3 Genius Ideas that Make Music EPIC

The most important thing I learned listening  to Thomas Bergerson's music is that there is always another layer. Just when you think you're  hearing everything, go back and listen again and you will hear some element you didn't catch  the first time. For example in colors of love from the album 'Sun' at first it sounds like  a pretty simple texture on orchestral strings. But then you realize that there's this  bubbling synth underneath everything. There's also a warm, smooth pad providing ambien

ce and sustain and there's even a low  drum accenting the very first beat. So even the simplest most basic part of the  track is already at least four layers deep. When I think of epic trailer music there  is no artist even close to the top of the game as Two Steps From Hell. Nick Phoenix  and Thomas Bergerson are masters of that huge cinematic style and at the request of Wade  Smith, who won our first composing competition, I've been specifically listening to Thomas  Bergerson's work to figure

out how he pulls it off so well. Today I'm going to share with you three  things I've noticed Bergerson does to make his music so awesome and thank you to Wade for getting  me to pay attention because they're so good I plan on incorporating them into my own work. So I'm going to say that first one again because I think it is that important  - There's always another layer. Here's a section from the track  'Dragonborn' from their latest album 'Myth' There's a melody on the middle strings,  a count

er line in the high string, bass and harmony in the low strings, piano  in the background, flute runs in some of the gaps and with all of that going on wasn't  until going back and listening again that I realize there's also a french horn on  that melody line with the cellos and Brass supporting the background harmony as well.  It's not super easy to hear but I'll try to EQ out some of the highs and lows so you  can focus more on that french horn register. I was working on music for a corporate

video  recently and it got into a place where I was happy with it and about to send it to the client  when I suddenly remembered this idea there's always another layer so I went back and added some  more pads on the chords for fullness and a simple flute part and a high register that was repetitive  enough to recede into the background but filled in that otherwise empty pitch range and a few other  textural elements I didn't really change the music at all but these extra layers made it even  Ful

ler and richer and it totally worked the client is always happy with what I send but this time  the feedback was WOW. When I interviewed Wade, who you'll remember inspired this video, he  mentioned how he incorporated some of these layering ideas in his competition entry: "It's all about the subtleties right, it's all about being an artist right,  adding like the small little details." I think the production, you know, is  probably what put this over the edge." Speaking of the competitions, our

next one will  be announced at the end of the year and it's going to be video game themed. Make sure you're  subscribed so you don't miss the announcement. Let's move on to lesson number  two: It's possible to be big the whole time and still have room to grow. Now that kind of seems like a paradox but Thomas Bergerson manages to make his tracks  sound huge and powerful right from the start. Jump to only about a minute into the track  'New Life' and the sound is freaking huge! I would be so satis

fied to achieve a  massive sound like that. Jump ahead to four minutes in and holy s@#& it's insane! But that earlier section was also full and  Powerful so how's he pulling that off? So one way is by making use of the full range of  registers from down low to way up high. Back to that earlier section in 'New Life' he's got  the women's voices in a middle register, brass in that warm tenor range, strings below behind and  above the voices, including in a very high range, big deep drums, a mid-hi

gh instrument that  might be a dulcimer. Essentially he's leaving no blank space on the canvas. Of course this  does not apply to every track in every style, but when your goal is to specifically achieve  a massive full sound making use of the full spectrum of registers will help you get there. I think another way he pulls off that sense of fullness is with this sort of rule of three  when it comes to rhythm. It's very common in Bergerson's music to always have three layers of  rhythmic activity

: a long slow background rhythm: like one chord for the whole bar often  with sustained pads or strings or brass, a middle layer at roughly the pace of the tempo:  usually with more variety than just taking off the beats but quarter and eighth notes is the  general pace. This will usually be the featured melodic instrument, and then a third layer that  is rhythmically very fast: like 16th notes or constant eighth no pulse. Usually arpeggios or an  ostinato figure on strings or synths. 'Evergreen

' from the album 'Vanquish' is a good example. Early  in the track it's at a pretty low energy relative to where the track is going but he still gets  a very full sound with this rhythmic stacking. We have an active ostinato part on the piano and  celesta, a slow background rhythm with the bass and sustained chords, and then a melodic line on  the choir and violins that's somewhere in between. When I spell it out like this it feels like 'yeah,  that's a fairly standard arranging technique, so wh

at?' But it's such a reliably consistent  part of his style that I think is worth keeping in mind. Just like he has vertical fullness  by using the full register of low to high, he's achieving horizontal fullness with a  different pacing of rhythmic layers. Again the main point was that he's able to pull off  a big full sound even in his relatively quieter sections because of how he takes advantage of all  the available space. Another thing that stood out to me about Thomas Bergerson's style was

n't  immediately apparent until I realized how hard it was to find examples that didn't have it so one  idea I had for this video was to try to recreate one of tracks completely in the DAW: trying to  capture every instrument and drum part and counter line and so on. It was something I immediately  regretted as soon as I got started. But anyway, while looking for a good track to do a sound  alike of I kept finding example after example where there were prominently featured vocals and  I thought

that'll be way too hard to recreate I'll just move on and look for a track that  doesn't have vocals. I kept looking and looking, I even got Wade's input who knows this music  deeply, and it was really hard to find candidates for a remake that didn't have vocals. So I  thought 'hmm, maybe that's not a coincidence, maybe the human voice is one of the secrets  to that epic cinematic sound?' So I could literally pick almost any Thomas Bergerson track  to illustrate my point here because that is the

point so how about 'Creation of Earth' another  one from 'Sun' and yeah the drums and Brass are huge two but try to imagine how much less  impactful this would be without the voices. An interesting thing is that I made a video  recently about the music from Ori and the blind forest and how the composer Gareth Coker  also used human voices to breathe life into that score. If you're trying to unlock the secrets  to a lush and rich sound with your music like Thomas Bergerson and Gareth Coker and y

ou need to  watch that video next where you'll learn the three different elements that make music feel alive. Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next one.