New Ambience: Winter Encampment

Greetings Patrons,

It's still fall here in New York City. In fact, most of our trees still have green leaves on them. But did that stop me from jumping head first into a winter themed ambience? No. No it did not.

I was trying out various microphones for violin recording so I figured I'd make that the basis of a new track. I wrote out a few simple melody ideas longhand before I decided to just riff on the basic theme. It took a few takes before I was ok with it, but I think it works for what it is.

I then did some orchestration with a small sampled string section and a smattering of voice. I like that the solo violin sounds rustic next to the pristine AIR Lyndhurst studio recording of the samples. Also, I used a convolution reverb impulse of the same AIR studios on the solo violin to place it in the same sonic space as the string ensemble. I'll definitely be using this technique on other instruments in the future.

It's a quiet piece, well suited for a winter themed track. The ambience is from a wonderful field recording by Thomas Rex Beverly which I layered with various wind and branches track. That forms the bed. I then constructed the foreground elements out of many small parts, imagining the scene and populating it with various soldiers going about the business of maintaining a woodland campsite in winter.

As this track is in Patreon sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version, as well as ambience-only, and music-only versions here, for patrons. Additionally, I created two 'No Activity' versions which remove the soldiers entirely, leaving a wooded winterscape. I hope you find these useful additions.

Brief Website Note:

Several of you have emailed me about the massive drop-down list of SoundPads getting cut off on various browsers, screen sizes. I thought about trying to make a multi-tiered list and then decided maybe I'd just scrap the whole thing. A drop down list of 33 items is a bit silly and something I didn't consider when I started doing SoundPads 9 years ago. Also, as the site is entirely hand coded, every time I added a SoundPad, I had to update the menu on every single page, quite a pain!

So, I've removed the drop-down from the top level pages. The SoundPad link in the menu bar takes you to the SoundPad landing page, which I updated with all the header graphics, and added the genre filter from the homepage. I think this makes much more sense long term.

The drop-down lists remain on the lower level pages (and all SoundPads) but I'll be removing those as well in the coming days/weeks.

Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.

Best,

Tim

https://tabletopaudio.com