About a year ago, I posted a cover of the Pink Panther theme on this blog. Here, I’m breaking down precisely how I did it.

I assume you understand that by “how I did it”, I don’t mean putting the music online and typing my post. ^^ In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised to get quite a few feedback about my previous post [1] and I thought I’d make a second one from the same mold.

So, here is the first music I recorded with additional sounds to create a particular atmosphere. The idea was to give this hyper famous musical theme a ‘dark, black and white 50’s movie’ flair [2].

Now, what I started from was far from that. I just played the main pink panther theme on my guitar, pretty much like so:

Then, I thought I would be cool to add a pretty deep bass line and, since my guitar is tuned pretty low (one full tone lower than standard), I just added something like this with a nice bluesy tension [3]:

Liking the sound of that, I decided to try to stretch this theme as much as I could and to add some bluesy guitar licks here and there and a slow drum pattern [a]:

At this point, I felt like something was missing but I couldn’t quite figure out what. I asked a few friends for their opinion and they felt the same way. Cold, empty, incomplete: these were the feelings people had listening. I agreed but somehow felt like there was a way to do something decent out this music without breaking anything that was already there but, without adding too much either in order not to change the overall effect.

I started by adding a few notes a piano here and there:

That was better in my opinion but, at the same time, it was not really solving the problem either. Then, I started to think “Sound design” and dived into universal sound bank. In my mind, this panther wasn’t the goofy inspector Clouseau from the movies but rather an enigmatic character in a trench-coat walking in the dark alleys of New York or Chicago at night, probably a private detective working on a gloomy murder story… So, that’s the kind of effects I started to look for. I settled for a very urban sound [b] that I shortened to make a loop as well as one [c] which gives the feeling someone’s walking by the decks of a harbor at night. I added a couple of extra sounds to break the monotony of a long loop. First, a boat horn [d] that I liked more than the one in the previous file and a police car [e] that I used to suggest a dramatic effect. The sequence sounds like this:

And, blending it with the music, you get that:

I was quite satisfied by the final effect and thought that the music was now expressing all I wanted it to express. I submitted this mp3 to the french website zvok, where it got a few positive comments.

I hope you found that message interesting and, if so, I’ll do that again for other musics. I am currently remixing and trying to improve the quality of a few of my stuff so I might talk about that too!

Happy koninginnedag for those of you who know what that means and who’ll read this message in time for that. ^^

[1] Although, none on the blog itself but rather on Facebook or by mail. ^^

[2] I know, dark black and white doesn’t really mean anything but be honest, I’m sure you understood what I meant.

[3] Using the first blue note (also known triton), which is a diminished fifth (i.e. 3 full tones higher than the fundamental).

[a]

[b] It’s supposed to be San Francisco actually if I remember properly.

[c]

[d]

[e]

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