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New Ambience: Whiteout
🕑 Added 2024-01-17 16:51:28 +0000 UTCGreetings Patrons,
Is it a coincidence that during work on this track, New York City received its first decent snowfall in 701 days? (It was only 1.4")
Whiteout is a POV of a struggle against nature. Brutal headwinds, stinging sleet, deep drifts, and biting cold are your adversaries in this one. It was a challenge to create a chaotic feeling of blindness and disorientation.
Musically, my plan was for driving rhythms with no real tonal center, and plenty of dissonance. This is tough to maintain over a long period (I tried - it was bad), so I created lulls in the onslaught to coincide with short breaks into tonality.
The instrumentation is pure orchestral in this one. Strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussion with low strings doing some extra percussive work.
The ambience is layers of wind, including some mechanically synthesized wind courtesy of a sampled version of an old theater wind machine that spun different-sized cylinders against canvas belts at varying speeds.
As this is in Patreon-only sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version (live on the site next week) as well as music-only, and ambience-only versions. Additionally, I created 2 "No Figure" versions that remove the snowy footsteps and wind-battered cloak sounds.
The music-only version of this would probably work well for any kind of chaotic situation in which up is down, and down is up. Ambience-wise I think this might even be passable as a desert sandstorm.
Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.
Best,
Tim
Comments
Elad Gilo
This is absolutely perfect for my arctic campaign. Thank you!!!
Reverend Fox
To the last part of your description, yes. The ambience works as a sandstorm! Living in the high desert of Nevada, right up against the Sierra Range, we get winds that gust up to 40-70mph at least twice a year, and the ambience-only version perfectly highlights that chaos!
