You know those scenes in the movies where the protagonist is hanging on by their fingertips, slips, falls, and then catches themselves on something else at the very last second? This track is the Song-A-Day equivalent of of that.
I didn’t start working particularly early, but it also wasn’t very late either. Mid-afternoon, and certainly enough time to get something reasonable recorded. I was working mostly in Stepic again and interested in seeing if I could move far enough away from the chill ambient “formula” I mentioned yesterday without losing the things that I like about working with Stepic’s workflow.
- Slight Presence Ray Toler 3:00
Interestingly, while I was doing my experimentation, I came across a couple of YouTube videos from S1gns of L1fe, including one titled “STEPIC MEISTERCLASS – Chill Ambient.” I think I watched this last year when I was deciding on whether or not to purchase Stepic, but I wasn’t really paying super-close attention to what was being done, only how Stepic was being used. Watching it again today, I either completely absorbed SoL’s methodology, he and I are mystically connected somehow, or the formula is so blazingly obvious that even I figured it out.1In retrospect, Agile Gossip from last year sounds like I used this video as a paint-by-numbers guide! It’s both funny and aggravating when this happens. But let’s lean in – now you know how yesterday’s track got its title.
I watched a few other quick videos, mostly to see how other people have been applying Stepic and similar plugs to their workflow, but nothing super-inspirational jumped out at me, so I just fired up a few synths and started playing. Things started heading into a heavier realm. The guitar came out. Superior Drummer came out. And in the end, I just couldn’t get that catalyst that turned a groove into a track.
I Hear That Voice Again
At around 8:30 or 9:00, I decided that I just wasn’t feeling what I’d been doing for the last 3-4 hours, even though it was a decent little jam. A great lesson Song-A-Day has imparted over the years is that I’ve become better at selectively listening to those little voices. It’s now slightly easier for me to ignore the ones that are rooted in imposter syndrome, laziness, self-deprecation, and fear, and slightly easier for me to understand the ones that are being pragmatic, reasonable, or telling me that I’m just knocking my head against the wall, overworking the dough, or any number of other tortured metaphors that you might like to substitute.
In any case, the pragmatic voice jumped in and said, “are you going to actually write something or just publish this half-assed jam that won’t go anywhere?” It also said that if it really had a track in it, I probably no longer had time to do the production work on it, and it might be better as a month-closing track anyway. We’ll see.
But I listened. I saved the project, opened a fresh one, fired up a piano, and within 10-15 minutes had the basic composition of Slight Presence complete. I wasn’t really sure what to do with it, though. It would have been ok as just piano, but felt one-dimensional. I added the bass pizzicato. That sounds nice, why not add the celli as well? And here’s where mistakes turn into eurekas!
The basses were playing quarter notes and I played pretty accurately for once. I quantized anyway, but forgot that I had my quantize set for quarter-note triplets. This had the interesting effect of moving anything that wasn’t on the 1 or 3 beat to the nearest triplet just ahead or behind it. I didn’t know this had happened until I was trying to record the celli part and it created this magical interplay that I might have come up with on my own eventually, but now didn’t have to!
90 Minutes to Go
Now that the strings were doing something decidedly interesting, I added the violas and second violins as off-beat answers to the celli. And then I added the first violins against those in a rhythm that appears slightly earlier. I decided to move the higher strings to the second half of the piece only.
It’s all sounding pretty nice at this point, but it’s still kind of in “nice jam but not a track” territory. I loaded a cor anglais, decided I’d used it enough this month, and went to one of my other lyrical go-tos: solo cello. The upside of this is that it’s an amazingly beautiful instrument (definitely the one I would want to play if I were a string player). The downside is that it’s hard enough to program strings to sound even remotely non-artificial and far worse if they’re up front and soloed. I did not have time to really go in and get it perfect (or even close), so I’ll live with the weird artifacts until I decide if this one gets any further attention in the future.
I improvised a few different melody lines while listening to the other parts, quantizing, adjusting velocity levels, etc. The first one I recorded was in the higher register. Then I decided to copy it to the first half of the track and down an octave. I had originally repeated the A pattern twice before moving into the B, but with the new solo, I needed one more repetition of the A section to let the theme develop a bit more.
At this point, things were more or less finished. I doubled the cello line an octave down in the second half, then made it into a harmony part, then decided that would be good for the B section (as well as a nice way to introduce the second cello), then decided to change the back half to being a harmony line as well.
Recording and mixing was pretty normal. I used Cinematic Rooms Pro for the reverb to sit everything in the same space. I think the higher strings might be a touch too loud, but I’m not sure it’s bad enough for me to remix it. The majority of the work was already done when I got to the actual mixing, though I did have to re-record with a different piano because the one I’d written the piece with no longer sounded good with all of the strings. I did flirt with adding some woodwinds, but felt that it was where it needed to be.
I posted around 11:45, shut everything down, and went to bed. One more day…
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Pianoteq, Spitfire Chamber Strings, Spitfire Solo Strings
Effects, Mixing, & Mastering
FabFilter, Gullfoss, Cinematic Rooms Pro
Notes
- 1In retrospect, Agile Gossip from last year sounds like I used this video as a paint-by-numbers guide! It’s both funny and aggravating when this happens. But let’s lean in – now you know how yesterday’s track got its title.