Fucked up and missed last week due to being sick/lack of inspiration. Happy with what I've come up with this week though! This is sort of a sequel to my track 'Adorable Barn Fowl' in terms of sound and style.
Dive your ship into space and escape the light.
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It's occurred to me that it would be nice to have a coach or to get someone to review my tracks on a regular basis to get more targetted feedback, especially in the area of sound design and sound timbres. Anyone interested in helping out a struggling musician?
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Sun, Feb 26, 10:15 - 12:45.
Intro
A E C G
i V II vii
Verse A
i III vii VI VI III iv V
// Prechorus
// III iv vii I III VI V I
Chorus
A C Dm Em G F E G
I'm struggling on what this song "is". Maybe like a spacefaring song, but I'm not sure what the next progression should be after the verse and where the modulation should go. I had a moment of wanting to give up but I pushed through it to lay out another set of chords. (I think it would be easier if I planned this out in advance.)
16:30 - 18:25. Finish the composition and try to tie it together. Needs more production practice (especially if I had time to audition it on other speakers and headphones). I think the levels are off - I really mixed it with low levels and as a result I don't think I used all of my dynamic range.
Total time: 5h 25m
== Objectives ==
Over the past month or two I've reviewed:
* Varying bass notes in a chord progression
* Using suspended chords
* Using seventh chords
* Using dominant secondary chords
* (Ongoing) Learning voice leading/counterpoint
A few other points that have been suggested by listeners (thanks!) include:
* Using more pads to fill out a song
* Improving transitions
* More "driving" bassline
Since last week I didn't end up creating a song I might concentrate on doing that first instead of doing more counterpoint and voice leading.
One thing I should also consider overall is better timbre and sound design for my music.
i dunno
Glitchy downtempo track with minimal melody. Just had to pump something out today, this weeks' been tough on the music making front.
Somewhat glitchy minimal melodic tune. Made in live. Created a good couple of A/B loops and then performed it into arrangement view, so transition are weak in this track. Focused a bit more on the mix this time around and gave some space to my higher pitched voice creating a band for each of them - they sit a bit better and more clearly. First time I've used vocals in a song in quite some time - one of the bass voices is me pitched down an octave.
As always, constructive feedback appreciated. Particularly, for the mix on this time around, I worked a bit more than usual on it.
To shake things up a bit, I decided to see what I could do with TR-606 samples this week, as opposed to the usual 909 hits. I used an effects chain with two parallel chains on the kick sample, with two high-pass filters, each with a medium-high resonant peak. One was for general kick body resonance, and the other was for the beater, to punch through. I ended up filtering the snare and hats as well.
There's a drum rack of percussion and one of handclaps, a track or Rhodes-ish Electric (with some auto-filter to punch it up), and Tension through an LFO-controlled bandpass auto-filter for a wah effect. And there's some Analog through a pulsing mono auto-pan. There's also some x-factor noise from the new Kastle modular synth, a totally fun little thing. (The patches I've made so far are pretty broad-spectrum, so I hit them with high-pass and kept the level low. A work in progress.)
Everything got auto-pan, and all the percussion (plus some of the keys) got some send automation (delay and reverb). Full-chain master on the 2-bus.
Title comes from the eight vertices of a cube.
Frasier and I have talked for a long time about starting a Mario Kart DoubleDash Tribute Band. Sometimes when we hang out we just cue up our favorite courses and leave it on as background music. One of the bests charts in the game is the infamous Rainbow Road. This arrangement is super straight-ahead. I really just wanted to modernize the classic and learn the ins-and-outs of the piece. In future weeks we'll likely revisit this and completely destroy it for the better.
My second track for RPM 2017 as well as week 8 here on Weekly Music continuing with the Acid God theme.
Used pretty much the same methods as last week, but I feel I got something a lot more dance this time around.
For this track I used the following:
- Phoscyon (303 soft synth emulator)
- DM1 - The Drum Machine
- Logic Pro (DAW/various VST/FX)
- Alto Sax
Pulled a sample from an audio bible for this one.
feeling dark this week
trying some processes sinewaves
This week was a real struggle. Hit major writer's block and went for what has been working which is sort of groovy 4x4. I tried composing to film for the first time which was interesting. I wrote this track to Lost River, Ryan Gosling's directorial debut. It definitely helped to create a vibe that I could try to capture with the song, but unfortunately it didn't end up being a particularly interesting one musically. I also sampled some dialogue from the film to further bridge the worlds.
Had a lot of time to reflect on my music this weekend at work and remembered what excites me about music, what I love in other peoples styles, and this week should see a return to the old riddiot :).
OH ALSO I didn't want to mix this so I just threw three compressors on the master channel and brickwalled the fuck out of it. lol
