Late last month, THX decided to take to Twitter and share the sheet music for their iconic “Deep Note” sound, which you’ve surely heard playing before several of your favorite movies. Having the sheet music, and from an official source, means that fans are much better equipped to try and recreate the sound themselves. Now, one guy has, and he decided to do it with just his voice.
Mach Kobayashi explained his process of layering 30 tracks to create his cover in a brief blog post, writing that he just wanted to see if he could actually do it:
“I’m not a great singer but most of the notes were more or less in my range. So I went into GarageBand and for each note at the end, I picked some random notes in that G2 to G3 range, and sorta glissando-ed to the final note. I doubled the tempo because it seemed a little too slow as written. There were 30 tracks in all (3 tracks each for most of the final notes and 2 each for the bottom 3 final notes) so that took a little while. I dropped the top note by an octave and raised the bottom 3 notes by an octave so I could sing them a bit better. (I think the bottom notes are outside the range of human vocal chords.) And then I recorded me singing with each of those 30 tracks playing in my earbuds, pitch corrected the 4 notes in Final Cut Pro X, and edited the whole thing together.
Anyways, by the end of it, my throat was pretty sore but it was a fun experiment to recreate an iconic sound from my childhood.”
It was definitely an ambitious undertaking, but Kobayashi actually pulls it off pretty well. The intro is especially accurate, I find, as it captures that sort of initial descent of the sound (which sounds something like a spaceship powering down) before it blooms into its climax.
Do you think the guy did a pretty solid job? What other instruments would you like to see cover the sound? Let us know in the comments!
Featured image: Mach Kobayashi/YouTube
More odd stuff from the web
- These photos of bearded men looking upwards are mighty bizarre
- You can make requests to Netflix now!
- Jeremy Renner’s arms in Tag are completely CGI
