Trailer Music Start to Finish

Hi everyone, this is Cyrus. This is coming a bit late, but I wanted to give you all a behind the scenes look at the trailer music. Click the links for the versions I'm talking about and I’ll have download links at the end for the final track and the version I decided not to go with.

The song is named “Load Bearing Drywall”, and I made the first version of it on May 24th. This was mainly just me riffing trying to play with futuristic synth ideas that were more popular in the 90s and early 2000s. There’s also a beat over it for some reason. That was from something else, just wanted to see how it worked with some rhythmic element.

First Version 

Pete understandably wanted to hear it without drums, so this is it without drums with a little more work on the synth and riff. It’s got this cool resonant pitch bending effect that I consider to be a pretty iconic 90s thing. That effect didn't make it into this song, but I'm looking for places to use it in the full soundtrack.

No Drums 

Scrapping the pitch bending and letting the notes bleed into each other left me with a nice ambient texture so I started playing with that and adding new elements to it.

Ambient Mode 

After this was months of mastering. This part is always difficult in ambient tracks like this. You build these really rich textures and then to make them manageable in a more complex song you have to make compromises over and over.

I also completely rewrote the notes on the main synth texture to be more emotional and intentional and tweaked the synth a bit.

The way it worked out, this version sounds a lot like late 90s/early 00s game music because the synths sound like they are mimicking real instruments. It just feels very retro to me. In modern music, you don’t need to write a synth to mimic a string section because you can just find a sampled string section in hundreds of libraries, and so synths are being used for more unique sounds than that in modern electronic music. It used to be more popular to synthesize something like a flute or violin.

However, the synth is still derived from the synths I started with and doesn’t sound like I was just looking for a string section sound. It comes out sounding really unique, I’m really proud of this if you can’t tell.

Chimes

Eventually we reach the final major decision in this song. Do we keep these high pitched Chime things that I added here?

I really liked them as a musical element. I *especially* liked the way they accentuate the bass as it comes in. They’re on a wave (an LFO to be specific) that is fixed to the tempo. When the wave is low, they are quieter and have more noise filtered in. When the wave is high, they are louder and the shiny high frequencies can get through. This lines up with the bass to create a really nice swell in the music.

Unfortunately it brought a very ethereal, magical quality to the trailer that felt overdramatic. Wound up going without it to let the trailer’s tone stand on its own.

Fortunately, you can download both versions here. Thank you for reading all this hogwash I appreciate it.