Made with Concept 2 – Dark Mountain

Welcome to episode 3 of ‘Made with Concept 2’. If you’ve seen the previous episodes, you’ll know the format. For those of you that are new here, this series is about demonstrating just how easily you can build out music for a scene using Concept 2. In part 1 we’ll show you the scene, and in part 2 we’ll demonstrate exactly how we got there.

This time we’re creating atmospheric music for a dark mountain scene – think of The Shining and you’re on the right track. We really want to set the scene and make something that’s both mysterious and atmospheric. Let’s get into it…

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Video transcript

OK, thanks for coming back for part two for the mountain scene we’ve got here. So a short clip, but very cinematic, very atmospheric, really reminded me of almost the start to The Shining or Arrival these type of movies where we really want to set the scene and make something that’s mysterious and atmospheric. So let’s go through how we built this scene up. So first thing we did was add a kind of noise atmos track, and for this we’re using the space glacier preset.

Just to very quickly switch one of the oscillators to, traditional mode and then to noise to thicken up a little bit, a little bit of subtle modulation, drag and drop for the cut off and the mix of the reverb there just to keep the preset evolving all the time, without having to do too much automation, just allowing me to move on to the next layer nice and quickly. So having got that down, I wanted something that, a little melodic layer that was just going to keep the pace moving forward.

So I used the high transition preset here. And you can hear this is almost like a little cord that’s zipping in. So the original preset used the advanced shape here just with a repetitive pulse. But I didn’t want this to sound too repetitive. So again, I just used the drag and drop functionality of the mod system to LFO the frequency of the shape that’s controlling the EQ here, which is producing this pulse. So now this pulse is not happening on a regular, repetitive cadence.

It’s happening at different times, different durations and different moves. So that’s actually quite nice again. So putting those two layers together, now we’ve got something that’s evolving, automatically evolving nice and quickly. Nice and easily, just giving us a good basis for the scene now. We need something that’s going to pulse, it’s going to hold the scene together and then we’ll add some melodic elements. So we can move on, I wanted something trailer ish, something like a kick.

So came across this giant drop preset. And this was a really good start for this. So I actually switched on the second oscillator here, just add a little bit of high frequency, a little bit of bite to help cut through the mix almost has a kind of spring reverb type of sound, which was a good at just underpinning the whole thing. Once that was down together, I wanted to add another element that would match with that kick. So I came across this entrance preset, it almost feels like a bit like a double bass, but a little bit more abstract, which is really cool.

So there’s a little pitch bend going on here which adds this nice cinematic vibe that was added using the XY capture here. Just myself on top of this factory preset because I wanted this particular pitch bend I didn’t want to automate it in the DAW because I wanted the whole thing just to loop nice and easily. So we use the capture feature here with two bars and then use that to adjust the detune of the oscillator and the gain just to give it that little characteristic pitch band.

Now put together with the kick, we’ve now got something that just underpins the whole scene. It gives us this sense of dread, it could be fine just to leave it with those layers that that could actually work depending on, you know, on your own, your taste. I kind of felt it needed a little bit more. So just to punctuate the entrance to the scene, I used the bowed string scrape preset. That sounds a bit like this. So this is using what looks like a bowed guitar and the advanced shape is then zipping through that file within the granular oscillator.

So it’s got this really metallic, unusual, more organic type sound coming out of the Concept plugin here and using that just at the start to kind of enter scene and then quietly at the end exit it. So moving on needed another element that was going to be a little more atmospheric again. So I found a preset here called the Ghosts, that I really liked. Very ghostly, obviously, and unusual. That made me feel like it fitted the mist in the scene.

So what’s happening under the hood here? We’ve got the convolution reverb that’s got a vocal sample on it, that kind of pulsing vocal sample. So this gives you this very ghostly feel. If I turn this off, the preset sounds very, very different. It’s more like a kind of stab almost. Adding the reverb back in, you’ve got this ghostly vocal character and you get a little bit of rhythmic evolution as well. So I wanted to take that rhythmic feel even further.

So I ended the ring modulator using it more like a kind of pulsing mechanism, not an actual ring mod. Now adding a little bit of panning modulation in the DAW, allow that to move around the scene and give you this really unusual, ghostly quality. And then just for the final layer, I wanted something pad like, but again, atmospheric, unusual, so came across the destroyed dream preset, which is as you can hear, is very interesting, very unusual.

It can be really aggressive, actually, with the mod wheel up. But bringing that down to zero. Got this really nice distant pad that I felt fitted really well with the scene. And so again, it’s using a distorted guitar chord in the convolution reverb to create this otherworldly atmosphere, which I think works really nicely in the track. So putting everything together, this is what we have. Thanks for coming back and watching this third part of the Made in Concept 2 series.