The brief for December's Crow Hill Company Composer Challenge was to "write something ‘wintry’ using the latest instrument in the Vault series: Wavering Choir." This time we could use any instruments we wanted, although the choir needed to be prominent. Challenge: accepted!
My inspiration came from wintry epic track from Imascore, Winter Storm, that I've adored for years. It's a bombastic mix of choir and orchestra with an icy sparkle. Obviously, I'm nowhere near Imascore's level. They make music professionally and I just tit around at home when I have a spare hour, so borrowing inspiration from their work is a great place to start.
Writing to a tight deadline (I only had a couple of evenings free to work on my competition entry this time) meant I couldn't spend my usual ages faffing about with the detail. Which shows in a lot of places this time; the choir programming is mostly just block chords, the melody is just carried by the piano so gets a little lost. But looking past the self-criticism, I think I did manage to hit my brief. Using sticks washed in reverb gives the percussion a light and frosty air. The risers and cymbals are crisp. The choir's held notes do, sort of, remind me of a howling winter gale.
Here's the VST list:
Choir: The Crow Hill Company - Vaults Wavering Choir
Piano: The Crow Hill Company - The Vertical Piano
Orchestra: Spitfire Audio - Albion Tundra
Drums: The Crow Hill Company - Concussion
Additional percussion: Native Instruments - Modern Drummer
Effects: UVI - Whoosh Designer
Reverb: Valhalla VintageVerb & Supermassive
Once again, the track did not win the competition, but it was fun to enter and more importantly gave me the kick I so often need to get a track released.
Comments