Trailer Music Tutorial: Blood by Richard Pryn

In this video I breakdown how I wrote the track ‘Blood’ which was featured on the latest trailer for the movie ‘Dragged Across Concrete’ with Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn.

I show you how I started the track from a small sample of a cello recording I had done with Elephant Music and developed the idea based around the sound I had created.

Building the track with textures and tension.

This track was so much fun because I essentially started it with a single sample of a string bwaaam.

How I build a track from one sample

Starting from a single sound is one of my favourite ways to write. A lot of my placements come from this kind of texture work, and it comes from a sense of play.

The trick is to stay with one audio file and have fun with it. I’ll take a long note, like a string recording, and run it through effects until it sounds like something new. Distortion adds texture, modulation adds movement, reverb adds space and depth, and pitch shifting, especially down an octave, can take it somewhere much darker. One effect can make a single recording sound like a whole string section.

For a braaam-style sound, my usual chain is simple. Crush it with a compressor, shape it with EQ (I’m usually cutting rather than boosting), give it more grit with some distortion, then put it in a space. If it’s sounding a bit keyboard-like or too clean, those steps are what fix it. Visualising the image you want helps too, such as standing on a cliff watching an enormous battle about to begin.

Layering takes it further. I’ll duplicate a sound and stack it with others, for example low brass with trombones for that extra rasp, then bounce the result and treat it as one new sample.

Once I have the core sound, I build the track around it with textures and tension. Automation is a big part of that: bring the volume up, fade in the mix on your effects, and take the reverb from dry to wet so the sound changes as the cue grows.

If you save these as audio files for your own library, write the key in the file name so you can find the right one later.

For more on this, read How do I get my award winning Cello sound?, BRAAAMS - How To Use The Sound That Everyone Knows and A Single Violin Pluck Did All This. You can hear the track itself in the Dragged Across Concrete trailer. My Building Drones course shows how I turn one recording into a full, evolving cue.

Happy composing!Rich