Climbing Crow Hill – Ray Toler

Having finished A Monkey on Your Back relatively early in the evening, I enjoyed several hours just messing around with sounds. Monkey wasn’t an unpleasant experience in any way, but aside from trying to reach an audience and make some money, I love creating music and exploring sounds. It’s fun.

Mary went to bed relatively early, I put my headphones on, and the main sound of this track emerged. I had it on a loop for a few hours while I explored different things. It was really just the main pads, the bass, and the acoustic drums, with me putting various things around or on top of it. I actually wasn’t consciously trying to write anything, I was just enjoying the moment. As you listen, you might understand why.

Climbing Crow Hill Ray Toler 4:53

Social Media Positivity

If you like up-tempo EDM, this is your guy.

I wrote a lot here about social media, but deleted it. The TL;DR is that it’s largely a vampire and if you’re using it more than 15-30 minutes a day, you should stop. But there are some bright spots, notably people who are making either funny or special interest short-form content.¹

One of the people I’ve discovered is a guy who goes by “The Chris Michael®” (shown at right) and if you like high-tempo EDM, drum and bass, techno, jungle, or any of the other gazillion sub-genres that have emerged in that space over the years, you should look him up. I see him on Facebook, but I imagine he’s on all of the main platforms. He routinely covers what’s great about all of the various styles and has introduced me to several newer artists. More importantly, he helps me listen to a style of music that I’ve loved for years with refreshed ears. He’s also the reason I’ve been more interested in doing this style of music this year. If you like it, or if you don’t, Chris is at least partly to blame.

Who’s the Chick?

I’m not really going to dive into the production process – I’m still learning it – but it’s surprisingly light on effects. I didn’t have to do much once the arrangement was finished. There are a couple of details I’d like to highlight. First, there’s a female vocalist on this track. She’s an amazing performer, and she’s not real. This is a voice synthesizer called Synthesizer V. I wrote the melody and lyrics, programmed them in, and it sang for me. I’ve had this software for a couple of years now, but haven’t used it because it’s a little complicated. Or at least I thought so. Aside from the usual frustration and confusion of not knowing the key commands or icons for a program, this actually went pretty quickly once I took a breath and watched a short tutorial. I think the vibrato is a little over-pronounced, but I can actually go in and fix that. And she’s not going to complain.

I could have sung this, though it would be at the top of my range, but my voice wasn’t the right one for the sound of the track. It needed a female vocalist. I’m really glad that technology has given me the ability to have one on call, at least until I can convince one of my friends to replace the temp track.

In the synth world, there’s an eternal and idiotic “Ford vs Chevy” argument about whether or not it’s ok to use presets or if you should be programming every sound from scratch. I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts, but I love presets. If I can’t find a sound that works among the (quite literally) hundreds of thousands of sounds I have at my disposal in the studio, the problem isn’t with the professional sound designers who made them. To that end, with two exceptions, everything you hear in this track is a preset. As an extra challenge, I used the default preset on two of them. I didn’t even look for a better sound, I just took what was there and made it work.²

The only other production thing I’ll mention is that I had some trouble with Superior Drummer. I’ve been ok with just exporting a stereo drum mix for previous tracks this month, but I really wanted to get in and EQ the kick specifically, tame the toms down a little bit, and send a few snare hits to an even more pronounced dub delay, but I couldn’t ever get the multi-out functionality to work. I got it to send audio to the right place, but it was so quiet that it was unusable, so I went back to just exporting a stereo mix and using that. I’ll fix it later when I figure out what’s going wrong.

How Many Words?

If you look at my various individual Song-A-Day pages for each year, you can tell which ones are songs because I use my handwritten lyrics as the featured images. After uploading the various assets this morning, I checked the 2026 page and was struck that there’s only one non-lyric track so far this year. I know that’s going to change,³ but I’m on pace to at least tie 2018, when I wrote 16 songs – the most I’ve done in a month.

Now, as to the lyrics for this track, there are only ten words. And if they haven’t been written at least a dozen times before, I’d be amazed. Maybe not with the exact melody, but I can’t imagine it’s the first time those lines have been written. But it doesn’t matter. It’s exactly what this track needed and, for once, I showed enormous restraint in only having them appear once. This genre is one that you feel more than hear, and while the vocal helps cement the framework of it all, it does it’s job, picks up its check, and goes home to let the music come back.

I’m really happy with this one. It’s positive, sounds decent, and has even more potential in the future when I have time to really dig in and get fiddly with it.

Lyrics

Climbing up
Flying high
Raise my hands
Touch the sky!

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Superior Drummer 3, XO, Bass Station II, Diva, Hive2, Repro-1, Pigments, Cosmos, String Murmurations, Exhale, Synthesizer V

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Valhalla, PanMan, Gullfoss, UAD ATR-102

Notes

1
Seriously, I just deleted seven paragraphs of well-considered, but obvious bitching. You’re welcome.
2
And I suspect you might be surprised if you knew which ones.
3
Spoiler: unless something dramatic happens in the next couple of hours, the track for the 12^th will be instrumental