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How to imitate the "angry strings" effect in The Meg?

babylonwaves

Darth Fader
hi,

i'm trying to imitate a kind of muted spiccato/col legno/dig string articulation i'm hearing a lot right now with my libraries and i can't really nail it. the interesting part is that you don't really hear a tonality at all.

a good example is the string ostinato in "toshi's sacrifice" (from The Meg by harry gregson). here's a snippet:



what I mean you can find at 0'15 for a couple of secs.

anybody has good pointer for me? thanks!
 
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Your best bet is probably to look in orchestral FX libraries. 8Dio's Symphonic Shadows has sounds that are similar to this, and other libraries in that vein (CAGE, Uist, etc.) would probably also have them.

You might be able to get somewhere close with a standard string library by layering shorts and col legnos at multiple pitches and possibly artificially pitch-shifting everything down.
 
@pmcrockett
thanks, that helps. the little issue I have with CAGE is that there appear to be no round robins for the FX. i wonder if that's different with Symphonic Shadows or Albion Uist.
as for layering: i've tried that but didn't get to a result I found convincing. I believe, if you layer shorts and col legnos, there is still to much tonal info in there. maybe I didn't layer enough though and eventually I need to combine FX arts and layers.
 
Sounds like a big ol layer of stuff to me.

As you deduced in your original post, try layering shorts/spiccatto strings with col legnos. There's also a low brass layer in there doing the same thing, maybe bass bones + cimbasso. Getting the fundamentals in the right octave helps to lessen the perception of tone.

There's probably also some high perc in there following the rhythm to give it more bite in the mix.
 
@Scoremixer
yes, there are a fair amount of instruments going on. which is okay, that type of layering i'm used to. to be honest, where I lack knowledge is aleatoric effects.

Getting the fundamentals in the right octave helps to lessen the perception of tone.

that's a good hint, thanks for reminding me! i'm so used to spread out chords. not a good thing here ...
 
You can do something similar with a string library from Berlintools or whatever their name is. It's called string effects or something. Note that there are also brass staccs in there, as well as synth playing. It's a bit of a mess, what makes it cool.
 
Symphonic Shadows has what are effectively round robins — most of the patches aren't keymapped by pitch because the pitch is ambiguous, so each key for the patch is a different take of the same or a similar sound. Dunno how other comparable FX libraries do it, though, because Symphonic Shadows is the only one I've used.
 
You could possibly also achieve something similar by combining Martele FFF Exposed/Spiccato Exposed (Berlin Strings) with Spiccato/Short Staccato Dig and some Col Legno (SSS), all bass sounds. But you'd have to boost the frequencies around 2-3k and remove some of the lowest frequencies to get a less identifiable tonality.
 
No ones going to mention metropolis ark3? It's practically made for that stuff and that stuff only lol.
 
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