The Crown – Duck Shoot (Rupert Gregson-Williams)

After finally sitting down watch the Netflix series The Crown last year I was really blown away by the excellent soundtrack. English composer Rupert Gregson-Williams along with scotsman Lorne Balfe composed the music for season one and two. During season one there is a scene where Churchill goes shooting. The accompanying piece of music is aptly called Duck Shoot and is used in various guises throughout the series.

It’s based around a simple twelve bar cycle in D minor. It may well be the harmony has more inner-voices than the below transcription, but this captures the essence of it. There’s a little bit of voice crossing, which is undesirable.

I decided I wanted to make an orchestral mockup to test a new template I was designing. Below is a screen capture of the playback.

It’s 90% Spitfire Audio but there are some other bits and pieces too. I’ll break each section down. Below are the groups as they appear in order in my template.

Woodwinds

The piece is started with what sounds like a solo clarinet. I used the BBCO Discover library. This is £49 or free for students and educators. It doesn’t have as many articulations as more involved versions but it’s fine for some basic sounds.

At 0.47 this is joined by some Oboe, two bassoons and another clarinet all from the same library. There’s also some ensemble woodwinds from Spitfire Albion ONE.

The only other thing of note is a three note ostinato that I used high register flutes and piccolos for. These enter at 2.23 just before the brass. All of the woodwinds were summed and mixed with some Slate Digital Fresh Air, Logic compression and EQ.

Brass

The brass was tricky to get right in this mix. I’ve never been 100% satisfied with just one brass library and find myself needing to layer to get half decent results. The brass comes in around 2.39. I ended up stacking both ensemble and legato patches from Albion ONE with BBCSO for the lower register horns.

At 2.55 there’s a distinctly more gritty part that enters. I ended up using an Albion ONE Low Brass patch called “nasty” which worked great. This was doubled with some other Kontakt brass with various distortions on. All the brass was summed into a group with some Reviver, LA-2A compression and Logic EQ.

Keyboards

The pianos only play in the outro (3.11 onwards). I layered three pianos all from the excellent pianobook website. This is a community sourced exchanged of Kontakt instruments, mostly pianos, but you can find all sorts there. I used probably my favourite go-to soft piano, Jonah’s Felted Grand for the body.

This was augmented with two Christian Henson sampled instruments, the Family Grand (a binaurally recorded piano in Christian’s living room) with a Logic low-pass filter and the Tape Delay Experiment (see video below). They were summed together but with hardly any effects, just a free Maag-EQ emulation called Luftikus to add some 40kHz boost. Here’s how they sounded together:

…and here’s how the Tape Delay Experiment was made:

Percussion

There is percussion throughout the piece from soft bass drums to full-on toms and cymbals. I can’t detail every instance of Kontakt but it was 90% Albion ONE with some BBCSO. I used some low-pass filtering in the outro to create some even softer bass drums. The Waves Lo-Air came in handy to add those almost-sub-sonic speaker rattling cinematic lows in. The percussion was summed through some Waves multi-band transient designer, an Arturia 1176 and some Logic EQ.

Strings

In the intro there are some very quiet con sordino strings from Albion, latterly I switch to the normal string long patch. From 1.35 onwards I found it useful to bring out certain lines by using the BBCSO, especially in the bottom end. There’s also some spiccato here, which plays a quite involved line. I’ve brought these two up in volume for the purpose of this bounce:

To add some girth to the bottom end of the strings I used two instance of Spitfire Audio’s Contemporary Drama Toolkit (or CDT for short), using the Electric Cello patch. Here you can hear it with the BBCSO Celli and Double Basses:

In the outro I used a free Spitfire LABS instrument called Frozen Strings, using the Super Sul Tasto Violin patch. All of the strings were summed and mixed with some Waves SSL E-series.

Synth Pads and Other Synths

To my ears, the score is not purely orchestral and has some lovely synth programming used very tastefully. During the intro and outro and I used another free Pianobook Kontakt instrument called Americana Granular Pad by regular contributor Joshua Meltzer. There’s a preset in here called Appalachian Dream which I love and use all the time.

To help support the bottom end and really add an extra dimension I’ve used two soft-synths, an Arturia Mini-Moog using a self-created orchestral sub preset and an instance of Alchemy for a pulse – using a modified preset called Rhythmic Flex | Cream.

“Guitars”, Vocals and Mastering

There are a few other ear candy sounds that don’t fit anywhere else. The “guitar” certainly isn’t a real guitar, it’s another supplementary instrument that helps carry the intro, another Pianobook Kontakt instrument called ASAT Classic Variations, which really is a favourite of mine! This is run into Valhalla Shimmer, a pitch-shifting reverb plugin.

Lastly there are some vocal pads. This is a combination of some more Spitfire CDT “Aahs” and some Winter Voices Evolutions. Winter Voices was another Christian Henson/Pianobook brainchild – a free crowd-sourced vocal library for Kontakt. You can learn more about it here:

https://youtu.be/sSKCrhD7ugI

For the master channel strip I tried to match the original OST mix as closely as possible without losing any sleep over it.

I used some Slate Digital “Grey” compression (an unashamed SSL-style bus compressor), Logic’s Pultec “tube EQ”, some Kush Audio Hammer EQ (I think this is modelled on the Massive Passive but I could be wrong), more Fresh Air, a Kush Audio Clariphonic EQ (one of my favourite go-to mastering EQs), some Fab-Filter EQ (I’m still on version 2!), Slate Digital “Red” and then some limiting. This might well be more or less complex than the original master channel strip but I’ve now way of knowing. Anyway, this was a bit of fun, I might do more orchestral replays in time.

If you want to download the .pdf of the chords you can do so below:

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