The Making Of: “Vocoder Transcendence” by Lionel Schmitt
Label co-owner Dan Graham and Lionel Schmitt, one of our newest and brightest composers, dig down into the creation of Gothic Storm’s latest release. Featuring evocative, cinematic vocoder melodies combined with surging orchestral power, the task of composing and producing this complex combination was no easy feat, as the two discuss below…
DG: Six months ago I suggested a few alternative album ideas to consider including ‘Vocoder Transcendence’ (which was suggested to me by a trailer editor). Why did you choose this concept, and how do you feel about it now that you’ve spent the last few months on it? What challenges and discoveries did it bring?
LS: Initially I didn’t want to tackle this concept but then I had some kind of vision/sonic picture of what I could do with this idea, which intrigued me to go with it. As so often with diffuse ideas it turned out rather differently, although the tracks Civilization, Remnants and Neverworld are probably pretty close to the musical phantom image in my mind.
Actually working with vocoders is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I had to use at least 4 instances of Pro-Q or more with almost all bands used on most vocoder leads. It’s such a specific colour/sound that always has a funky and weird touch. Which works well for more pop-y and “fun” type of music but was rather challenging as the emotional lead in cinematic music. I haven’t decided yet whether I think it really worked out in the end, haha.
DG: For me this album is unusual but also graceful, melodic and emotional so could work with anything human and emotional, but the vocoder perhaps gives a feeling of humans interacting with machines and technology. What kind of emotions and imagery did this album express for you while you were working on the tracks?
LS: There are a lot of very personal influences on the album. The vocoders rarely influenced my musical intentions as I didn’t focus much on their “nature” as vocoders, just like I’m not thinking much about the nature of a cello as an instrument when writing a cello line. Overall my inspirations and moods were different for every track.
I had been listening to Johan Johansson’s “The Sun’s Gone Dim And The Sky’s Turned Black”. I remembered that the lyrics are about unrequited love, which surprised me a bit when I actually read the lyrics a while ago. That came to me and I thought — how about a piece about entirely letting go of the idea of love? Shortly after that thought, the idea of “Neverworld” started playing in my head.
“Foreverland” is the contrast piece, taking a head-on splash into a dreamy world full of love.
“Eyes Wide Open” is inspired by ideas of how the world, our surroundings and buildings etc. will look like in the future, perhaps in 50 years or so. There’s also an image by Andrée Wallin that was an inspiration for that.
But it’s also about seeing wonders in our current world. The endless width of the skies and the universe above, the single burning light-ball that keeps us alive, the complexity and structure that keeps even the biggest buildings standing and the deeply complex infrastructure that keeps our world running and so on. It’s about going through the world with “Eyes Wide Open” and seeing and acknowledging all its wonders, many of which we might just be used to.
DG: What are your favourite tracks on this album and why?
LS: Civilization, Foreverland, Eyes Wide Open.
Mostly because they pretty much turned out the way I wanted them to be and feel the most “finished”. I always feel like the music is writing itself in a bad and random way, out of my control. That effect is reducing over time as I improve, but it still happens a lot. At the end I usually get there by 80% or so, after a lot of work and contemplation. With these tracks it’s closer to 90%+.
DG: Despite being young and quite new to trailer music, your music is exceptionally well-produced, technically detailed, expressive, full of nuances and has beautiful melodies. How do you think you are achieving all these things without the 10 years of experience that most good composers need to get to this level?
LS: A couple of weeks after writing, a lot of my music starts sounding amateurish in several aspects to me so I’m not sure haha…
I make the process last as long as possible. I try to iron out as many issues as possible in a long period of time. Which means that I will never fully finish my tracks even a day earlier than the deadline demands. If possible I keep coming back to the pieces for months, on the side of working on new ones, and slowly push them to the finish line. And every time I open a project during that long self-revision and finishing stage it’s a new and fresh impression and every time I find something to improve. I never understood why some people wrap up tracks in just a couple of days or less, if not really necessary. Even a few small but significant changes over time makes it worth keeping the track in the baby bed and “raise” it until it leaves the house. ;)
That’s where a lot of detail and nuance comes from. It’s less about being slow and taking long time to write music but more about polishing it and reaaally wrapping it up over a long period. Always opening the project again and again to tweak whatever sticks out in that moment or add a few other little elements or details.
I think without a great obsession and a certain perfectionism it’s going to be hard to bring the energy to really fully milk the potential of one’s pieces. I have no problem with spending several hours (spread out across several days for fresh impressions every time) on a 15 second violins line for instance. Since I’m rather lazy and unfocused at the same time this makes for a toxic combo leading to unnecessarily long production times :D. I’d like to only keep that perfectionism but my brain feels otherwise.
DG: Tell us a bit about your composing process — how you choose ideas to work on and how you develop them.
LS: Overall my approach is — trying to come up with ideas I love and getting really obsessed with keeping up the motivation while writing and of course because I don’t want to waste time writing something that’s mediocre to me at its core. Sometimes I revise one melodic idea for hours till it seems right (I have produced up to an hour or more of sketching just for one idea, sometimes over the course of weeks).
While composing I just let instinct do the work mostly. Which also means not giving a damn about any kind of technical rules. For example, some may say sub bass should be mono. But I use stereo widening tricks like the haas effect and phase modulation on sub synths and 808s because I like the sound of it, even in busy epic mixes.
I barely learnt anything anywhere about any aspect of music production (I can’t even determine the key or chord of anything without technology) so I’ve just purely been trying my luck by doing it in the last few years.
GD: Although you’ve worked with some great publishers it’s too early in your career to have seen much income yet, and in fact you had to create this album while living in a homeless shelter in Germany… during a pandemic. That sounds pretty extreme… is it as bad as it sounds, and how did you cope and stay motivated enough to produce such fantastic work in such circumstances?
LS: It was quite far from extreme or even bad. Non-ideal at worst. It’s a big house with lots of rooms (one for each person — a pretty normal but very small apartment). So, not really any different than a normal lockable room minus shared cooking and sanitary places, which were not very busy at all.
The pandemic actually made things better for me since no visitors were allowed, thus it was much quieter than otherwise for sure, which allowed for more focus.
As I’m writing this, I’m barely a day away from moving into my own normal apartment and it’s still wonderful because I basically had one foot on the street the whole time and the goodwill/funding of the state ends the day I can move into the apartment.
It won’t be any easier or harder to write music over there though since my enemies — unfocusedness and procrastination — aren’t location bound.
DG: What are your favourite albums and composers and why?
LS: Thomas Bergersen will probably never leave the highest throne :D My favourite album from him “Seven” is also my favourite album overall! He has such an amazing mastery of so many different styles and pretty much every piece
Otherwise there is also Ivan Torrent, Michal Cielecki, Paul Dinletir, Kevin Rix, Hans Zimmer, John Powell (really unique choices those last two…) and a bunch more… of course can’t mention everyone. But a couple of highlights I guess…
Adam Saunders and Mark Cousins are legends in production music.. writing awesome music for decades and still going strong and sounding as fresh and inspired as ever. Especially their wonderful modern and sciency underscores (actually love that style!) and their amazing orchestral adventure music stands out to me.
Stuart Roslyn is fantastic and intriguing — writing the most charming Disney-esque orchestral music for CPM (Album: “Orchestral Wonder” — available on Spotify) and then smashing it with hard hitting and unique almost EDM trailer music full of jarring signature effects etc (Album: “Inertia” — Audiomachine).
Julie Cooper has written many stunning, elegant and lyrical pieces for KPM, Audionetwork (“Symphonic Skies”!!) and Universal.
Some (more) favourite albums are “Da Vinci Code” & “Angels and Demos” by Hans Zimmer, the wonderful neo-classical and rather unique “Nordic Score” album by Michael Edwards and Christian Tschuggnall (over at Volta by Universal. Also lives on Spotify though), Beginnings & Continuum by Human Origin (Spotify or Warner Chappell Production Music). Bruton at Universal lately released “Human Emotions” which has some of the very best emotional underscores I’ve heard.
As one can tell, I don’t listen to much film music but now that I have heard most of the great production-music I’m focusing more on soundtracks finally, haha.
DG: Question for our composer readers: what sample libraries and plugins did you use on this album and why?
LS: So many libraries… I spent all money I didn’t need for living on libraries so far, obsess over sales and receive some for free as beta tester or demo composer. I sometimes use 5–8 libraries just for violins. I’m just sooo specific about how every element of my music sounds, so I actually do need many libraries to stay sane. ;) I also do so much processing and layering that many libraries barely sound like they come out of the box.
The really important ones for the strings LEGATOS are Vista by Performance Samples, Cinematic Studio Strings and also their solo strings both as ensemble layers/first chairs and soloists, Century Sordino Strings and Spitfire Chamber Strings. There are always some more subtle layers from other libraries. I especially like using layers of Adagio by 8dio (Violas and Violins mostly — the legacy versions which you can ask for via their support) for some more grit and expression and Solo Violin B by Performance Samples as a layer for more drama and definition.
For the strings SHORTS it’s mostly Fluid Shorts 1 and 2, Adagio (ultra gritty Bass spiccatos!! But also lovely Violins and Violas shorts), Hans Zimmer Strings (love the 60 violins shorts), Cinematic Studio Strings and solo spiccato layers from Xsample’s Contemporary Solo Strings (Cello and Bass mostly). But as before, I use layers of a bunch of other libraries too, depending on the piece.
There aren’t a lot of short strings on the album so it’s almost more a list for my music in general.
For Brass it’s mostly JXL Brass (12 horns, 3 Bass Trombones and recently the 12 Trombones, all bought separately), Metropolis Ark 1 for low brass, 66 Trombones and Tubas by 8dio, Cinematic Studio Brass, Hollywood Brass (the 6 horns are legendary) and layers of Angry Brass Pro Soloists by Performance Samples. As always, additional layers depending on the piece.
Choir is mostly Oceania 2, the very old and unavailable Voices of the Apocalypse, Soundiron Venus and Mars for legatos, Strezov’s Rhodope for Bulgarian choirs and 8dio Liberis for children’s choir although I bought Strezov’s Arva after finishing the album.
Percussion is mostly Hans Zimmer Percussion, 8dios Epic Ensemble Percussion Series, PercX by Auddict, Medusa by Musical Sampling and the usual countless layers.
For textural/hybrid/synthy sounds it’s really endless… but I mostly use Omnisphere, 8dio’s Phenex, Photosynthesis 1 and 2 by Jeremiah Pena, Slate + Ash Auras and recently their absolutely incredible Landforms. I also use loads of orchestral textures from Hans Zimmer Strings, Arkhis, Orchestral Swarm London Contemporary Orchestra, Albion 5, Olafur Arnalds Chamber Evolutions and so on.
These kind of sounds are often also results of a lot of layering and processing patches from several different libraries resulting in almost-new sounds and a couple of self-made ones.
Overall Omnisphere is possibly my favourite purchase of all time. An incredible collection of textures and many tonally playable and often unusual and description defying sounds and even fairly deeply sampled instruments. It’s also quite easy to tweak and come up with new sounds IMO.
I’m much more minimalistic with plugins. I only have a handful of commercial plugins and lots of free ones.
I use Pro-Q for equing and multi-band compression + side-chaining and Valhalla Vintage Verb as reverb mostly. Here and there also Raum, lately R2 by Exponantial Audio and the awesome free Valhalla Supermassive.
Gullfoss is like an amazing mixing assistant to me and I use it now on almost every instrument track. Check out the trial version.
And of course some good old OTT and also Puncher by WA Productions.
SDRR by Klanghelm for Saturation.
Auburn Panagement (Free Edition) for some of the panning.
The free Valhalla Spacemodulator is amazing for sound design and stereo tricks. I also love Stereo Width from the AIR Creative Collection. I usually go to “phase” and play around with the width knob. Very cool on pianos and sometimes drums and FX.
That’s pretty much it for my most-used-plugins. For me mixing is mostly just EQ (lots of it!!!!), panning, stereo tricks with tools like the above, the (hopefully) right layering of the right libraries and only recently side-chaining. Good for allowing drums and FX hits to punch through more by making some selected other elements (especially bass stuff, sometimes just bass frequencies via Pro-Q multi-band compression) get compressed down whenever they come in or hit their peak.
DG: Finally: what are your hopes for your future musical projects and composing career?
LS: I want to do a lot of different styles, especially a wide range of filmic and documentary styles and underscores. I have been way too focused on trailer/epic music in the last years but there many more types of music I love writing.
And whenever I can afford to write music that will earn me nothing I’ll be more than happy to write more creatively free and media unfriendly pieces. ;)
Although I’d surely still be doing production and trailer music even if I didn’t have to financially, because that’s literally most of the music I listen to now, especially production-music in all its many shades and styles.
Vocoder Transcendence is available now for industry use. Full public release to follow…
