The Name’s Bond… James Bond

This is the Infinite Series cover of David Arnold’s Arrangement of the signature James Bond theme music, as appearing in the 2006 James Bond film “Casino Royale”.

Infinite Brass makes a grand showing in this legendary piece. There were a couple of reasons to choose the famous James Bond theme as the next Infinite Series cover. First of all, everybody knows it, and it’s great fun! Second, it’s production-heavy, and it was time to show off how Infinite Brass fares in such context. While other demos have very little post-processing, “The Name’s Bond… James Bond” is slam city. And third, while it’s a fairly simple piece, it has a number of technique and orchestration choices that make it impossible to perform with conventional sample libraries, and as such is a perfect showing for Infinite Brass. Some of these are: different types of mutes playing at the same time, variable flutter-tongue in a legato line across the entire dynamic range, flutter and growl with mutes, controlled falls and bends, grace notes in a fast fff legato line, mid-line fff screams etc.

Bersa Hall and its scoring stage-like ambience proved to be a perfect fit for this kind of sound.

While not overly complex instrumentation and performance-wise, the piece calls for many mutes throughout, as well as different combinations of mutes for certain passages. Infinite Brass’s selection of 13 mutes makes it a walk in the park to create these exotic colors, requiring just a nudge of a controller to swap the mutes between the lines. 

Introducing flutter and growl into a line has never been easier; just dial in the controller. Infinite Brass being able to add flutter and growl on a per-instrument basis makes it easy to perform organic-sounding angry low brass passages.

Infinite Brass update 1.6 brought about legato improvements which help the instruments tackle fast lines with absolute clarity, and the unlocked pitch bend range allows the trumpets to scream even harder in the chorus. 

There’s a lot of compression all over this production. each instrument family bus was compressed individually (horns, trumpets, trombones, tuba), and a bit of drive was added. It can be noticeable as slight fuzz when the brass plays fully open. In the chorus, the horns were loaded as a separate group with a different mic mix (a lot more Inst mic), a bit more compression, and a boost at ~8 kHz. The principal trumpet also gets a bit more compression in the chorus. The drums are slammed to hell and back, and then there’s bus compression, tape, and a limiter on the master channel. 

< Back to Infinite Brass