Supermarket Matters

http://supermarketmatters.wordpress.com/

About the project

Supermarket Matters is a 12 episode comedy podcast in the making. The brainchild of Mark Chatterley it will be written and created by talented people trying to break into their chosen careers.

This blog will follow their journey through the initial plotting through scripting, to auditioning, recording and editing – then finally, distribution.

All of this, mainly due to us all being more strapped for cash than we like, will be done using as much free software as possible.

If you have any skills you would like to showcase by getting involved, please get in contact with:

supermarketmatters@gmail.com

 

My role

I offered to provide all of the background music, incidentals and sound effects for the 12 part podcast.

What I intend to do over the next few months – until the project is complete - is to document all of the processes and ideas and to post all of the background music, sound effects and the like from draft through to completion, so that the projects making can be showcased.

The same is also happening over on the Supermarket Matters blog.

The Story So Far ……

The first things I worked on was a piece of background music for the supermarket and a distinctive tannoy sound.

This is how it has evolved so far:

Musak - I’ve heard of it, had a basic idea of what it was but wanted to be sure that I was thinking along the right lines. So I began by researching the term ‘muzak’ (elevator music) and this led me to a band called The Lindberg Hemmer Foundation. I also drew a bit of inspiration from something completely different (quite unexpectedly) – A Nintendo Wii (the music on the Mii channel!).

So far, so good and I’m happy with my points of reference.

Before any tune popped into my head, I thought about what hardware / software I was going to use. For the drum and percussion tracks, I eventually settled for the Boss DR-55, a Roland TR-727 and Yamaha PSR–4500.

For everything else, I used Omnishpere, Halion, Real Guitar and Plugsound Fretted Instruments.

I began building up the rhythm section by sampling a few drum phrases from the PSR-4500 and EQ-ing out the bass drum so that only the cymbals, hats and shakers remained. I then programmed the DR-55 and TR-727 to fit around the phrases accordingly.

By this time I began thinking about the chord progression (real guitar) and melody (Halion). The bass line followed suit (Plugsound). Omnisphere was used for the first and last few seconds just for giving the intro and outro an ‘organic’ feel.


The tannoy was done on a vintage electric piano in turn run through a basic reverb unit.


To avoid repetition with the background music, I will be working on several other pieces. And over the coming weeks I’ll be building up a catalogue of some field recordings.