Featuring "Empress Cicada" from George Vlad's field recording @ 0:27: youtu.be/nOIRrEfnDEM?t=27
Got the BBC One orchestra Discovery and played with it today.
This week I had to write a 15sec Radio News Jingle.
Then I thought about what makes it work being so short and what it would take to turn it into a longer piece. I had to deconstruct my jingle and rebuild it with a new structure, trying to keep everything else the same, such as tempo, instruments and theme, but stretch it and make sense of it still.
It wasn't as easy as I'd thought but that's what makes it a great challenge.
Below is the 15sec version which I made first.
It's funny, when I was 17 and decided that I wanted to be a composer, I imagined I'd hopefully one day write music for movies, about made up feelings seen on screen.
I never imagined my own life will become so complex and hard to understand.
Now I'm 33 and I already don't have the notes to describe my own feelings.
It was my daughter's birthday today.
Thought of letting go of expectations and mindlessly play with arps and synths for a while.
My goal for this year is to get better at building piece structure, mastering build-ups and encoding strong emotions. This piece is not part of that search. Hopefully from now on I'll better manage my time in order to follow through with my plan.
I was inspired by NASA's sounds captured on Mars and used some samples here. First thunder like sound is actually wind on Mars.
I was also inspired by the post rock genre, with its steady buildup, echoy notes, delayed guitars and strong release of that buildup (about half into the piece).
It was a rushed project to meet the deadline, so I'm not too sure about the mixing process which was... simply not done at all :)) Just winged it.
Enjoy!
It's been a busy and stressful week so I tried to sqeeze in at least a minute of music today. Hopefully next week will be more creative. I tried playing with Kontakt's Session Strings, not trying to make something in particular, just test how it sounds. This is what came out. I started with a few chords and I added a piano melody and some funky synths and a flute to back it up.
It's a poorly executed piece but that's the best I could do today.
weekly from
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@Ranranzeau LOL, editing saves me when skill or vocal abilities are lacking. :P
Thank you for your interest. :D
@Zero_Chasing_Spirals Thank you for taking the time to go through the making of this song so thoroughly. I'm unfortunately not tech-savvy enough to grasp all the implications of your technical choices. What I know is I'm impressed by your skills but, above all, love your singing.
You make it sound like it was an easy one, which speaks to how much work you have put in your music. If find this motivating. Thanks!
@Ranranzeau Sure. It all started with hearing the recording I mentioned above and thought "this sounds like the start of a good jam". Didn't think of what it will turn into, just started quantizing it, layering a beat, a synth, then played with guitar and piano. Soon it started to sound like it had the structure of a song, but didn't really know how far off it was yet, never tried making one before. Kinda sounded like it needed vocals to make sense. The idea of making lyrics or singing was too foreign to me but the next day I decided to try anyway, if it's lame it's lame. :))
There was this strange thing happening, the song was stuck in my head, it had lyrics and a melody, but the song didn't exist yet. So I felt compelled to make it happen. Some adjustments needed to be made on the original structure, as all the sections were 4 bars long and now needed to be 8. But otherwise the instrumental part stayed the same as I finished it on day 1. The instrumental part is pretty straigth forward: pick an instrument, play, quantize, effects and mix with the rest.
There's a lot of technical details in the vocals editing alone, so let me know what interests you in particular, I'll gladly share my process. Keep in mind, for vocals it's just standard steps I learned in school but never got to use, really, since I never went into studio music production.
Hope this helps and you weren't expecting something completely different, lol.
I work in ProTools and used Xpand, RealLPC, MiniGrand and Massive for the instrumental. Stock effects, nothing fancy.
Vocals: AKG 414 mic, multiple takes on playlists, WavesTune, volume automation, and I can't remember which plugin for the vox effects.
I recorded 6 tracks: Verse, twice for the Chorus and three tracks for BG vocals.
good song!
This is beautiful!
Can you tell us more about the making of the song?