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Danny Elfman

Composer Danny Elfman continues to have an extraordinary career in film scoring. His work is iconic and revered in the film world.

Omnisphere Pleasure
Danny tells us, "I would have to say that discovering Omnisphere this last year has been one of my greatest pleasures. I'm always looking for new sounds and new plug-ins to run with my sequencer. Using Omnisphere along with DP is fantastic for several reasons. First, there's a great core library to choose from and Eric Persing has, along with all the Spectrasonics sound designers, done a really vast and thorough job. It's great, finally, to have sounds organized so well with the many 'tags' that they provide. Secondly, it's really easy to program your own custom sounds. My first day, I already had several dozen edits that I really liked and put them in a separate 'Favorites' folder. The Omnisphere browser system made it super easy to find them as I needed them."

Elfman's work often features Spectrasonics' Omnisphere virtual instrument on many of the music cues - Elfman frequently uses two Omnispheres for up to sixteen possible sounds at once.

"When I know I'm going to do a lot of synth work, I begin with a bank of the factory sounds and a slew of my own variations that I think I can use, and use them I do!" continued Elfman.

"I find myself diving into the 'Psychoacoustic' sounds a lot, frequently in the 'Experimental' and 'Film' genres. I also found myself often going to the 'Distortion' category, also in the 'Experimental' and 'High-Energy' genres."

THE SOUNDS
"An example of what I did would be taking the 'Buzzord' sounds, which I had half a dozen custom variations that I came up with. Several variations on the 'Big Boomer Trash Strike' from the 'Impacts and Hits' category was used a lot. From the 'Pads + Strings' group I went to the 'Sweeping Pads' and 'Quirky' tags a lot. The patch 'Secondary Strike' from the 'SFX and Noise' category and 'Sound FX' genre was very useful and like the others, I had a number of variations on it. Finally the 'Hybrid Organic' category gave me sounds that I would use both as hits and pads and sometimes a cross between them," Elfman explained.

"I can't say enough good things about Omnisphere," said Elfman. "I love doing my own synth editing, but I'm no programming genius and I have very little patience for new plug-ins that require steep leaning curves to start really 'working' the patches I like. Omnisphere was really easy and intuitive. And for each file in DP, I'd make all the edits and variations on my sounds as was required, and having them attached to that file for later use made my life easier."

"My compliments to Eric and all the folks at Spectrasonics.  Good work."

Be sure to check out Danny's fine scores.

Danny Elfman at IMDB

(photo credit: Jimmy Lenner, Jr.)
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