KVR Audio

ghostwhistler · Post by **ghostwhistler** » Mon May 16, 2022 12:34 pm

Man's a genius. (along with his T Dream compadres of course).

I'm referring to his sound design for the likes of the Babylon 5 soundtrack. I would love to improve my sound design skills to be able tocome up with all the cool effects and sounds he uses to build tension and release and transition. I'm going to assume that, at this point (90's) he was using FM, though I'm sure his sound pallette was much broader. Are these simply FM processed noise whooshes and such? I'm currently trying to learn FM8 to this end, any help is greatly appreciated. I'll link to some samples below, YT/copyright permitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK8z0sGJJtI&t=34s

about 30 seconds in there's a gentle wash of noise, I'm guessing. Doesn't sound like regular analog synth noise so I assume it's FM in some fashion

CHOOS · Post by **CHOOS** » Mon May 16, 2022 6:48 pm

Unless someone has made a patch for a good gong with FM I give up on these.
Ive tried in the past and I wasn't willing to spend more time on it. Not worth it in my opinion.
To me I sounds like a low quality sampled gong. I could of course be wrong.

https://freevstplugins.net/chau-gongs/ This might be worth sampling and using sample reduction and or low pass filter and other fx.

CHOOS · Post by **CHOOS** » Mon May 16, 2022 6:50 pm

Just found this video which is really cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GyD8EprgH8

HAL76 · Post by **HAL76** » Mon May 16, 2022 8:10 pm

I´d recommend a little research on the generation of FM synths from the late 80s (1989) that were extensively used in the 90s and other digital competitors.

Yamaha couples FM with AWM since around that time then and all the Kawais, Rolands, Korgs etc. around didn´t dispense "samples", too back then (like people today).

We should maybe better speak of ROM waves and definitely understand them as an integral part of the synthesizers, but how ever they called it - they were just everywhere. Affordable, spectrally complex, new timbres that you´ll also find in Nils K1v (free) for the beginning.

Important: lower sample rate and bitt depth, limited frequency bandwidth and dynamic range and so on ...

ghostwhistler · Post by **ghostwhistler** » Tue May 17, 2022 6:45 am

CHOOS wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 6:48 pm Unless someone has made a patch for a good gong with FM I give up on these.
Ive tried in the past and I wasn't willing to spend more time on it. Not worth it in my opinion.
To me I sounds like a low quality sampled gong. I could of course be wrong.

https://freevstplugins.net/chau-gongs/ This might be worth sampling and using sample reduction and or low pass filter and other fx.

of course you could do that. I've no idea how big Chris was on sampling. TD used the Emulator and the m1 (at least).

I guess it depends how much time one wants to devote to creating sounds for these purposes. My general approach is to get ideas down quicly while the energy is high. But if you are as skilled as Chris you can probably design stuff like this just as quickly. A skill to practice obviously

Collusion · Post by **Collusion** » Wed May 25, 2022 11:13 am

A lot of what Chris was using on the Babylon 5 soundtrack was coming out of E-Mu samplers and the E-Mu Morpheus. Don't forget this guy would have also sampled the living daylights out of his PPG gear from the TD days, which is probably what is being mistaken as FM sounds. The Morpheus featured heavily in the background transition effects, it's character is easy to spot to anyone who's ever used/owned one and the E-Mu samplers available at the time also had some similar filter capabilities.

Watch this and pay attention to the contents of Chris' instrument racks. Note that the video of him in the studio is from later in his career, rather than working on B5. https://musicofbabylon5.com/christopher-franke/

[edit]To corrent myself, the video would have been from the fifth and final season of B5. Those big grey Akai 5000/6000 samplers in his rack (can't tell which model) came out in '98. I got the production timeline wrong. Apologies.

[/edit]

Collusion · Post by **Collusion** » Thu May 26, 2022 12:10 pm

ghostwhistler you might find this a useful starting point for your FM8 explorations. It's an FM8 adaptation of an old Yamaha SY77 patch that emulates a PPG, similar to the sounds Franke uses on the B5 soundtrack... https://collusioninc.net/files/Franke%20B5.nfm8

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Tue Jun 21, 2022 6:12 am

I was involved with him before he left to Hollywood. He had a Waveframe sampler that time. But KVR member EdgarRothermich who went with him to California should know better…
But I am sure its not the tools, its decades of experience…

How to sound like Chris Franke?