Steve Tavaglione performs with EWI, Ableton Live, Kontakt and Omnisphere at a recent gig in downtown Los Angeles
You may not have heard of friend-of-the-blog Steve Tavaglione before, but you’ve almost certainly heard his electronic sound design work on countless film and TV shows such as Wall-E, Finding Nemo, CSI: New York and Las Vegas, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, American Beauty, and Road To Perdition, just to name a few. Tav is probably one of the most ubiquitous laptop musicians in the world, having carved out a unique niche for himself in Hollywood as a creative sound designer and computer-assisted session musician. He has also designed sounds and presets for Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere synth and sample libraries from Tonehammer and 8dio.
Having worked on major film and TV projects for many years, Tav has a unique perspective on the business of music for picture and trends in the industry. I had a good chat with him recently about working in Hollywood and some of the software techniques he uses to make new sounds.
Steve Tavaglione performing “Cinematic” with the band Simplexity
DESIGNING SOUNDS FOR FILM
There are actually two basic types of sound designers who work on major projects in Hollywood. The first type, usually credited simply as ‘sound designer,’ is the person or team who create and place NON-MUSICAL sound effects in the film, like the sound of a laser gun firing, an explosion, or a car’s engine revving up. For example, the legendary sound designer Ben Burtt created the sound for the blaster pistols in the original Star Wars films by striking high-tension wires with various objects such as a metal wrench.
Han Solo squeezes off a shot
The second type, sometimes credited as ‘score sound designer’ or ‘electronic music programmer,’ works directly with the film composer to create MUSICAL sounds and textures that can be used as part of the score. This role has become more and more important over the years, as electronic sounds have come to play a more integral role in film music. Steve Tav has made a successful career in the studio as this latter kind of sound designer, working on countless major film productions with Hollywood composers such as Thomas Newman, David Holmes, Aaron Zigmund, Paul Haslinger and Trevor Morris.
With so many commercial sound libraries available these days aimed at the soundtrack market, it isn’t too hard for contemporary composers to find quality electronic sounds to use in their scores. In this environment, the most important job of a sound designer is to come up with fresh, creative sounds that CAN’T be found in sound libraries, and figure out how to make these sounds work MUSICALLY with the score. The secret of Steve Tav’s success is his ability to consistently come up with out-of-the-box electronic sounds and make them work, often by juxtaposing musical ideas and concepts in strange new ways that no one else has thought of before. He always keeps his mind open to new ideas and combinations no matter how absurd they might seem on the surface.
“I’d like to hear Meshuggah do a film score with orchestra, and then put the vocalist from Meshuggah into Melodyne and use that to control a water drum or something like that.” – Steve Tavaglione
Meshuggah – ‘Straws Pulled At Random’
CREATIVE TECHNIQUES WITH MELODYNE
One of Tav’s favorite software tools for coming up with unusual new sounds and effects is Melodyne from Celemony. Melodyne is an amazing application that allows you to analyze any music or audio file, determine what individual pitches/notes were played in it, and generates a graphic display of the results. Then you can change the rhythm or pitch of any note simply by moving it around on the screen. In this image you can see a piece of music that has been imported into Melodyne and analyzed, laid out on a pitch vs. time grid. Each of these orange bars is a note, just like in a MIDI editor, and you can reach in with your mouse and change them around however you want.
Originally Melodyne only worked with monophonic material, such as a lead vocal or bassline, but in late 2009 the company released a new version that incorporated their Direct Note Access technology, allowing producers to analyze full tracks or songs in Melodyne and independently alter the pitch and duration of any note in any part, whether it be the vocal line, the keyboard part, or the snare drum. Melodyne is widely used in many areas of the music industry, generally to make small corrections in the pitch or rhythm of a live performance and make it sound more ‘perfect’. If you’ve ever heard of pop music producers tweaking a pop vocal to fix out-of-tune notes or other mistakes, Melodyne is one of the main tools they use for this.
However, Tav tends to use Melodyne somewhat differently, stretching it to do things that its designers never intended in order to come up with creative new sounds and effects. One of his favorite techniques, for example, is to take some complex audio material such as a modern classical piano piece and use Melodyne to analyze all the notes in it and export them as a MIDI file. Then he will take this MIDI file, import it back into Ableton Live (his favorite DAW) and play part of it back, triggering another sampled instrument of his own design in Kontakt or Omnisphere instead of the piano, like the sound of the rain or the sound of a park bench being struck by various objects.
Another of Tav’s techniques is to use Melodyne’s ability to analyze the overtone structure of a sound to transform its timbre. For example, he might record the sound of a single sustained note being played on an instrument with a complex timbre, such as a bowed upright bass. Then he’ll import that into Melodyne and look at the relative volume of the different overtones that make it sound like it does. This is where it gets really unearthly — by taking the overtones and changing their relative pitches, he can make new timbres and sounds that could never exist in reality. The natural overtone series is an ascending scale of perfect fifths — what would it sound like if you arranged them all in major seconds instead, a whole step apart? Or if you pitched them to the ascending tones of a major chord, or a particular scale or mode?
After transforming sounds in Melodyne like this, Tav will often sample them and then move them into a powerful sample-based software instrument like Kontakt or Omnisphere in order to do further manipulation and tweaking of the resulting sounds. Keeping the final results filed away in these instruments also gives him a way to keep track of his work and easily access his original sound libraries at a recording session when every second counts.
