Backstory
- Happy Wednesday everyone!! I hope you all had a great week and are ready for some more music!! Let’s jump into it! This songs origin comes from the tail end of the backed up ideas. Everything you hear up until about 1:16 I had already finished, and that’s because of when I wrote it. The idea came to me because of the animated short that played in front of Moana (if you remember from the first post, Moana was the music that basically got me out of the funk). Anyways, the music in that short was really synth driven and I wanted to take my shot and incorporate the feeling that its music had for me, think computers, desks, technology, you know, geek stuff.
- Beginning/Verses
- I started the whole thing with the piano hits, which loops for a good 25 bars.
- And the first 8 bars have the techno synth which just arpeggiates an E chord and hits C#, E, B to finish the 4 bars. Then it shifts down and resolves to the B again at the end of the 8.
- For the drums, everything until the groove comes in were made from scratch. At the time I remember only liking Classic Studio Kit so I used that one more than any others.
- I added the held string notes to give some color and had the Liverpool Bass (the only midi bass I think sounds good of the GarageBand plugins, even to this day).
- Right before the groove comes in there’s 8 more bars of another retro bass that’s bumped an octave up and is lower in volume to help the song build. I actually omit it the second time that section comes up, I kinda wanted people to feel like something was missing, and secretly hoped they would go back and find that riff, or try and play it in their heads whenever it came to that part lol!
- Once the groove/second pass of the verse comes in the new drums are a drummer, this one was Kyle. I just got it to what I wanted and looped it till we got to the Chorus.
- Chorus
- Surprisingly the piano drops out completely anytime this is played, don’t worry it comes back soon.
- Basically the Retro Basses take over and do what I initially wanted to be a vocal melody. That’s why it has just the 3rds as harmony, but what ended up happening is that I spent so much time listening to the song while making it that I couldn’t imagine it without those sounds as the focal points. So in they stayed.
- The Liverpool Bass stays in and just has a new line but the drummer changes! We get a new guy named Logan, that actually plays a simpler pattern through the rest of the song. Same deal, just found what sounded right to me and looped it to death lol.
- Since the song just repeats out I’ll talk about the end before the bridge. There’s a 3rd Retro Bass to the harmonies and that walk up, that jumps all around… Yeah, I have no idea how I did that, to this day still don’t know how I made that work. In listening to each part separately, I can’t even pinpoint where each note is placed, and the third harmony sounds like I messed up hella bad while recording and quantization just worked in my favor lol!
- Anyways, after that comes a Glockenspiel!!! My favorite instrument in the world! I tried to play that motif on the electric guitar first but it was way too overpowering (it’s cut off of the picture, but the track is still there in the project).
- Bridge
- Last part of music! PIANO HAS RETURNED! If you look at the second picture you’ll see what I did all the piano on. It was easier, I didn’t know chords well enough to do it manually, get over it lol. But on the bridge it was super fun cause I accidentally rolled my hand down one of the notes and I loved the way it sounded. So in the bridge I took that and made it the foundation. I would hit the second to top box twice and just drag my finger all the way down to the top gray box and it got what you hear in the song (you can try it yourself, I just did it a few times to make sure)
- Bass pretty much follows the piano until the walkup that goes back into the chorus, I made that harmonize, cause why not, harmonies sound pretty, always put em in!
- Drums are still Logan but just with the crashes turned off, and the only other instrument is the Retro Bass acting again as a vocal melody that never came into being.
- I think this song holds a place in my heart cause it was another one my brother really liked (if you can’t tell his opinion of my music is pretty important to me)! So much that he wanted to write to it. I gave him the reigns and sent him the project to let him do what he wanted with it, sadly nothing ever came of it and he probably has that project still somewhere collecting metaphorical phone dust. But it was just one more bit of confidence boosting that just kept me on track, I was gaining traction and although it was slow, I was soon getting to a downhill slope where no one was gonna be able to stop me!
Every time you start something, whether it’s a new venture or something you’ve done a thousand times, you are always gonna have to have that period of not knowing what’s happening until the ball starts really rolling. Funny I use that, look at the bridge and how that accident turned into an integral part of the song. Like Bob Ross said, “We don’t make mistakes, just happy accidents.” And what I will add to that is a snowball metaphor, “Keep it rolling, you never know what your ball is gonna catch”
If you missed last week's song "Misdirection" <---LINK
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