

The promo video and Don's reviews were both sufficiently painful that I didn't make it very far through either one.

I have Audio Imperia Trailer Guitars, and I really like it. I use it more for ideas than actual recordings, but it is still worth its weight in guitar strings (that's meant as a compliment) for inspiration.

I haven't been sufficiently impressed by any of the other "trailer" libraries to make the purchase. I still have tons of raw material from ISW Impact Steel and Juggernaut, Heavyocity Evolve, Soniccouture Geosonics and all my SFX libraries to keep me amused for a very long time. If I did a lot of trailer work (I don't) or if I were just starting out I might feel differently.

BUT, the part that really disturbed me was the implication (inference) that the video shows how one can create a trailer-like track. Good grief I really hope a great deal more effort goes into such things! (man do I sound like a grumpy old geezer!)

It is silly to see a player hitting one key and head bobbing, but there is much more to building trailer music than this. These kits help you add sound fx (which I would imaging most here do with whooshes, big drum hits, or atonal orchestral fx, no? What's the difference?) but it doesn't creat melodies, harmonies, or flow.

Audio Imperia are really at the same level, giving you sounds with less control than a place like Heavyocity. But they also don't come with the big pricetag (I might get Novo at the next half price sale, which would still be more expensive than Keep Forest's entire product line). In fact Keep Forest gives you presets that have many sample selections, plus an octave for setting pitch, which is something I've suggested to Audio Imperia, since many of their libraries are just presets of samples on each key with fx, no pitch control.

Granted, Keep Forest needs some more sophisticated scripting (like Heavyocity) but considering they just began last year, they are already doing more that AI does with most of it's libraries (as far as scripting). AI does have some great sound designers though. It will be interesting to see what KF does once they get beyond "Fx" libraries.

Maybe his keyboards are just poorly setup velocity wise

Thumbs up for Audio Imperia from here as well. Nice little company.

Ah, I enjoyed that! A good laugh is very therapeutic so they say.

I enjoyed it as much as listening to (most) trailers these days ...

FriFlo wrote:I enjoyed it as much as listening to (most) trailers these days ...

I was going to say the same thing - except I'd probably say I enjoyed it more!

Haha. Bless.

Though no more wanky than that Output Sounds one.

byzantium wrote:

FriFlo wrote:I enjoyed it as much as listening to (most) trailers these days ...

I was going to say the same thing - except I'd probably say I enjoyed it more!

Actually, most Trailer music is as comedic to me as this video. :-) Lately, I counted the whooshes in one 2.5 minute trailer (not even an action flick, but a children's movie) for my wife and it was something like 17, which really surprised her and made her laugh listening to it once more. People (non-musicians and maybe some trailer composers) seem to have lost a feel for decent usage of effects. They just don't notice it, but when you point them at it, they realize how ridiculous it has become ...

FriFlo wrote:Actually, most Trailer music is as comedic to me as this video. :-) Lately, I counted the whooshes...

I know, it's ridiculous. At my last time at the cinema (quite a while back I hate to admit) there were 4 or 5 trailers in a row that were pretty much identical to each other - regardless of content - ridiculous over-the-top bombastic effects at enormous volume and the same old boring one-note/one-finger drones and big drums and synths and whooshes and risers and braaaams, and big long production build-ups etc etc etc. (If Zimmer didn't do it, I guess someone else would have). I know there's money to be made no doubt in this kind of trailer music but I couldn't do it / stick it to save my life...

Will it ever change though, as it's that part of the brain that attracts us to sensationalism - trailer music being the equivalent of tabloid headlines ... (now there's a (tongue-in-cheek) analogy!)

There may be music that interests me less than what I hear in most trailers, but it is not coming to mind at the moment.

I actually really like trailer/hybrid music, especially the stuff written by Mark Petrie, Daniel James, James Everingham, Jasper Blunk, and a few others. The music shown in the original video definitely isn't a good example of this style of music. The buildups and epic conclusions have to be earned, by first introducing a compelling musical idea and THEN building on it.

Could be wrong (I'm not very plugged into that industry) but from some recent listening it seems composers are moving AWAY from soundkit-heavy tracks and back towards more traditional orchestral productions. It makes sense, I bet most music editors already have giant collections of soundkit stuff prepped to drop into tracks. A track like the original video, that is all SFX and has "zero calories" of musical content, likely wouldn't find any buyers.

That would be nice if there was a trend away from the current stuff. I find most trailer / 'epic' material pretty boring and uninteresting. Same old chord progressions if any, focus on big sounds and production more than on the music. Not a lot happening except in the production/sound evolution side. But that's not to say it doesn't work for most people when one's focus is on the picture and its combination with the music/FX, and not on the music itself. And I guess another factor is the limited time one has to make an impression, and the fast pace of change visually, perhaps there is not a whole lot of time to develop something more 'musical'. (Perhaps this could be another thread on 'trailer music', although personally I doubt I'd have more to add to it, other than 'I don't like it!').

If it comes with a complimentary backwards baseball cap and hipster beard, I'm in.

I'm not much of a fan of trailer music either.

I'm also not much of a fan of threads about trailer music always being mostly people saying they don't like trailer music.

"Hi, I'm Matt Bowdler, I do not unendorse this message!"

TheUnfinished wrote:I'm not much of a fan of trailer music either.

I'm also not much of a fan of threads about trailer music always being mostly people saying they don't like trailer music.

"Hi, I'm Matt Bowdler, I do not unendorse this message!"

Maybe, just maybe, because most of us are musicians and actually care about it as music, not just a commercial means to an end?

Or not.

Ashermusic wrote:Maybe, just maybe, because most of us are musicians and actually care about it as music, not just a commercial means to an end?

Or not.

Oh lord, let's not rise / stoop to this here.

One of the things I love about this place, is that it doesn't impose musical values on its members. If you love hybrid music, good for you. No, its not the same as Beethoven, nor is Kraftwerk and nor are the Arctic Monkeys.

Bobbing baseball caps and keys pressed REALLY hard with a grimace... well now, that's different.

Guy Rowland wrote:

Ashermusic wrote:Maybe, just maybe, because most of us are musicians and actually care about it as music, not just a commercial means to an end?

Or not.

One of the things I love about this place, is that it doesn't impose musical values on its members. If you love hybrid music, good for you. No, its not the same as Beethoven, nor is Kraftwerk and nor are the Arctic Monkeys.

Never said differently nor am I looking to impose my taste on anyone else. We all like what we like. But surely we are free to also say what we don't like, why we don't like it, and why we think others also may not, right?

Honestly Jay, it's partly the tone. "Most of us are musicians and actually care about it as music" is the kind of comment that will just end up hurtling the thread into a brick wall. If there was a thread about drum and bass, or hip hop, or ambient, or death metal... would you feel compelled to offer the same insights into those threads too? If not, what's the difference? Is trailer / hybrid / epic music fundamentally worse as music than every other genre in musical history? Is is uniquely incapable of being done well vs badly, all evenly an affront against all absolute musical integrity, or is there a list of other genres I missed beyond musical redemption?

Anyway, as I read it the spirit of the thread is about how stuff is presented and the absurdities therein, not really an open invite to rag on a genre. All these things are interesting for discussion in the right place, but occasionally a button is pushed with me where I see something going down such a well trodden divisive rut it'll just derail what the thread was originally about. It's a free world and a free forum so by all means carry on, but I'll be in the corner waving a flag to say "can't we do things just a bit better here?"

In regard to the fellow in the video, I suppose you could say he's giving us the finger.

More finger fun, recorded on the high seas. Very good with a beer.

Jeez if I drink a beer with this video combined I get even more dizzy!