Body Language [175]

rusty-jernigan (62)in #music • 6 years ago

https://soundcloud.com/22degreehalo/entwined-175

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Hello everybody! :)
Got a new work-in-progress to share with you! The future is bright for this one, so don't miss out on this first release!
I'd like to share with you the process I used in making this song, but it's honestly very simple. It all started at the upright piano that resides on the lower floor of my home. I spent a lot of time on Sunday sitting at said piano. I recorded a few jams. None of this material made it into this recording, but what did make it into this recording was the feeling that playing the piano created.

I came upstairs with this stoic euphoria and began creating the synth that you hear in the opening bars. What you are hearing open this song up is the last few bars of a jam I had at the computer. I then grabbed myself a drum rack I created previously, and a beat eventually came into my head once I understood the sounds I was working with. I made a few iterations of this beat. Then, I suddenly felt the urge to sing. So, I did one take of just straight feeling. I wasn't worried about the words. Only the feeling mattered. The tone of my voice was what I was working on getting across. After this take was complete, a moment of incidental tinkering brought about the reason to finish this piece.

I was astounded to notice that when I doubled the speed of the vocals everything I had created up until that point, the synth and the various beats, suddenly made complete sense. I basically had all the musical elements I needed to finish the track... or so I thought. I sat at my computer with headphones and got chills and honestly got a little emotional. This day's writing session was complete. When I finished jamming out hardcore style in my bedroom, [you would've laughed your ass off if you'd seen me..] I decided to take a peek outside my bedroom window for a moment of calmness. Wouldn't you know that there was a rainbow outside the moment I stepped to the window? I took this as an affirmation that I had completed something special.

On Monday, I revisited the basic ideas I had gotten down in Ableton's session view. I decided that it was important for me to add a bass line. I stumbled across an awesome preset from watching one of my favorite youtuber's channels, and I instantly dropped that preset into an empty track. After jamming out with my newly altered preset, I decided today was the day to arrange these musical ideas, so I explored a few different ways of combining the various elements, like what way I wanted to start the piece, where was the emotional peak of the piece going to be, etc. After I explored a bit, I decided that I'd like to just get it down and then begin editing the piece down. After the ideas were successfully recorded into Ableton's Arrangement view, I listened a few times to what I had captured. That's pretty much all I can remember doing on Monday.

Yesterday was a day for further edits, adding some gentle compression, reverb, etc. without going all in on mixing down my ideas, mostly because I knew what I had wasn't complete yet. Today, I cut about a minute off of the beginning of the piece to get to the chorus faster. I made the new cuts because the first, fresh listen today felt a little boring leading up to the first chorus which took away from the impact of all the extra sonic material coming in. I stripped it down and did a basic mix to get everything in a decent place to present to you all.

There are loads more little things I did here and there to make certain moments more impactful, but I'll let you discover them with your own experience! I hope this explanation helps you to feel more capable of creating your own works of art. Knowing the steps of my process for this song might inspire you to complete that project you just can't seem to get out of limbo with. Or maybe somehow you've discovered a trick you've never thought of before, like doubling the speed of your vocals. A lot of times my crowing moments are when I step outside the box and try something unexpected just for fun to hear what it sounds like. If you aren't having fun, why are you doing what you are doing anyway? ;')