“Superpower” music branding project

In a return to a former life I’ve been responsible for composing, remixing and arranging of music for the BBC’s ‘Superpower’ season on the power of the internet.

The music for a season about the power of the internet and it’s effect on our lives needs to do three things :

1) Sound big and important
2) Sound ‘internetty’ (ie. blips and bleeps)
3) Sound like people are affected

I found a lovely piece of library music called ‘Data Streams’ published by Universal which really matched the people-y criteria but not the other two, so I called the publishers to see if they could get the composers to send me over the source material to remix at will.

About a week later and I had a link to a slew of WAV files. In the mean time I’d dragged my trusty steed the CS1x into work and had begun adding lots of new elements, strings, drums & percussion, bitty bleeps, alternate bass lines, arpeggiated 303 type sequences etc.

The reason for doing all this was two fold. Firstly, deadlines suddenly became incredibly short and it didn’t feel like there was time to commission a composer to do something from scratch. I’ve done this before and there’s nearly always 2-3 stages of to-ing and fro-ing before you’re heading in the right direction.

Secondly, having all the elements ‘in house’ meant it was very easy to edit, remix and re-purpose the music to fit different moods and different types of programming; science, news, personal stories, promos, TV branding etc.

Hence ‘Data Streams – BBC Remix’ as you can hear below; my ‘Master Template Track’ from which I used as the basis for creating the remixes I needed.

LISTEN

ALTERNATE VERSION : ‘PEOPLE’ REMIX

ALTERNATE VERSION : ‘TECH’ REMIX

For a comparison, here’s the original :

And see the videos I made for the season (also incorporating the music).

TECHNICAL STUFF

Whole thing arranged in Pro Tools LE with a DIGI002 rack system, mastered with Waves Masters (LinMB and L2) plug-in suite.

The CS1x provided bass, 303 types lines, trancey pad
Digi Xpand for the strings and some other bits.
Spectasonics Omnisphere and Stylus RMS plug-ins bought and installed at incredibly short notice for extra instruments, sfx and drums.