Big Brahms

Hey guys! Today Espen is making some Brahms, using reverb and distortion mostly!

How I make braams

The video above is Espen’s. Here’s how I go about the same thing in my own music.

Braams are the big, brassy, filthy single-note stabs that Hans Zimmer made famous with Inception. What you’re trying to mimic is lots of brass players belting out one enormous note together, or one giant trombone playing across a huge canyon. It’s so big that you hear not just the attack and the texture of the note, but the tail bouncing around you as well.

There are lots of ways to get there. The classic route is orchestral brass: raspy tubas, cimbassos and trombones. If it still sounds a bit keyboard-like, I bounce it to audio and process it. I crush it with a compressor, cut a little with EQ (I more often cut than boost), add some distortion for texture, then put it in a space. Finally I shorten it and add a quick fade at the end so it doesn’t click.

You can do the same with a synth, and you don’t need expensive ones. Logic’s own synths work fine. I’ll put a synth through a big outdoor reverb, then sometimes a guitar amp so the mids bite more. In Omnisphere I like a long reverb and a pitch bend down on the note, then compression for more oomph, and something dirtier from a distortion plugin if it needs more grit.

The best results usually come from layering. Cimbasso for weight, low trombones for rasp, maybe a distorted brass sample or a synth on top, then send the whole lot into the same space. It helps to picture the scene you’re scoring, like standing on a cliff watching a battle about to start.

Save your braams as you make them. If you save them as audio, put the key in the name. If you save them as instrument presets, you don’t need to.

In a track, braams work best alongside epic hits, a pulsing bass and risers.

For more on this, Epic Hits is a quick tutorial on layering samples into hits, and The Ultimate Guide to Trailer Hits & Impacts explains the different kinds of hits and how composers use them. My Trailer Music Course shows you how to make your own hits and braams step by step.

Happy composing!Rich