As I began thinking about the 9/11 anniversary this week, I wanted to do a track in honor of the "heroes". Not just something to honor the incredible bravery of the FDNY and NYPD that served on that day, many making the ultimate sacrifice, but also to honor those heroes all around us who serve every day, usually unnoticed.
I remembered that I cranked out a quick track a while back and called it "Heroes", but in reality, I didn't give it that huge, heroic sound that it deserves. That takes time, and for some reason I just didn't feel like spending the effort back then.
So, I resurrected this track and completely redid it, probably spending about 20 hours reworking it in Cubase 5 Studio. This program continues to be an absolute pleasure to work with and is rock solid. It still hasn't really crashed on me a single time (though my sound card did start misbehaving and causing the BSOD one night, forcing me to reinstall the sound card driver). Though the interface in Cubase is not as visually interesting and "pretty" as the one in Sonar, I'm now realizing that Cubase is MUCH easier to look at for long periods of time. All the "3D-ness" in Sonar becomes completely distracting after a while and as much harder on the eyes that the generally 2D look of Cubase.
About the only part that remained completely intact from the first incarnation of this composition is the piano part, which was rendered using SampleTekk's "The Big One" piano library. The other tracks were cleaned up, overdubbed and rearranged, and some totally new elements were added, such as bass guitar and drums. I made heavy use of the Halion Symphony Orchestra plugin that came with Cubase 5, and also used IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonik on several tracks.
I think the end result sounds quite "heroic". Let me know what you think?
here is a direct link to the mp3 for non-shockwave environments
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