It’s already late in the evening and I need to get started on the next piece, so I’m going to try and limit my diversions. This one had a really weird process. I think the end result is decent, and one that I suspect I’ll listen to more than I currently think I will. Let’s back up to yesterday, though.
After posting Stet, I had dinner and hung out with Mary who’d gotten home from a business trip. She was pretty wiped out and went to bed early, so I headed to the studio with a decent chunk of time to write. The last few have been more or less sedate, excluding the oddball Put On Your Best Dress, so I was anticipating going a little more uptempo, even if I stayed instrumental.
- Faint Glyphs Ray Toler 4:52
First, though, I remembered that I had a tech support ticket in with The Crow Hill Company. If I talk any more about it, this will be a 2,000 word rant about copy protection, so I’ll cut to the end where I finally installed two products of theirs that I bought over a year ago but hadn’t been able to use. Now I could, so I installed and knocked around in there a bit. One was a drum library and it’s good, but not what I was thinking about doing. The other was a vocal library with a single voice doing sustains and gestures. Spoiler: it’s the voice that opens this track, but we don’t know that yet.
As I mentioned yesterday, I was really jazzed to learn more about Choreographs and explore it a bit more deeply, so after toying with the Crow Hill stuff, I decided to get to work and build an entire patch from the ground up. I don’t remember if what ended up in today’s piece was that patch or a preset that I tweaked. In any case, more than an hour of playing resulted in some cool zone-out moments, but little that was usable.
Ok, maybe a beat will help. XO, here we come. I also started with an init patch and this time, what you hear is what I came up with. No, nothing’s working. Maybe some piano or electric piano. I played with that. Nothing stuck. Let’s dig through the Spitfire stuff I never use. Orbis is always fun – it’s a lot of recordings from around the world. But nope. nothing.
At this point, I decided to go back to electronic and figured that maybe Cycles would be a good counterpoint to Choreographs and intended to do another from-scratch program. I ended up deep in zone-out territory this time, to the point where I realized that I was just listening to what I was playing rather than actually writing anything. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but if you’ve ever done it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
It was about 11:30, I was falling asleep at the keyboard, hypnotized by my own noodlings, and decided that nothing was going to happen. Forcing it would just piss me off and make me frustrated. And that never ends well. I showered, went to bed and started watching the tutorial video for Cycles, which put me to sleep in less than five minutes. After picking the phone up off my face, I got a decent night’s rest.
One, Two, Five!
I had a realization today. I wrote in yesterday’s post that I might get really weird in week three. It is week three. In fact, week three is almost over. I laughed when that fact slapped me. I’m having much the same experience as last year where I’ve had my head down working and look up and am not only over the hump, but accelerating toward the finish line. I’m struggling to find ideas, and also dreading the end of the month because I think there’s still more to say. The difference this time is that I’m planning on continuing to write regularly going forward.
So. After several days of being on schedule (writing/recording the evening before, mixing and posting in the morning), I’m now back to the ticking clock kicking my butt. I opened up the project file and looked at what was in there. I hadn’t deleted any of the instruments from last night, so here’s what we’ve got:
- XO with a drum pattern
- Choreographs with a custom patch
- Cycles with a custom patch
- Dot Allison Dulcet Voice with its default patch
- An electric piano
- Orbis set to field recordings from Uganda
Aside from the XO pattern, nothing in there was any kind of an idea, so I decided to give myself a challenge. Write a track with what’s already in this project, at its current tempo, and even though everything in there is wildly out of sync with everything else. My one concession was that I could get rid of one thing and add one thing, but that was it.
I got rid of the Cycles patch because it was super weird, and added Halogen FM with a kind of retro synth pad. And then… well, I put the jigsaw puzzle together.
Sticking With It
I’ll admit it. This thing sucked for a long time. Like, “I’m not posting this” sucked. But I kept moving things around, getting an idea for how I could change this or that… but slowly it took shape and I started paying attention to little details. I tuned the children’s song and the low drums to be in the same scale as the solo vocal and synth pad. I tuned one of the drums up an octave because it was a big puddle of mud down there.
I drenched a bunch of things in reverb, which I don’t normally do anymore but somehow knew would be the right thing to do. I added a subtle tremolo to the piano, a delay to one part of the drum pattern. The choreographs rhythm pattern moved a lot across the stereo field and it was fine in headphones but really distracting on speakers (normally it’s the other way around), so I narrowed it, then panned it off to the left, and panned its Ugandan kalimba-ish pattern to the right.
And suddenly it didn’t suck anymore. The piano took me the longest to get right because it needed to be the thing that kept changing to keep the piece interesting, but also couldn’t be overly busy or distracting from the vocals.
This one started out destined to be a contractual obligation track, then it moved to experiment, then to practice, then to limitation challenge, and finally emerged as something relatively cool. I’m still in the chill zone, but it’s almost the end of week three (ha!) and I’m just happy to be posting something decent at this point.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Dot Allison Dulcet Voice, Orbis, Choreographs, Keyscape, Halogen FM
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, PanManb, Tremolator, Valhalla, Gullfoss