Apert

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.

The only concrete thing I remember about this track is that I wrote the entire piano part first and in one take. I’d been noodling for a bit with the lovely Piano in Blue sample library and had come up with the general pattern you hear. While it was still fresh and enjoyable, I improvised the entire track, not really paying attention to bar numbers, but with the metronome going and an occasional glance at the elapsed time.

As with any task you do a lot, after a while you start to get some instinctive feel for certain aspects of it. In this case, my time both as a musician and my earlier days as a DJ have really hammered in a sense of multiples of 4 and 8. Most western music¹I’m talking about standard rock, pop, and dance here. No need to drag out your progressive rock cred and tell me about how many songs are in 5/4 or 7/8 or Pi or something. is in 4/4 and, further, is generally divided into multiples of 4 or 8 for the various sections.²As always, forgive the explanations if you already know all of this. So while I was watching the elapsed time, I was also noting when I was approaching certain measures like 65, 97, etc., because those would be clean multiples that might lend themselves to natural sections.

Which ended up being only slightly true. While I did add markers every 16 bars, they didn’t really mean much in terms of verse, build, rise, fall, etc. They just helped me feel out the general shape of the piece, because each “chord” in the strings is eight bars long. They’re hard to predict, though, because the random nature of the piano improvisation camouflages that natural time sense we pick up with formulaic pop and dance. 

Here’s where my memory is fuzzy. I don’t remember whether I added the string sections or the mangled strings from Slate + Ash Landforms first. This means that I also don’t remember if I wrote the string parts one at a time or by playing chords. Looking at the MIDI really doesn’t help me either, because either I played chords and then split notes to the strings, or I wrote the strings and then merged all of those notes to the Landforms track. If I had to guess, though, I wrote the string parts individually. Some of those voicings, especially the chords at 1:23 and 1:40, are too precise. 

It’s Better Than I Thought, But What’s It For?

So, my general take while listening to this over the last year or so has been that it’s almost, but not quite, in “swing and a miss” territory. I like it, and I like what it is, but I don’t always let it play through and instead skip ahead. As I look at the multitrack, though, I think maybe I’ve been too harsh.

I’m happy with the string arrangement, and the incorporation of both string evolutions (with all of the bowing, rebowing, swells, etc) and Landforms (with its “almost a synth now” sample mangling) provide this lovely extra dimension that I almost don’t hear, but that I miss when I remove them. In fact, I’d completely forgotten I had anything other than the main string sections in this piece just from listening to the final mix.

I have no idea what to do with pieces like this. In my dream world, it’s the soundtrack to a short film, and I definitely get various image streams in my head while listening to it. While I wouldn’t have thought about it in 2024, AI-generated imagery has exploded over the last 12 months and I’m amazed at some of the things I see from artists like Fredrik Jonsson. While the future retro vibe doesn’t necessarily fit, the fact that he’s made such incredibly detailed visions gives me hope that before too much longer, I’ll be able to make professional looking videos that live up to the vision in my head.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Piano in Blue, Spitfire Symphonic Strings & Symphonic String Evolutions, Slate + Ash Landforms

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, Valhalla VintageVerb & Delay

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Notes

• 1
  I’m talking about standard rock, pop, and dance here. No need to drag out your progressive rock cred and tell me about how many songs are in 5/4 or 7/8 or Pi or something.
• 2
  As always, forgive the explanations if you already know all of this.