The Making of… ‘Quantum Voices’

Gothic Hybrid is delighted to release another masterfully unique trailer album from world-renowned composer Andrii Yefymov, alongside collaborator Yehor Nikitenko. This intensely original album blends hybrid trailer power with experimental voices, creating a sense of otherworldly suspense and premium originality. We spoke to Andrii about the process behind creating this album. Read on!

Andrii, you do a great job of keeping everyone at Gothic Storm aware of the latest trailer trends. Did this album concept come purely from your awareness of these trends? Or is the use of abstract vocals in this style something you’ve been thinking about doing anyway?

Well, using human voices in trailer music is something that has always inspired me. Trailers must catch the viewer’s attention and the human voice is a perfect tool for that simply because of our nature, we are programmed to react to voice and voice-like sounds more. But yeah, definitely it’s obvious that there is a trend of using voice SFX / signatures, so I decided to give it my own twisted approach!

How did the composition process work for these tracks works? Did you start with vocal ideas and build the rest of the track around that? Or were the vocals added once the back bone of the track was complete?

As always, I start with some signature sounds and try to set up the overall sound world. In this case it all started with several sessions with vocalists in my studio, when we recorded a lot of strange weird sounds, ad-libs, vowels and short phrases. When starting a new composition, I’ve just experimented with these sounds giving them various treatment and processing the hell out of them. Once I was satisfied with a couple of main signatures, I continued building up the track around those sounds.

I loved your other experimental vocal album for Gothic Storm “Indie Love” and I can hear some similarities in rhythms and sounds in this album. Do have any particular influences for when it comes to this style of vocal production?

Thanks! Well.. on that album I had a similar approach, recording hundreds of sounds and then messing around with them. I’ve tried to come up with something original and exclusive, while still keeping tracks edit-friendly and usable for the clients, so yes, I’ve looked through various recent trailers and tried to understand how editors are working with these types of cues.

Can you give us any other insight into production techniques used on this album? Perhaps some go-to instruments that really worked?

I think that these type of tracks heavily depend on the nature and quality of sounds. So the main trick was to record a lot of interesting voice SFXs and phrases. This is not something you can “do in a box”, you know.. Finding a good vocalist that can freely express weird things with voice is really important. Then comes processing — pitch shifting, resampling, distorting etc.. There are so many things you can do with a simple audio recording to turn it into a signature sound!

For this particular album I really wanted to keep things original and exclusive, so I’ve created a dedicated set of custom made risers, glitches, benders, basses and signatures all from scratch using hardware and software synthesisers and my own raw recordings. That’s why it’s difficult for me to name any “go-to instruments”! Even though I work from my big DAW template, filled with my favourite go-to instruments, this particular album was made a little bit atypically for me.

Do you have a favourite track on this album? If so, why is that?

Probably “Shrodinger” is my favourite one. Mainly because this was the first track I made for this album and I’ve spent the most time on it experimenting with various things to find “that” sound for the whole album. Balancing abstract sounds with more traditional trailer elements, then playing around with proper sections / stop downs and signature phrasing. That’s why I am more attached to this particular track. But It doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the best track on the album. I’ve tried to give all of them a different flavour, so they could potentially fit a wider range of productions. You are very welcome to check out the album and pick your favourite one!