Developing Your Artistic Voice as a Composer (Part 2)

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of identity as an artist. And continuing our discussion from Part I, I’d like to look at some ways you can immediately inject more of your own “sound” into your work - be it for video games, film, commercials or whatever project you are working on to help develop and craft your own voice as a musician.

One of the easiest and most accessible ways to start developing your sound, is to use sounds that are only available to you. This can take on a variety of ideas but let’s start with the most basic. A percussion instrument, like a shaker, can be played in a kontakt library - but if you were to record your performance, in your space, with your gear - suddenly you have a recording that not only feels more life like but has elements of you in it that no one else can replicate. A sample library can only take you so far in having an original sound, but your habits, your space, and your performance inherently are you - especially if you take these recordings and mix them yourself!

If you are a guitarist, you may be familiar with Eddie Van Halen. Eddie’s famous for many things in the guitar community, but amongst them is his tone. The “Brown sound” as it’s come to be known is a warm, high gain guitar tone. EVH was a big proponent of DIY’ing and hacking gear together to get what he wanted. His custom guitar, the “Frankenstrat” was hand built and his amp was modded with a Variac - essentially a giant dimmer switch which allowed his amp to be at “full power” to give him a great distorted sound, but giving him the ability to turn the volume down. In technical terms a variac works by supplying a lower voltage to the amp but the amp behaves as if it is getting the full voltage and offers some great warmth and saturation to your guitar tone.

This is cool and all, but the point of the story isn’t here yet - there’s a famous story where Eddie and another well known guitarist were hanging out. And this second guitarist got the chance to try Eddie’s gear - the exact same gear with the exact same settings. When he went to perform, he was quite surprised that it DIDN’T sound like Eddie.

As a performer, there is so much more to your sound than the actual gear you use. Micro level details in your performance - such as how hard you play, slight rhythmic inconsistencies and more all add up to sounding “like you”. As a though experiment, if you were to take your brain and put it in another’s body - having access to their lungs, vocal cords, and mouth - you may timbrely sound like them, but your manner of speech, your accent, the words you use, all things you do subconciously and are uniquely you will transfer as well.

So in short: you are inherently you whether you like it or not, you might as well take advantage of it!

So performing live instruments on your music, even if it’s just clapping or a shaker, can add so much dimension and color to your project than just relying on sample libraries.

The other simple way we can develop our own sound, is to literally develop our own sounds! Getting good at synthesis or instrument design (series coming soon) allows you to build entire sonic universes that no one else has access to or can reside in. A basic synth patch may just be a bunch of filtered square waves, but if you were to build your own and mixed in sound design principles/aesthetics that appeal to you such as granular synthesis, sampling, harmonic distortion, blending in noise, etc, you start to develop your own sound and taste in the same way that composing a lot of music leads to developing your sound as well.

This is something I really strive for, especially on my horror projects as that is an entire niche in the industry where cool sound design gets a chance to shine musically. Contact microphones, reverbs, insane EQ curves, and more are all things worth experimenting with if you were looking to get into this deeper. If you don’t have the capacity to perform live or build instruments/synth patches, don’t count yourself out yet! There are plenty of awesome free plugins that are included in your DAW or available online. Experiment with plugins and effects, you may find some unique ways you like to do things that can eventually become a defining element of your sound too!

If you are interested in more, be sure to subscribe to the youtube channel where I am currently working on editing a bunch of video tutorials on some of these ideas and more!

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