While OP-forums battles are pretty successful, here it is still to a tradition to settle
What if we had “Open Battles” where no hardware is mandatory to begin with?
I want to test this idea, so here is the very first “Open Battle” brief, let’s hope it is successful enough!
For this battle you can use up to two instruments.
Recording can be done in a DAW, a 4-track cassette recorder, a sampler, or any other recording support.
Technical achievement is not the point: the aim of open battles is to explore your instruments further, discover new sound design techniques, get a track done, and most of all have fun!
The first axis for this new battle is “soundtrack”:
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MAKING MOVIES
Look for a video that inspires you (a trailer the sound of which you cut for instance). You can create it from scratch if you have the skills, or assemble* pieces of (eg copyright free) videos such as the ones bellow and make your own video! Don’t forget to cite your sources!
Here is a video I did to get you started:
All the source files are linked in the comments.
Feel free to rebuild your video from these bits or from scratch!
Here is a link to download the whole video above.
*Da Vinci Resolve is a free software that is pretty powerful to manipulate video and sound.
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SOUND + VISION
Craft the basis for the soundtrack of your video. The aim is to get a “grid”, a structure that clearly gives you the moments when the video changes. You can either record yourself on your instrument while the video is playing, or go forensics and assemble (in Resolve or in a DAW) fragments of sounds to the video. You can even only use “markers” that would disappear in the final track.
Extract the audio and import this back into your sampler (or whatever support you’re using for your recording). -
EXPLORE // MAKE NOISE
Prepare some sounds in your instrument. As it was introduced above, an extra instrument (hardware or software) is accepted for sound design. Go as wild as you can, you can’t go too strange! In particular, you are encouraged to push the FX to their most uncomfortable zones, and mangle this as clay. Explore as far as you can, push the limits.
You can also sample your own voice and go crazy with this material. -
NO LOOP // NO BEAT (optional)
Avoid creating loops, at least no drum loops, unless it is somehow required by the movie (e.g. in a dancing scene). But even then, it is encouraged to use e.g. chords rather than drums. An occasional percussion is ok of course.
If you need inspiration, check Disasterpeace’s works or just pay attention to your favorite movie soundtrack…
The other aspect I would like to encourage in this battle is “transmission”.
Upload your track in SoundCloud with hashtag #NautBattle01 and submit it here.
You can of course also upload the whole video and soundtrack editing in YT, and drop the link here next to your SC link, if you think it will give some interesting perspective to your track.
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SHARE
When you submit your track, you should share a part (or all) of your sound design as samples, sample chain or user patches.
Do whatever you can so that other people can reuse your work. -
REUSE
You have to reuse at least one sound/patch/sample chain of (at least) one track that was previously dropped!
Make it not too long: target is around 3 minutes, could be shorter but not much longer (unless you have created an awesome short movie)
Deadline: Fabruary 21st 2021
We then vote for one submission, the composer of which gets to establish the brief for next battle 
