I love that everyone with an idea now has the ability to voice said idea. Sure, there’s a bunch of garbage to sift through, but I think that makes it that much more exciting when you stumble upon something brilliant.

As for FETIDUS, oh yeah, there will be a finely-polished original score released on traditional old-school CD (and the normal new-school suspects like iTunes, etc.), with the best music from the FETIDUS audiobook. It’s been one of my favorite parts of the project to work on, and I can’t wait to see/hear the final project. Chipping away at the epic project one word and note at a time.

Speaking of New Media authors doing fantastically odd things, I sincerely think we’ve entered a kind of golden age with the converging forms of media and the miraculous means to produce and transmit multi-media arts. I’ve seen some wild and crazy projects, like brain-impulse controlled live performance, interactive Flash story-telling, awesome developments in the indie film movement, artists that crossover from iPhone apps to film scoring, etc.. It’s just an amazing time to be an artist, and I take inspiration from these trailblazers and am just so grateful to enjoy and do the type of work I’m doing here.

For all the cutting edge things the New Media authors are doing, I think book soundtracks might be one of the most fantastically odd

As a response for now, I have collected a large set of sample libraries, plugins and other tools over the years. I still buy new libraries and tools when I hear something I love. There are so many great sample libraries out there, it’s amazing. I can’t keep up with how many cool products there are.

As for the “sounds” they’re all just part of my collection of virtual synths/plugins, sample libraries, etc. I play everything with a keyboard controller (or in the case of percussion, a drum controller) and run everything into a DAW/sequencer to record the MIDI, then I assign that to various virtual instruments. Sometimes I’ll record acoustically, particularly in the case of acoustic guitar and of course violin. Otherwise, I’m almost 100% “in the box” now — although I used to have racks of external synthesizers and samplers. Now, just about everything is virtual, or “in the box” for me, although occasionally, I’ll buy a special, external synth.

So I use the virtual instruments/plugins I’ve bought over the years. Native Instruments (NI), for example, has plugins that cover a large spectrum of what I use. Kontakt is my favorite sample-playback tool, but I liberally use other NI synths such as Massive, FM8, Absynth, etc. They sound great. I have a bunch of other ones from other wonderful developers, which I use all the time. But even the virtual instruments that ship with DAW apps like Sonar, Cubase, Logic, etc., are extraordinarily good. Sonar alone, comes with some killer virtual instruments, so you can do quite a bit with just Sonar Producer and a MIDI controller. Same for Cubase, Logic, etc.

As for the percussive side of things, with any music I release “professionally” (for lack of a better term, meaning some piece of music that is meant to really stand on its own, perhaps for a client, or that I sell, like my Aeolian May work a few years ago), I have meticulously programmed/played all the percussion by hand via controller and recorded them via MIDI. Every last note. I often use an Akai controller (currently I love the Akai MPD32) and Roland Handsonic, then use Native Instruments Battery and various drum sample libraries as the key source of actual drum samples, but I program/layer/perform all the beats by hand. I’ve also been known to pull out my djembe and bongos to layer acoustically, but that takes more time.

When I am in a big rush, or I’m just creating a temp/demo track, sometimes I do use drum loops, but I often mangle them or tweak them. Sometimes I don’t do much to them, just layer them or edit them as needed for the rhythm section to knock the track out quickly. They are temp tracks that will usually be replaced at some point in the future. All depends on the project, time available, etc. Some of the dramatic scoring percussion loops of the EastWest libraries are so damn good and inspiring they just beg to be left alone with minimal tweaking or layering with individual samples, although I’ll almost always add a nice taiko kit via MIDI that works so well for action sequences.

In the case of the FETIDUS music, most of the beats are done by hand as I normally prefer to do them, but yes, some of the beats start as drum loops or sample libraries I’ve purchased. Just depends how far along in the production cycle I have a particular piece of music.

For example, on KA Texture, several of the source percussion loops are part of the EastWest libraries I own, layered/tweaked here and there with some other sounds, rhythms, hits and transitional elements.

On Retribution and A Slow March Through Hell, for example, those drums are 80%+ me in front of a drum controller (the Akai or Roland) fed into NI Battery or Kontakt, layered with several kits, and various effects, then tweaked in MIDI. Sometimes I’ll have a loop which I’ll smash and mash to hell and back as part of the texture as well.

One little “trick” I do is that I like to layer a typical acoustic drum kit with an electronic kit, like an 808. Then I apply liberal amounts of EQ, compression, reverb, gating and sometimes even distortion. It’s so much fun!

When I release the official score of FETIDUS, I’ll be polishing and tweaking all these compositions properly, mastering them, etc… and probably go through replacing some of the infrequently-used drum loop sources with hand-performed variations if needed. Depends entirely on the piece. If I had time and budget I’d record a lot of them acoustically, but I’m not that much of a masochist! We’ll see. These were good enough for the current production, but I have a different standard for the stand-alone score. It’s got to live and breathe on its own as foreground music… not dramatic background music. Again, tools like Battery with extensive libraries and plugins come in handy.

Activation by 5? One of my favorites… it’s got a couple fun tempo warps, an interesting time signature that I love to play around with, but it needs a lot more production and sculpting before I can release that as a stand-alone track! Will definitely be on the FETIDUS soundtrack release!

Finally, something must be said of the DAW/sequencer you use. Over the years I’ve bought most of the major DAW apps, on both Mac and Windows, although I now use Windows exclusively (sorry Mac guys! Had enough of Apple for now!). My first album was created and recorded in Logic. And I used to love Digital Performer. So the Mac platform is outstanding for music, but in recent years I’ve been very happy on Windows. Now I prefer to use Sonar, Cubase and Live, with a touch of ProTools here and there. I also really love to use Reaper, which I’ve been using more and more lately. A great tool for your arsenal. Get a good DAW/sequencer (almost all of these can work wonders), a good controller (Akai is highly recommended) and a good sample player (NI Battery/Kontakt) and use compression and layering, and you can have some seriously kick-ass drum sounds.

My favorites have to be “Retribution”, “KA Texture”, and especially “A Slow March Through Hell”, but I really would like to hear a lot more of “Activation by 5″

Keep this stuff coming and let me know when I can buy my first song.