Today’s article about music creation in DAW REAPER will be devoted to May it Be composition of Enya, which also was used in The Lord of the Rings film. For its creation I downloaded MIDI notes from Internet, thank you goes to their original author, used large amount of instruments and effects and in final version left only sampler synthesizer DSK Overture and effects ESI Chorus, Reverberation and Phaser and built-in compressor to keep basses dynamic range in control. In the source MIDI file there is large amount of tracks, which with rich for frequencies and movement sounds of DAW produce mess, so I left only 4 of them : main strings instruments, flute ( main instrument ), basses and additional strings instruments, which play only in key parts for their strengthening. To make sounds of main and additional strings instruments do not create dissonance, I separated them by stereo channels, this also added volume to composition : to the left there are one instruments, to the right – others. Completed composition in FLAC format, along with project source file and sounds, can be downloaded via this link : May it Be, Enya, The Lord of the Rings in DAW REAPER.
Source tracks’ MIDI-notes have large amount of overlaps of sounds frequencies, which create audio mess; for example, tracks of string and wind instruments have notes, which move into basses area, wherein basses have notes, which ascend to middle frequencies; so, I removed from tracks all notes, that move outside of ranges. Then applied to sampled synthesized sounds of strings and wind instruments low-pass filters with high cut-off frequency, so that they’ll not move into high frequencies range to main instrument domain – flute. For it I used large amount of different instruments : piano, synthesized flute ( it even sounds more or less good and fits composition ) and other instruments, but exactly sampled synthesized flute sounds fit composition the most. In some of its notes’ sounds there are tambourines, but there is nothing to do about it : instrument is free and high quality in all other respects; clean quality can be obtained with paid sampled synthesized instruments, which use Sound Font samples. There were also large amount of experiments with instruments, effects and their parameters to balance composition and make it sound good ( for example, use of envelope’s Release parameter automation of synthesized in Funxion flute, to make it sound longer at the ends of notes groups, than at the ends of notes inside groups ), I did not described all of them to not increase article size 2 – 3 times and shown only final result.
In process of composition creation there were large amount of listens, adjustments makings and listens again till composition started to sound in a needed way; then instruments’ volumes balancing, to make them sound together instead of silencing each other, for example, I decreased basses volume, because this composition is not with a basses power, but a melodic one. Then a few amount of tweaks and composition started to sound good enough. This is it for today, check details in project’s file and ask questions in comments, if you have ones. Next time I’ll create variation of other composition to continue development in this area, see you next time.
