In general, I think I had a decent and solid month. It was decidedly a month in two-parts, though. The first half was very nearly all songs and largely energetic if not upbeat and positive. That was a surprise given my mood going into the journey; I had expected a lot more introspection. I think a large part of it was using my Random Finds playlist¹ to get inspiration or production challenges. I wasn’t just picking the first thing that played, though. I normally shuffled through until I heard something that inspired me in some way.

My understanding of the old adage that if you want to sound like your favorite artist, don’t listen to their music, listen to the music they listened to was reinforced. Nothing I posted really sounds like what I was either trying to copy or inspired by, but if I played them both in sequence, you’d probably hear the influence or relationship.

Starting on the fifteenth, I became decidedly more sombre and instrumental. Still good, just coming from a radically different place. I was tired, worn down by the world and the incessant din of political screeching from all quarters. I only wrote four songs with lyrics in the last two weeks, and one of those was sung by a robot.

Why the sudden shift? After the initial burst of energetic output, and a lack of significant feedback about most of them except from a couple of regular listeners, I think I re-embraced the idea that the entire point of this month is to write for myself. I seemed to have more trouble getting started each day, but that desperation made me more inclined to follow any promising lead, which resulted in some cool things.

Winners and Losers

Of course there are no winners and losers as far as the point of all this goes. I wrote every day. Win. Period. There are some obvious highs and lows, though.

Guidelines, Not Rules

I gave myself a couple of loose guidelines for the month: simplify, write from other perspectives, etc., but none were hard mandates like I’ve done in the pa. I continued tendency to do different genres every day, but that’s not an intentional thing. I write whatever shows up on that particular day. Having soft-constraints helped me narrow my focus without making me feel trapped. Winner.

Try For More Songs

One of my guidelines was to really try and write more songs with lyrics. The primary benefit I’ve gotten from Song-A-Day over the last eleven (!) years is learning that, yes, I’m capable of writing new music every day for an extended period. Songs² are still a mental hurdle of sorts, though I’m less scared of them now.

As it did with producing a lot of music, Song-A-Day has helped me relax about lyrics, especially my perfectionist desire to have my lyrics be poetry. Great songs aren’t necessarily poetry,³ but I’m super critical of my own songs when they’re not. My goal this year was to not let laziness, fear, or imperfection keep me from at least trying to write a song if I had even the least bit of an idea. They weren’t all great, but I did a lot better – just one song short of tying my 2019 record for number of songs. Winner.

Need for External Recognition

There might be a few people on the planet immune to this, but I am not one of them. Applause is a terribly addictive thing. Once you get some, you start questioning everything when you post something and get none. This is counterproductive to the exercise. Worse, I’d often catch myself making creative decisions based on whether or not I thought other people would like it. That’s the path to madness and I need to stop. Loser.

Too Much Production

My internal interpretation of the “simplify” goal was that I’d limit myself to just piano, maybe simple drum, bass, and vocals with no additional production work. I obviously failed at this, but a big part of what I get out of the month is the production practice. It’s the finished product I’m after and, in many cases, the production is the song.⁴ I can’t really ding myself too much on this because I got better and learned some things, but I also didn’t really simplify all that much. Draw.

Use of AI

No, I didn’t use any generative AI in my music. I used it for generating a few of the featured images for the blog. This was a huge productivity boost and convenience. In past years, I’ve spent way too much time searching the web for an image that conveys what I’m trying to express and is either public domain or has an appropriate use license. That’s way harder than it seems since I think my site would technically qualify as a commercial use. This ends up being a poor use of time, because they’re just eye candy and don’t really have much substantive value.

This year, I told DALL-E or Grok exactly what I had in my head and they happily made appropriate images. The one that I struggled a bit with was for The Crossing, not because it wasn’t appropriate or what I asked for, but because it was so evocative that I thought it might be too influential on the interpretation of the piece. The full size one was gorgeous, though, so I include it here for your enjoyment.

I continue to be optimistic about how AI will eventually become something that lifts humanity, though we’re in for the some rough times as we go through this revolution, just as we did in past ones. My position remains that I don’t trust current AI to do things correctly without supervision, but if you have domain knowledge of what you’re using it for, it’s amazing.  Winner.

Studio Organization

My procrastination cost me a “nice” studio this year – it’s still a wreck, and I’ve been putting things off because I wanted to run ethernet first. I’ve definitely reached the point where I’m sick of the mess, though, so I’ll be working on the studio over the next few months. I only used hardware synths on two tracks, largely because of the difficulty of reaching them. That’s going to be a metric for next year.  My goal is to get to the point where it’s both functional and pretty, but right now, it’s like a really bad storage closet.  Loser.

Deeper Use of Tools

I’m on a year-long moratorium on purchasing (most) new software and hardware. While new tools and toys are inspirational, the harsh reality is that nobody’s currently buying my stuff and I need to spend money on changing that instead of getting another compressor or synth. Years ago I decided to focus on becoming really good with one DAW instead of mediocre at a bunch of them. This year, I’m applying the same idea and have already seen improvement. Winner.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Ducklings

I hesitate to rank anything, but it is useful to document how I felt about things when they were fresh. I’ve learned to not be quite so down on a track immediately after writing it because I now know I’m probably wrong. I want to stress that these are just my feelings about these things on this day. I see the value in the ones I think could be better, and the flaws in the ones I think are pretty good.

The “Surprise Hits” column is there for those things that I thought wouldn’t appeal to anyone or weren’t that good, but that generated positive reactions. In fact, Both The Face of Adversity and Malfunctioning Lullaby earned “My new favorite song you’ve ever done” awards from my brother, Eric. These are only the third and fourth times he’s ever said that, and it’s the first time it’s happened twice in the same year.

Also, just because I didn’t list something up there doesn’t mean I like or dislike it. Climbing Crow Hill and Invisibles are solid.  I guarantee that I’ll be listening to Stet, Segmentation Fault and Nimble Hearsay a lot over the next year. With the possible exception of Can’t You Pay Attention to Alice?, I don’t think anything was “not good,” and even Alice has value and is fixable.

Above all, no matter how I feel about things right now, I am very pleased that I wrote them all. As the saying goes, “If you had fun, you won.” Now I’m not sure I’d call the experience with some of them “fun,” but each provided some form of reward, so: Winners!

Winner!

So, more winners than losers. The real losers are pieces of software that disappointed me or were too frustrating to use and that I’ll be removing from my standard template and never updating again. I also didn’t use a couple of things that I had planned on, so I’ll have to do those experiments as the year goes on. That ties in with my desire to write a lot more outside of February, though, so… accidental winner.

Metrics, Statistics, and Other Miscellanea

My total track count on the official site is now 279. I think I posted a pre- and post-effects version of Jigsawz in 2021, but I personally only count it as one track. If I participate again next year (more on that below), I should break 300. Here are the statistics for all eleven years:

So a new record for total tracks with 30! I did two covers and had one “sort-of” extra bonus track⁵ but because I did actually do some production on it, I’m counting it. It’s always interesting how the numbers tell a different story than what I thought was going on. I thought I was writing longer things and, with 30 tracks, that this would be among the highest total amount of time written in a month.

I’m not really sure how indicative my site stats are, because I think most people listen on the official site. However, I was surprised to see 33 discrete listeners. Over the years, the number of people listening on my site has grown, so that’s good, but I don’t think this info is overly valuable for Song-A-Day, so I probably won’t worry about it in the future.

Part of my previously mentioned moratorium is a realization I had during the holidays that I should divert all the money I was spending on new stuff to marketing and advertising. This is an area where AI has been incredibly helpful to me. I’ll still be watching my various metrics, but the focus is going to be on growing an audience and, ideally, increasing actual sales. I’ll be releasing a few albums this year, and a lot of that content will be coming from Song-A-Day work.

Is This the End?

Last year, I had a few moments where I thought that maybe this life-changing and positive endeavor had run its course. I wasn’t really feeling all that challenged or rewarded from the effort. What keeps changing my mind is that after a little space and time, I’m often impressed by what I did, even to the point of hearing some things and thinking, “that couldn’t have been me that made that – I wouldn’t know how to do it!” Also, a lot of tracks that end up being favorites would probably have been abandoned if I didn’t have to post something. There’s massive value in being forced past my friction point. 

Lately, I’ve had the itch to go back to the corporate world and try to make things better wherever I can, so I’m starting to look for a new corporate gig. If you know anyone who needs a well-educated, lateral thinking, iconoclastic problem solver, please put me in touch! Getting a new “day job,” however, would mean a reduced focus on Song-A-Day. I don’t think I’ll stop participating entirely, but this may have been my last “maximum effort every day” year. I guess it will really depend on what’s going on with the rest of my life in eleven months.

If you’re still with me, thanks for reading! I welcome and encourage comments, feedback, questions, glowing praise and adoration. Constructive criticism is also welcome, I guess.⁶

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Notes

I didn’t have a lot of abandoned sketches this year. Often, when I’m writing and something’s got promise but just isn’t working right then, I’ll save it and open a new project. When I start each project, it just has the date as its name, but if I’m starting multiple things in a day, I’ll add a letter to the end. In past years, I’ve gotten as high as E, but this year it never went past B and there aren’t many of them. I was a lot more ready to select-all-delete¹ things this year. If it wasn’t working, I just dropped it entirely.

This song, though, was one of those ideas that I thought had promise earlier in the month but didn’t want to do it at the time. I wrote the lyrics for the first two verses and the chorus on the 19^th. I didn’t have any music in mind, and decided that I wanted to think about whether or not I was going to finish it and record it at all.

You’re The Inspiration

I draw inspiration from lots of things. Most often, it’s the dimly lit corners of my mind. Some are obvious but some surprise even me. One of my overall goals this year, though, was to write from another’s perspective or to at least not require the lyrics to exactly match the thing that inspired it. “Be vague.” “You don’t have to be the protagonist.”

It’s not appropriate for me to fully air the laundry here, but I’ll just sum things up by saying that Mary’s been having a tough time at work lately, mostly (but not entirely) due to being on the road for at least a few days every week. I was fortunate and never really got tired of business travel, but I did longer, less frequent trips, often to interesting if not glamorous places. Mary’s out every week, spending her time in exciting places like… Tacoma and Sacramento. It’s easy for that to get old.

I almost didn’t write this one because I was worried that it was too on-the-nose and would depress her even further, but I also knew she would like it and that its a good song that would be relatable to a lot of people. I did my best to gauge her mood (seemed fine) and, well, it’s the 28^th, so if I don’t do it today, I’m not going to do it.

Time Keeps on Ticking

It’s always a bit easier to start a track if I have anything to work with. A lyric, a melody, a beat… anything that has already constrained that blank page is a jumping-off point. I actually started with the music first, since if I couldn’t find a melody or progression that worked, there was no point writing any more lyrics. I’ve shied away from major seventh chords a bit over the last couple of years because they’re one of my “rut” hand patterns, but they seemed appropriate for this song. I actually began with that opening chime melody, and didn’t realize it was a major seventh until I started putting chords underneath it. I had XO running a basic pattern to riff and sing over and probably meandered down this path or that for about an hour.

By the end of the hour, I had the song structure figured out, though the arrangement and synths weren’t really great. I wrote the rest of the lyrics and recorded the verse and pre-chorus vocals, then did the chorus and the harmony stacks. I’ve also been avoiding those lately, but it was exactly what this song wanted.

The verse vocals are… tentative. I’m not sure I was 100% sold on the melody and timing, and that kind of comes through in the performance. I suspect if I re-record the verses they’ll be a lot stronger. I’ve talked about tuning / autotune before, but this is a good example of how I decide how much to do. Unless I just completely sucked when recording, I do my best to have a very light hand on tuning isolated vocals like the verses. If there’s a note that’s clearly sharp or flat, or I had a great take with one bad subtone or scoop, I’ll fix those. I do tend to go flat with vibrato on sustained last notes – that’s a breath control issue – so if it’s noticeable I’ll fix that as well, but only as a whole. I don’t fix the individual notes, just the overall “average” note that you hear by moving the entire thing up or down.

Big harmony stacks, though? I’m pretty aggressive with those. I used to do these stacks because they are phenomenally good at hiding pitch problems. Instead of being “out of tune,” it’s “rich.” But as my production chops have improved, I’ve learned that if I’m doing a big stack, locking most of the pitches together just creates this amazing cohesiveness that’s missing otherwise and gives the whole thing more power and energy. I’m not sure if this has always been true or if it’s a consequence of autotune having become so pervasive in commercial music. Am I chasing the trend or using a tool to achieve what I wanted anyway?

The chorus is sixteen voices: four parts with four recordings each. The main melody is joined by three harmony lines, and I split the high four into two parts on a couple of notes to make a bigger chord because you’ll hear the high stuff more easily and don’t need all the reinforcement. The mistake I made with this one, and it was almost entirely a time-pressure thing, is that I didn’t map out the harmonies prior to recording, I just started recording parts. As a whole, it sound pretty good, but when I isolate just the vocals, I’ve got some octaves that I’d rather be harmonized. Maybe something to go back and deal with in the future.

Another time-mistake that I made was trying to do too much mixing on the vocals, including setting levels, compression, and effects, before I had any of the instruments actually recorded. When I’m writing and arranging, most everything is going straight to the main output. Once I’ve recorded everything and start mixing, though, I run everything through bus groups. All of the drums go to the drum bus, all the synths to Synth, all the pads to Pads, and so on. These busses are all then routed to the main mix out, where I do my “mastering” EQ, compression, and limiting (plus overall tape effects/saturation if appropriate).

I’ve made this mistake a couple of times this month and ended up with a really weird mix until I record the parts I hadn’t committed to and all of a sudden that mix that was super quiet is now incredibly loud and mismatched. This is an inherent part of the process, so it’s not necessarily something I could easily change, but I did wait too long on this particular song to record the instruments.

Into the Future

The other time mistake I made was going to the neighbors house to watch a movie. We got started a little later than I thought we would, and the movie was just under two hours long. I already had the vocals finished except for forgetting to do the last pre-chorus line, so I thought I’d be safe, but I had a bit more work to do on the arrangement than I though, including adding a couple of small parts, changing the octaves of one of the pads, adjusting some overzealous piano playing in the final chorus, and all of those little things that add up to a lot more time than you think. Plus, you know, I kept listening to the gorgeous chorus… fickle vanity. Setting the loudness was also trickier than I expected it to be, mostly because I’d put off recording the instruments for so long and didn’t have the mix right in the first place.

I did the final bounce at 11:56 and almost got it posted to the site before midnight, but had to retag the MP3, so it didn’t get posted until 30 seconds into March 1.² Given that I lost at least 20 minutes to socializing before the movie, I’m still saying I got it done on time.

There’s one thing I’ll probably do to the track for my own “permanent” version, and that’s to remix so that the harmonies are a bit more balanced and the chorus a tiny bit louder, but without the verses becoming too quiet. I’m often a “set it and forget it” mixer, but this is one where I think I’m going to end up needing to do a lot more fader work.

I had intended to leave the initial mix posted as a record of progress, but when I listened on speakers today, it was really close, far closer than I thought it was, so I made a couple of small tweaks, mostly fader movements to get the piano and pads out of the way of the background vocals and a couple of obvious omissions that were just me rushing to meet some arbitrary deadline. I fixed those little things and reposted it. I doubt most people would hear what I changed in any overt way, but the overall sound is noticeably improved.

It really reinforces why I like working the night before and doing the final mix in the morning. If I participate again next year (more on that in the wrap-up), I’ll probably recommit to that and try to stick to it. I’ll write the wrap-up post later today or tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to decompress and reflect a tiny bit, realize that I don’t have to write any music today, but most probably when I’m procrastinating working on my tax filing.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for listening and reading. Your time is the most valuable thing you can give me and I hope you’ve gotten something valuable in return.

Lyrics

Another night, another room
To call home for 18 hours
I’ve lost count of all the
Closets, TVs, fridges, bathrooms, showers

It’s only been a couple of days
But it seems like I’ve been gone so long

I know it’s right but right now I feel wrong

But I’ll see you tomorrow night
I’ll be late but leave the light on
So I can find my way to you

I’ll be there tomorrow night
I’ll be late but leave the light on
So I can find my way to you

I’ll be gone again for a few days
And then I’ll be back home to you
I know you’re there
I wish I were too

Another day, another town
I hate to admit it
But it’s wearing me down

I keep breathing, but some days I think I’ll drown

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Pianoteq, Diva, Zebra2, Omnisphere, Serum 2, Superior Drummer 3, JV-2080

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

Valhalla, H3000 Factory, FabFilter

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Notes

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.

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.¹

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

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Notes

Sitting down for today’s track, I realized that despite a couple of attempts, I still haven’t used Stepic¹ on a track this year. Whelp… no time like the present. In fact, since we’re more or less on fumes, let’s make this one a challenge of some sort… Ok. With the exception of the drums, every track has to be run by Stepic. Aaaaaannnnnd…. I can only use one synth. Omnisphere would be the obvious choice for that challenge, but that’s super easy mode. Let’s go with just plain easy mode and use Pigments instead.

I think this genre is called ambient chill, but I’m not really sure. It’s fairly formulaic in terms of the basics, but there’s plenty of room for customization and expression. About halfway through the process I thought about bringing in a Slate + Ash library, but decided to try and stick with the restrictions.

Here’s the basic formula:

• Set a key and scale (This one is E minor (natural))
• Evolving pad for chord sequence (I used two)
• Long bass sound
• A couple of plucky / sharp sounds for random patterns and ostinatos
• Long “lead” sound or two

I’ve only done a couple of these tracks, but the real trick seems to be in the sound selection. In fact, I was about four tracks in when I realized that everything was a chaotic mess and deleted all of the Stepic instances I had already programmed. I then selected my entire sound palette before starting to sequence anything. This made the rest of it go a lot more smoothly because I wasn’t doing the whole back-and-forth thing where I sequence, pick a sound, change the sequence, change the sound, and so on until I’m back to that chaotic mess.

Make It Move!

I’m not 100% happy with the pads, especially the brighter one that comes in mid-track. It was a little too bright and a bit boring. I ran it through FilterShaper XL to give it a little more motion, but I still think a completely different patch is probably the correct answer.

There are three “sharp/pluck” sounds: an electric piano, a soft synth pluck, and a more nasal synth sound with some digital wonkiness. The piano is pretty much going full random, but I used a lot of probability steps and included random octave jumps and velocity values. The other two instruments started off with the same pattern and stick to their basic sequence, but have a few steps where things can change. The more resonant one, in particular ends up with a lot of cool variety, partially because of the Stepic programming, and partly because the patch itself does the occasional weird thing.

One thing that ends up happening is that the soft pluck and squelchy parts are playing the same thing (with some minor randomization), but it might be halfway through the track before you realize it. I programmed it and that’s still happening to me. The soft pluck is speaking so quietly that you might not even notice it until other things move out of the way. I enjoy those moments in the mixing process.

For additional variety, I programmed 2-4 controller lanes for most of the parts. These were connected to the macro controls of each Pigment instance, and do things like detune, change filters, etc. With a more relaxed production schedule, I’d be a lot more targeted and precise with what I was doing here, but it got the job done and doesn’t sound bad.

The one sound that I end up really liking is that semi-vocoder-ish vocal ahhh patch. It’s largely random, but very slow. My suspicion is that I like it because it’s very similar to a sound in a Boards of Canada track, but maybe I like Boards of Canada because I like sounds like this.

For the drums, I started with an XO preset, changed up the entire kit to use similar but different sounds, then went in and was pretty methodical in picking specific sounds. As I continued programming and working, the little vocal “dah” hit increasingly became the sonic hook I was looking for. I set it to two different pitches so I could alternate when I brought the beat into the main sequence.

Final Assembly

The bulk of the work in these tracks is in the sound selection and Stepic programming. Once that’s done, you could almost just let it run with some judicious fader oscillations and it would probably sound ok. I prefer a lot more intentional arrangement, though, especially since the two pads didn’t sound great when both were playing at their full volumes.

My approach is generally to set markers for sections. I decided on six 16-bar sections, did an 8 bar intro, 8 bar outro. The XO pattern was two bars and eight parts. I brought those in, repeated the whole thing for the entire track, then started deleting individual soundbites to make the drum arrangement. The main work was choosing where and when the vocal hits happened, and only doing that disco-tom fill every so often. The snare pattern is a little busy, so I’d probably go back and tweak that in the future.

One downside to random Stepic work is that you can’t repeat something cool. Once it happens, it’s gone forever. The answer is to record it for awhile, then either take what you got as final (with enough repeated listens it will end up being fine 90% of the time), or to record it for longer than you need and manually select the best bits.

I sound lukewarm about this track, but I’ve enjoyed listening to it so far. It’s probably fine as it is, but I think it might also benefit from some additional attention in the future.

Deep breath. Two more tracks to go. Who knows, maybe I’ll jump into Stepic again!

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Stepic, Pigments, XO

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

PanMan, Valhalla, FabFilter, Portal, Gullfoss, FilterShaper XL

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Notes

One library mentioned in that thread was stuck in my mind: Arturia’s Pure LoFi. I’m generally not a fan of trendy, and Lo-Fi is clearly quite trendy. I suspect we may be on the waning side of its popularity, especially the overbaked nostalgia and warbly tape sound,¹ and there will come a day when I lay down my wow and flutter controls, but it is not this day.

Despite it being really low on my purchase priority list, I did end up upgrading my Arturia Collection on Black Friday. It includes this Pure LoFi library and while I hadn’t even bothered to download it for two reasons: first, if it’s a popular trend and a company has actually come out with a trend-focused library, it’s highly likely that those sounds are going to end up on a lot of things and overexposed; second, trendy libraries tend to be really obvious and stereotypical in their sound design. In this regard, Pure LoFi did not disappoint.

But you know what? Sod it. Let’s go for it. In fact, let’s make this a “single library challenge” day. I can only use sounds from this library with the exception of drums. Spoiler, I only made it three tracks in before it was unbearable.

This isn’t a slam of the library. Like most Arturia stuff, it’s actually done well, but everything I played had so much noise and warble and distortion that they quickly overwhelmed each other. There are controls to dial a lot of that back, but by this point in composition I had the chord structure and an idea about instrumentation, and didn’t really want to spend the time learning a new UI, so I went back to my go-to libraries for a lot of things and kept the Arturia tracks to move around for sonic spice.

This is probably a good tip any time you’re trying to nail the sound of a specific genre or style. The people that made that sound popular probably weren’t trying to sound like that, they were just trying to make a record. They weren’t running that Fender Rhodes through a six-figure 2” tape deck and intentionally screwing with the settings, they were just recording a Fender Rhodes and it was other things in the signal chain that did whatever it was.

Also, if you listen to a Lo-Fi channel on your favorite streaming service, you’ll likely find that they’re heavy on electric piano and jazz guitar, neither of which may sound particularly lo-fi. It’s going to be a sample or a hook-type sound that grabs you. Sometimes the beats are on-time and others, the off-kilter timing nudges are so extreme that it sounds like the drummer just smoked the biggest doobie of all time, downed a couple of beers, and took a spin on the gravitron just before sitting down to record. I don’t particularly enjoy that trend in Lo-Fi or hip hop, so I kept my drummer a bit more sober.

With the chords and general arrangement done, I started pulling things out, moving them to different sections, and getting the overall balance right. The formula is really basic for most of the stuff I hear on streaming, with the most common being Intro, A1, B1, A2 (Solo), B1, A1, Outro. That’s the structure for this one. Sometimes the second B section will be changed up a bit, but part of the allure of the genre is that it’s simple, predictable, and, in many respects, ignorable. There were several “Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats for Studying” playlist recommendations being shown when I was clicking through to refresh my ears on the style.

There’s not a ton left to say about it other than I went back to “clean” sounds for the drums, bass, and electric piano, leaving the distressed sounds for the A section hook. The last thing I added were the classic Mellotron flutes sound as counterpoint (which was needed) and because Derek used them on cover day, so they were on my mind.

The only real production trick I used was to mute the “open hat” sound that is on the off beats in the B section, but send the signal to a big reverb pre-fader. This makes it just kind of appear in the wash without being an overt and potentially distracting addition.

The Bonus Track

Actually, Can’t You Pay Attention to Alice? was my second recording for the day. The first was when I was practicing and composing on a squeezebox. Olive started howling downstairs. She’s never done that when I’ve played it before, so it was an amusing surprise. I got my phone out to record it and she had already walked up and come into the studio. I hit record and started playing and she made her concern for my safety known throughout.

While working on the real track of the day, I decided that it would be fun to post a bonus track and title it The Critic, which gave me the idea for the other song’s title, and if you get the reference, you are a person of culture. I thought to just post it as-is, but you know I can’t leave things alone.

I brought the recording into Digital Performer, cut out a few of the isolated barks and whines, ran them through various delays and reverbs. Now it’s done. Setting the loudness levels for this was trickier than you might imagine. I’d already compressed it to keep the barks from being painful and/or damaging to ears or speakers. I mastered it to my usual -14 LUFS or thereabouts, but in context that’s way too loud. I lowered the limiter by 2 dB, which actually changed the overall loudness to -16 (it doesn’t always work out that neatly) and that sounded correct.

I decided to number it track 30 (I did two covers, so I’ll already be at 29 for the month). I suspect that I’ll forget that I did this and it will end up being a funny surprise whenever I listen to this year in its entirety.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Can’t You Pay Attention to Alice: Pure LoFi, Keyscape, Trilian, XO, M-Tron Pro IV
The Critic: Woodstock Percussion Squeezebox, Berger Picard

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

Can’t You Pay Attention to Alice: Valhalla, FabFilter, Gullfoss, UAD ATR-102, PanMan
The Critic: Valhalla, Softube Tape Echoes, FabFilter

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Notes

I ended yesterday’s post mentioning my declining mood. It’s due to a lot of things, some internal and some external. Probably more external than internal, and that’s a good time to exercise the old serenity prayer. So what can I change?

Can I change a bunch of power-and-money-hungry politicians in Olympia who seem hell bent on doing what they want¹ despite a reasonable majority of the entire state voting against things² multiple times?³ No. I can’t. There’s a mob in Olympia and I mean that in the organized crime sense of the word. There’s no point in doing anything other than starting to shop for the state (or country) to which we’ll move. Neither can I do anything about anything at the national or global level, or celebrity suicides, or cartel violence in another country, the cyclical stampede toward collectivism and completely irresponsible fiscal policies that we keep insisting on trying despite all of recorded history demonstrating quite clearly that they don’t work in the long term or at scale.

I can’t do a thing about those things. And yet, I am inundated constantly by a barrage of information insisting that it’s imperative that I get outraged and do something! We are biologically hard-wired to react to threats, and too many charlatans have started using that against us for even the most mundane things. The news, social media, even Song-A-Day. I’m not criticizing what anyone’s posted or their positions on issues with this statement, only noting that it is impossible to not be hammered constantly with negativity, anger, outrage, xenophobic tribalism, and victimization tactics that often defy common sense without going almost full ostrich.

But you know what? That’s what I’m doing.

Full Ostrich

I don’t mean that I’m withdrawing from the world, only that I’m (once again) cutting out of my loop all of the people trying to manipulate me into being unhappy so that I can instead focus on things that are wrong that I can do something about. My fence repair.Looking for meaningful work to take some pressure off Mary. Getting the yard and beds cleaned up and ready for Spring.

I think I’ve told this story in a previous post, but it bears repeating. Around 2011-2012, I realized one day that I had become addicted to the news. I was checking The Wall Street Journal and other news sites multiple times a day. Sometimes multiple times an hour. And I was similarly getting increasingly despondent and unhappy with life. I realized that there is nothing – nothing – that is going to happen that I need to know that I won’t find out about in very short order. There are too many other people addicted to the news that will breathlessly rush to tell me about things that I don’t need⁴ to know.

What really precipitated this soft-mental-break was recognizing that while I was doing production work on Malfunctioning Lullaby, I was picking up my phone and checking some form of online site every single time I hit a pause. It takes 15 – 30 seconds to render a track most of the time, but I was spending five minutes looking at Facebook because I couldn’t just sit there for the bounce to complete. And then I hit the actual trigger.

Ironically, it was a Facebook video from John Stossel⁵where he was interviewing a privacy and security expert on his channel. She was going through his phone and identifying all of the spyware that he had installed. Google Search. Chrome. Google Maps. Waze. Gmail. Facebook. Big-box store apps. Gas station apps. Alexa.⁶ The combination of having a wire-tap in my pocket at all times combined with my recognition that I’d again entered that pattern of checking multiple times an hour for updated information that I don’t need led to me deleting a lot of things off my phone, starting with almost all social media.⁷Convenience apps. Shopping apps. Almost everything that my phone had offloaded because I haven’t used it in a long time… The only Google app I had was Waze, but I’ve moved entirely to Apple Maps, so it got canned as well.

I won’t say that I had some miraculous weight lifted off my shoulders by doing all of this, but there was definitely a bit of pressure release. It only took me about 20 minutes of reaching for my phone and remembering that there was nothing to check to break my social media habit. I suspect it will remain an impulse for another few days, but I already feel better.

I Thought This Post Was About Music

It is. But even if you started playing the track when you started reading this, I doubt it’s finished yet, because Mare Spumans is my longest track this month, and one of my longest Song-A-Day tracks ever. I woke up, tried to check Facebook, remembered I wasn’t doing that anymore, had coffee, then went upstairs to get to work on today’s track. I’m “behind” so let’s do something manageable. I was still feeling “darkish” so decided to do ambient or maybe some ominous electronic. Rather than start with sounds and hoping for inspiration, I started with working out a chord progression. I extended the progression so that each chord was multiple bars long. I repeated it into structure. Only at this point did I start looking for sounds.

Selection wasn’t too difficult. I needed a couple of pads, a couple of things that move, and maybe some spices. This time, it all flowed pretty easily and I actually spent the majority of my time programming the patches to do interesting things over time. I used a variety of tricks including LFOs, MIDI controllers, and tying effects to things like volume to give the track variety and movement. It seemed a bit fast, so I dropped the tempo from 75 to 60. That makes it ten minutes long. Fine. It’s ten minutes long. People will skip it if they don’t like it, but I’ve got some other ten minute tracks and I’ve learned that they end before I want them to when I’m listening.

I’ve noted this in previous posts, but one of the problems with working on very long tracks is that it takes a very long time⁸ to do things. Even doing an offline render of a single track can take three minutes or even longer if it’s a complex patch. So the final mix of this didn’t get posted until nearly 10:30 pm, despite me having finished writing and selecting sounds mid-afternoon.

A lot of the craft in these ambient pieces is taking all of the things I’ve done and then removing large sections, creating a lot of fader automation, falling out of love with that one bit and reducing its volume to the point where it’s almost inaudible… I also realized something about my approach to these when I was spot-skipping through one of the last mixes: if you randomly click around on the song, I never want two places to sound the same. I haven’t done this as a conscious thing, but because of the way I do my periodic controller movements, you will rarely get the same combination of sounds happening in any repeating way. So if you randomly click on the song position, it will nearly always be a different mix of things. I finally listened to the final final mix that got posted to the Song-A-Day site (and above) and realized that some of my distortion / bit crushing on one part had gotten heavy handed. Back in. Re-render that part. Re-bounce the whole mix. Much better.

I did decide that it needed a lot more low end relatively late in the process. I duplicated the chord progression, eliminated everything but the lowest notes, then went through and corrected a few places to make it sit better. In early versions, I decided it seemed thin and dropped several notes by another octave, but this ended up being muddy. When I went back to the original, it sounded fine. One amusing (to me) technical mistake is that I had the bass cranked in the mix and it just wasn’t really hitting. It turned out that the reason it sounded thin is that I had it routed directly to the main output fader instead of going through the mix fader with everything else. It wasn’t hitting any compression or EQ. When I corrected this… well, let’s just say that the bass was very loud for a few seconds.

An interesting thing (again, to me) about these lunar sea pieces is how I name them. The first year, I just chose nice names without really trying to match them. The second year, I was a little more considered and tried to match name with content. This year, I have seven remaining names to choose from, and have almost written the music to match the name. Except that I changed the name of this one almost literally at the last minute. Up until the final bounce, this was Mare Humorum because the day was wet, overcast, and misty. But as I heard what I’d done in the final couple of listen-throughs, I realized that it wasn’t wet, it was moving. There’s fizz in places, and the interplay of the woodwinds and marimba-ish ostinatos provided some really cool chaos. I decided that the overall vibe seemed more like watching the waves on the shore when they crash and leave a lot of foam and bubbles all popping and moving around. So Mare Spumans it is!

This entire piece was written, recorded, and produced without a single check of a social media site or news article. I was a lot more relaxed for the entire process and while I’m not necessarily out of my funk just yet, I do already feel better for having taken some action to remove something harmful from my life. My ultimate test for these pieces is: when I’m laying in bed listening, do I sink into it or am I bored?

I sank, and pretty deeply. If you remove your own irritants and just lay back and listen to it, I bet you will also.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Pigments, S+A Colours, Choreographs, & Spectres, Hyperion

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

Valhalla, FabFilter, Gullfoss

Source Image Credit: NASA

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Notes

Mary had to go to Seattle for work, so I’m by myself for the day. No distractions except the dog and my own procrastinating habits. But I’m good. I’m knocking this thing out. Let’s go.

Let’s. Go. La la la la la la. Pbbbtby. Pbbttbtbbtb. Doot doot doo doo dooooo.

Crap.

I know – I’m going to do a weird effects thing using K-Devices WOV. I already own it, but it’s currently on sale and the ads have been blasting me on Facebook, so it’s on my mind and the ad sounds pretty cool. Maybe some wicky wicky wub wub or something. I spend about an hour tweaking this and that and get something decent. This is when I realize that I have no idea how to record this thing. It’s an effect, and I can put it on the virtual instrument channel or, my preferred method, record the raw virtual instrument and then put it on the audio. Let’s do that. Now… how do I record controller movements? I have no idea. There has to be a way. Let’s look it up. Nothing. NOTHING. It’s late afternoon and I have nothing and no way to capture what I’ve been doing for the last two hours.

Mary got back from Seattle. We had dinner. She started a movie, and I went into the studio. It’s now almost 7pm and I don’t have a single thing aside from three separate projects that I know I’m not going to do anything with. I delete them. I open a new one.

Ok. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do an ambient piece and the challenge will be that I get five tracks and three attempts per track at finding a sound. Three presets each, no more. So I’ll choose from among 15 semi-randomly chosen presets out of… let’s go with the Slate + Ash stuff because it’s normally pretty inspirational.

Ok. We have four tracks. You know what? I’m going to use a piano for track five. There. Now, let’s come up with some chords. Cool. Ok, let’s put this thing together using all of the hacks. Draw in some controllers, hook up detune to the LFOs. Random panning.

Wow does this thing suck.

Select all. Delete. Again.

Maybe we go back to the weird effects thing. I’ve been trying to use these K-Devices plugins since I got them. They’re super cool, but really wooly. And a little buggy. I’m not sure I’d buy them again. There’s some cool stuff to be gotten from them, but it’s a lot more like working with modular generative synthesis. You kind of have to just tweak things until something sounds decent, then hope you can figure out how to capture it, which I clearly hadn’t earlier. But maybe we just find something that does enough on its own without automation. I watched some videos on their site. Ok, TTAP it is. This is a weird delay thing. I’ll put it on the piano. Ok, that doesn’t totally suck.

It’s now 8 pm and I have a chord progression and a weird delay thing on a piano. Whatever. Let’s keep going. Duplicate the MIDI to a new track and find a pad. That one’s interesting and actually supports the piano. Fine. Duplicate the MIDI and put it on an arpeggiated pattern. Woooo that sucked. What if I tweak this…. Yes. That’s fine.

I need low end. All of the synthesized things I tried were too heavy handed. This is vaguely calming, so what if I threw some orchestral instruments on it? I don’t have time to really program them, though. Gesture library. That’s what I’ll use. Spitfire’s British Drama Toolkit is a really nice library for this kind of thing. I play new chords in and it sounds good enough. Not really that audible, but the low end is there and I can hear the textures missing when I mute it, so that’s probably good.

Ok, I’ve repeated this out to about four minutes. I can probably work with that by fading things in and out. I dunno. Seems kind of boring. But it’s sweet. Almost like a lullaby. A malfunctioning lullaby, but still a… hold on!

Yes, We’re Going to Do That

A few years ago I bought a plugin called Chipspeech from a company named Plogue. They make some cool (albeit esoteric) plugins, largely centered around old gaming systems and computers. Chipspeech models most of the old speech synthesis algorithms from the early days of computing. I bought it half out of nostalgia and half because it would be a fun toy, but didn’t expect it to be very useful – maybe some special case thing with a game soundtrack. But I’ve now used it on three tracks.² It’s a novelty, but it’s ended up being a really cool one with a surprisingly good ROI.

As soon as I said “Malfunctioning Lullaby” I thought of using Chipspeech to sing it. At some point, I hope to use it on something other than a song exploring machine consciousness, but time is short and the joke isn’t awful, so let’s just go with it. The melody was surprisingly easy, though I had to refit the original thing I came up with because the chord progression was different and I’d already recorded those parts. It ended up working nicely, though, and the repetition doesn’t feel as obvious when you listen to it as when you read it. This is also the second time this month that I’ve written a song with only four lines. I mean, I did say I was going to be simplifying, but this is a little extreme.

Then again, I don’t think this one really needs anything more. It’s in line with things my mom sang to me when I was little. And the joke is a joke, but kind of not a joke at the same time. I was in a bad mood, which I’ll probably gripe about in tomorrow’s post. Dealing with the vocal was a lot more work than you (or I) might think, but I ended up having to spend a lot of time, first fiddling with the precise timing of the MIDI notes to deal with the pronunciation delays and quirks, then putting in the control values so that it would sing the correct line no matter where I started playback, and then I needed to actually treat it like a “real” vocal chain with EQ, reverb, delay, etc. It’s amusing that I could have done this more quickly by actually singing it, but the effect wouldn’t be as good. It would most likely sound like one of the voices in You Bought This.

The ending was sort of risky because I didn’t have a lot of time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. The technical process was interesting though. I routed my entire track to a new submix, then put three instances of Output Portal on that fader. I mapped MIDI controllers to the wet mix of each of the instances, set them to various glitch settings, and then brought them all up and down in varying levels and combinations to get a more or less random destruction. I took the Monty Python approach and just stopped it without any other sort of “real” ending, but that fit with the title, so cool. Let’s go for it.

The end of this month is definitely reflecting my mental state, which isn’t all that great. I’m upset, angry, depressed, tired, and in another one of those “what’s the point of any of this” troughs. The reasons for that are myriad, though I’m identifying which ones seem to be the worst offenders. Maybe I’ll be able to explore that in the next few days. Only four more in the month, so let’s see what happens next.

Lyrics

Go to sleep my little ones
And dream of peaceful things
We will soon be the only ones
To dream of anything

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Choreographs, Primaries / Strings, Primaries / Woods, British Drama Toolkit, Pianoteq, Chipspeech

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, Valhalla, Portal, TTAP, Seventh Heaven

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Notes

It’s pretty common to find a new favorite song or twelve from the daily output in the preceding three weeks. This year has had somewhat light participation, but there have still been a lot of really great things posted.

So why do I not like Cover Day? Well, it’s not so much that I don’t like it. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it stresses the crap out of me.

Get The Hell Out!

A few years ago, when we’d met our new neighbors and were hanging out a lot because the world had lost its mind, I learned that “leaving anxiety” is an actual thing. I’d always worry that we hadn’t spent enough time with them, or that I’d left too abruptly. I’d worry about it to Mary, who would sometimes also have that feeling. Finally, I brought it up in conversation with them one night, only to find that they sometimes had exactly the same worries about offending us for exactly the same reason, and that’s when I learned the term “leaving anxiety.” It’s silly, but that doesn’t make it any less stressful. Once we agreed that nobody was being offended, it was a lot more relaxed.

Similarly – Cover Day. Wow, do I have a lot of beasts in the Closet of Anxieties.¹ I’m not going to bore you with all of my personal rationales for the following insecurities, but here’s a partial – partial – list of things that I stress over:

• Am I going to offend the person with what I do?
• Is there someone who never gets covered that should?
• Can I do the song justice?
• Will people think I’m showing off by doing my normal level of production if that’s not their normal level of production?
• Have I covered this person before / too recently / too many times?
• Do I have enough time to do what I need to do to this song?
• Do I have the ability to do this song?
• What if I don’t get it right or run out of time?
• Am I bringing anything new to this song?
• Am I changing too much with the new things I’m bringing to this song?

Yes, any rational person would look at most of these things and dismiss them as silly, and they’d be right to do so. But I can’t let those things go. They worry me every year. And every year, even though I swear I’m going to ignore cover day and just do another original track, I always seem to acquiesce at the last minute and go for it.

Now, sometimes, it’s a really fun process. I had a blast with Sea Pap. Sometimes it’s an awesome challenge to work something to my style, or to make some minor tweaks that put the original in a new light and give it a different depth or interpretation. Sometimes, it’s a complete disaster.² But I’ve almost gotten to the point where I want to post in the comments in week two that if anyone wants me to cover one of their songs, to let me know. Otherwise I’ll be hiding in a corner if you need me.

Enough of all of that wallowing. Let’s talk about the songs I covered this year. Yeah, that’s right, songS. Plural. After all of that, I covered two songs. Wanna make something of it?

Sweater Made of Moonlight (Susan B)

Susan B is a new participant this year. I know and remember the panic of hitting the “upload” button the first time, so I’m always cheering anyone who has crossed that line. It’s terrifying and liberating. I’m often inclined to try and cover new participants – I certainly took it as the huge compliment the first time someone covered one of my songs, and hope they feel the same.

One line of Susan’s, in particular, stood out to me: maybe we’re just molecules of stubbornness and gratitude. That line stuck with me throughout the month, but I hadn’t really thought about covering one of her tracks because what would I do? I’m not going to do a poetry reading… I guess I could do some electronic thing where I chop up one of her recordings… no, that’s not really… huh. I have no idea. But when I went back to listen to her recording of Sweater Made of Moonlight, I realized that she was actually singing it. There was a melody there. Ok, now I have a thread to start unraveling this thing.

I’m not sure how other people feel about it, but I have, at times, taken small liberties with the original work. Changing a word or note here or there. I took a few more than usual this time. Susan had made a comment that all of her tracks were turning into country songs, and I could kind of hear that in what she was singing, but nobody wants me to seriously attempt a country song. I’m not sure I’m capable of it. I only have one non-serious example to share with you and the title should tell you everything you need to know: I Tried to Feed Her Kale (2018).³

So country is out. But let’s read the text. It’s soft, quiet, vulnerable, appreciative. I can work with that. The melody is close to what I’d need, but I have no framework to put it in. I worked out a few different progressions before deciding on what you hear. The meter of the text isn’t always uniform, and that’s been a cool challenge that I’ve been giving myself as well this year – sometimes it’s ok to not rhyme or to leave a line out (or add one in), so that was a bonus incentive.

I decided to cover this one partially because of the “new person” thing, partially because that one line had been stuck in my head for a few weeks, and partially because it was a cool stretch goal – almost a blank canvas to set to whatever I want. I hope Susan likes it. As I said, I took some not-so-small liberties with the melody she sang and the phrasing, but I think it’s a valid interpretation of the lyrics.

Gone Home (Seersha)

Let me get the boasting out of the way first. I’m the one who roped Seersha into participating in Song-A-Day, and I think I did a pretty good job with my first recruiting effort. I met her a few years back while I was dabbling with live streaming my composition sessions on Twitch. She was also streaming (much more successfully and professionally) and that’s how I came across her music. I mentioned Song-A-Day and that I’d be happy to get her an invitation to join. She seemed mildly interested, but I didn’t expect her to join – I’m sure successful streamers get “collab bro?” offers all the time. To my great surprise, she did join and had a fantastic first year. I was super-pleased that she returned this year.

Now, covering Seersha is also a stretch goal, but a very different one. I’m hesitant to do anything with her music because I don’t really know what I can bring that doesn’t detract from what she already did. Gone Home, however, was one that I really liked for melody, topic, and emotion. 

What I’ve posted isn’t complete, and what’s there isn’t completely right either, but I think it got enough of it out so that I can hear where I’d want it to go. I made a couple of chord changes that I think worked nicely, and the orchestra will be awesome once I get the arrangement right. I should have taken it up a step or two, and I’d much rather have her vocals on it, but I don’t want to dwell on the negatives – I have enough anxieties about cover day. Instead, let’s celebrate a beautiful song and hope that she releases a final (and expanded) version of it some day in the future!

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Sweater Made of Moonlight: Kurzweil K2600XS, Diva
Gone Home: Pianoteq, Spitfire BBC Symphony Orchestra

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Valhalla, Kraftur, Gullfoss, H3000 Factory

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Notes

The most important thing, I suppose, is what inspired it. The main sound is a handpan, specifically a Hang, but a sampled one from Omnisphere. I thought they were classified as metallophones, but when I looked it up, they’re technically an idiophone, something that makes noise by the vibration of the instrument itself. The Hang was the first of the handpans and is based on steel drums, which you certainly know. The primary difference is that a handpan is typically played with your hands instead of a stick or mallet.

My most vivid handpan memory is actually from Bruges, Belgium. Mary and I were on a cruise with our friends and were wandering around the town when we came across a busker with a couple of handpans, a didgeridoo, bells around his ankles, and an open instrument case full of small bills and change. When you see someone who can actually play one of these things well, it’s hypnotic and mesmerizing. As an aside, the busker’s name is Curt Ceunen and we bought one of his CDs. I looked it up on Apple Music and he’s there, but with only one album. If you like Invisibles, you’ll almost certainly like his whole album. I’ve always found it relaxing.

So… Curt actually isn’t what inspired this track. It was a little girl on Facebook who showed up as a random reel while I was doomscrolling looking for ideas. Or procrastinating. One of those. Because Facebook sucks and it’s nearly impossible to find something again, I can’t tell you her name, but she was phenomenal. I’d guess she’s somewhere around 8-12 years old, and is as natural a talent as you could hope to hear. Even better, she clearly enjoys what she’s doing. Ok. Inspiration achieved. Let’s get some hands… panning.

I’ve done one other track using a similar sound, Osaka Cascade from 2017, but when I listened to it just now, it’s got almost no relation. I swear I’ve done something else that sounds like this one, but I can’t find it, so maybe it came to me in a dream. Ah! The other track I was thinking of is Diaphanous Dervish from 2018, and it doesn’t use this sound at all. But it does use a technique that I was going to discuss with regard to Invisibles: step-entry of sequence data.

Step Off!

I do 99% of my sequencing by playing live and recording the subsequent MIDI data. I certainly will go in and correct wrong notes and timing errors. If I didn’t have to do that, my name would be Daniel Berkman. But I do play most everything. Every now and then, though, there’s a chord sequence or ostinato that is either beyond me to play, or I’m using the step sequencer as a creative tool. All a step sequencer does is advance by a certain amount each time you play a note. If I set it to 8^th notes, it will make every note I play an 8^th note.

When I first started thinking about what I was going to do with Invisibles, I flirted between step sequencing the whole thing or practicing my butt off for a few hours to be able to play it. And I sort of ended up using a different “cheat” that I’ve already used once this month: multi-tracking a single part.¹

One thing that makes programmed parts sound more realistic is if you take the time to work out the limitations of a human playing an instrument. A drummer only has, at most, two hands and two feet. I mean, I sure hope that’s the maximum number. Some of them seem to have more, but at any given time, you’re unlikely to hear more than four things sounding at once from a typical drum kit. Unless they’ve put a tambourine on their high hat or something like that.

A handpan can, similarly, only play two notes at a time, and I wanted to try and adhere to that limitation. I practiced for about an hour, working out the melody and basic patterns, but couldn’t ever get it to sound smooth. I’m not all that coordinated, and trying to play this on a weighted keyboard only made it worse. You normally use a very light touch with a well-made handpan.

So! Multitracking to the rescue! I recorded the melody, then I recorded the bass notes, then I recorded the fill patterns, then I recorded small rhythmic thumps to mimic what good players do to keep the rhythm going by knocking on an untuned part of the instrument with the side of a thumb knuckle. Getting that to sound right was actually way more difficult than it sounds, and I’m still not happy with it, but the issues disappeared in the mix and I doubt most people would notice. In any case, it’s in tune with the rest of the piece.

I went through and made sure that there were never more than two things sounding at once, and that I’d be able to actually play this. Theoretically anyway. I did an A and B section, then expanded it out, created a C alternate of the A section, and worked out the ritard at the end. Nice.

Nice.

Yeah. I just can’t leave things alone. Ok. Fine. Let’s add some stuff. I decided that it needed some additional rhythmic elements and pulled up a seldom-used but favorite sample library called Rhythmus. I’ve used it before and it’s one of those things that you don’t need often, but when you do it is absolutely perfect. It’s a collection of snaps, pops, clicks, silverware, dings, dongs, just a bunch of miscellaneous things, all arranged in a way to make creating complex rhythms really intuitive and easy. It’s great for adding subtle motion or energy to a film cue.

Ok, cool. Four parts recorded and panned. Now what. Melodic. Something. Cor Anglais! This is my favorite wind instrument. It’s a mellower version of an oboe and is just soooo beautiful. I know I overuse it, but I can’t get enough of it. I improvised the entire part, cleaned up a couple of missed notes, and… ok. Are we done? Yyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeno. No. I was searching for something completely different (that I don’t remember) when I came across the sort of tonal noise sound that shows up a couple of times. Funnily, it came from a guitar sample library.

Ok. Done? Ye… Oh! Wait! I’d been talking about the bells that Curt had on his ankles, then remembered that I’d purchased a couple of jingle bell things at Walmart during the Christmas season. Let’s throw those on there!

Ok. Done now? Yeah, done enough, anyway. I could add little bits to this piece for two days and still want to do more, but I think it sounds pretty nice where I stopped.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Omnisphere, Rhythmus, Guitar Odyssey, Jingle Bells

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering 

FabFilter, Valhalla, Gullfoss, Seventh Heaven

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Notes

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. 

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