Vicious Cycle [an aural rollercoaster][174]
https://soundcloud.com/22degreehalo/vicious-cycle-174
- - - - - - - V i c i o u s C y c l e - - - - - - -
I've gone through many phases of musical creation the past few months, and this one seems to be an important milestone.
Why is it important is a hard question to answer, but I'd like to give it an explanation if you'll humor me. :)
The Inspiration
When I was growing up in a small town in West Tennessee, music was always a part of life. I was involved with creating music well before I really got into listening to music for pleasure. When I did finally get into music for listening, I turned to my mom and dad's combined collection of old cassettes. I still remember the day my mom dug out all of the cassettes. I sat on the floor and listened through about four or five. The recordings I kept coming back too after making it through them all is funny to me now, but full disclosure, the music that really hooked me in those days was Journey, Styx and Foreigner to name a few. I've brought this up from my past because the old rock music structure in those classic recordings has made an appearance on this release. "Vicious Cycle" has a driving groove. Plus, it's got moments of synth solos, which sometimes closely resemble those adrenal moments of "shredding" I secretly still love very much! ;) I owe a lot of what I love about this track to my first musical love. Big up Journey, Styx and Foreigner!! haha
The Process
Let's talk about how this thing was made! I'll give a "quick" rundown of what I did, and if you happen to have specific questions, I'd love to answer them!
First, everything in this particular process has nothing to do with sound synthesis, per se. I knew the material I had to work with from the previous sound design and quick jam that resulted in [173], so this session was all about generating more ideas. I wanted to generate more ideas with this material because I didn't already have an exact idea in my head I could replicate. Plus, I really just wanted to see how far I could push this material without changing the nature of what it was. So, I just recorded a few jams by using the resampling feature within Ableton Live. Both of these jams landed me with about 45 minutes of material in total. After I created these jams, I listened back to them with a scrutinizing ear, allowing myself the ability to cut out sounds from the jams that appealed to me. I would chop them up and rename them with whatever it was about that section that made it worth keeping. This chopping/renaming session was more about staying in flow rather than analyzing and composing, so I'd rename them with generic titles, like "drum takeaway," "toms with nice synth pops," "cool pitch glitch" and "blues scale ghosting."
From that first session of chopping, I did a second session to refine the samples, and then I took a break. For me at least, the taking a break part is SOO hard but SOOO crucial to the process. After I had taken a nice fat break by playing some Destiny 2 or The Last of Us [more on that later], I held a little personal listening party of my sound palette. This third session was more to gather in my mind's eye the colors of sound I had at my disposal.
After I had heard them the third time, I had a strong idea of what I was working with, so I started placing the clips of audio in a linear arrangement. This is where the analytical part of the brain started to participate in the process because I was coming up with some really neat moments. However, that's all they were at that point, just moments. What I wanted to create was a nice full-realization of these moments that somehow felt cohesive without sacrificing the cool parts. Enter the analytics.. haha
To get these moments into a state where they could be further refined is the hardest part, mainly because it requires the sacrifice of these key little moments, which moments are like ear candy or the various corkscrews, loops, etc. in a roller coaster ride. Choosing which of these moments to cut for this piece in particular came easier when I started to focus on how the drums were to develop over the course of the piece. At the time of this writing, I have refined the first draft of this piece from almost 11 minutes down to 6 mins 15 secs, which means there are so many cool parts you wont get to hear, but I feel confident that the parts you will hear will make you happy they are there..
After the various parts were refined into shape, I entered the editing phase, which essentially allowed for more of a feeling of arrival at certain parts. After the major edits were made to delineate the sections, I listened over and over to catch little things here and there that I had missed from the mass edits. After all of this refining, I'd love to tell you that this piece is complete and perfect as it is. However, the truth is that nothing is ever truly complete. This process of changes can happen for days on end, but I want to shelf this piece for now because I'd love to engage with another palette of sounds and keep pumping out new things, but I will be listening to this piece over the coming days. I'm especially excited to hear what you think about this one. Your ideas, insight, etc. will be taken into consideration when I revisit this piece before adding it to my first proper album. Sound off in the comments below and let me know what you think! What stands out to you? Does knowing my process help you enjoy the piece more? Do you think it's "rock-ish?" Do you like the roller coaster? haha
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