The little child tastes freedom after escaping from a life time trap.

A bunch of experimentation here with actually playing some parts live in MIDI (over many, many takes).

Unfortunately I don't really like the outcome. It's a little shrill and the melodies aren't varied enough and the harmony isn't really that interesting or exciting, so it's a little bit of a "I wrote it and dumped it off" today.

I was quite stuck for inspiration last night, but I stumbled upon these two chords and that provided enough juice to finish this track.

Any parallels to War On Drugs are completely coincidental and all names-places-personalities are strictly fictional etc.

Lossless on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210213a

Bass is back on the menu for me and this week's song started with two bass tracks setting the mood for the piece. I completed it with a swelling pad ( Arturia OB-xa plugin) to go further in the same melancholic direction. I found my previous submissions lacked movement and focused early on making the track more lively through general volume track and panning variations as well as modulation swells on the synth pad.
I subsequently added the vocals, the cymbals and the dulcimer (both Spitfire Audio LABS) complimenting each lyrics line.
Then I spent much more time than I would have wanted on mixing and mastering for a result I'm not entirely satisfied with, especially on the voice.
My take away of the week: with patience and grit, you can redo an instrument track until you're satisfied. Not a vocal track, I learned that the hard way.

Soundclound for lossless version: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/the-wave

An unusually high temperature for this month had kept constant in the last days and I've done some work in the garden I would usually do in March or even April. While I know this kind of weather is probably a very bad sign for the environment, I still was very happy for it and did this joyful little tune with very simple elements: a violin (that is in fact played on the GeoShred app so it's an acoustic modelling soft synth), ambient background, bass, drums. There is also a kind of viola or clarinet kind of sound which is in fact another layer of the violin but slowed down to a quarter speed.

I've spent this week in hospital with a sudden bout of diverticulitis (not a fan, can't recommend it), so I haven't really had a chance to work on anything musically. However, in a delirium, bottled up on painkillers, I realised that the sound of the call buttons and IV pump alarms going off slightly out of time with each other sort of sounded like something Ryoji Ikeda might have composed while sick with a head cold.

Once again relying on my phone as my primary piece of recording equipment, which unfortunately wasn't able to properly capture the binaural effect that could be heard in the room, not least because it was positioned right next to my own IV pump. I would have liked to have moved it, but moving wasn't really an option at the time.

Should be getting out tomorrow, but I think I'll try incorporating more found sound in the future.

A bit of a rushed piece in lieu of sudden inspiration. It's not mixed or mastered very well, but here you go.

Once again, I only devoted time to this one very late in the week, with the syncopated drum and percussion lines. I'd had a thought of emphasizing bass, and having the guitars be more of a background wash...and a number of things claimed time during the weekend, so what I'd had tracked...had to fit together somehow, so here we are.

Drums: Ableton 64 Pad Kit Jazz, Ableton Percussion drum rack. Bass: Epiphone P-J with EQ-8 low-end rolloff. Guitars: PureSalem Mendiola through Balls Effects KWB for some grit, and also through high-pass Auto-Filter. There's one track of bridge pickup, one of neck pickup (output to send only), and another track of output to send only. Some clips are reversed.

Sends: one convolution reverb, one Valhalla Supermassive, and one delay. There's another convolution reverb I almost used--a large space--but it ended up sounding too mechanical on drums here.

Title from M58, a barred spiral galaxy.

This week I went for a mash up of Animal Planet and Zombie movies. The concept started with "What if David Attenborough narrated a documentary about zombies?". I listened to quite a lot of zombie games soundtracks (Undead Redemption) and western music.

For the voice of David Attenborough, I used vo.codes, which uses an AI to deepfake celebrities reading a script. There are quite a lot of samples also in this track, wind, crows, zombies. They all come from Splice.

This is a silly track but I had a lot of fun making it!