for my final project I’ve taken inspiration from aphex twins track “we are the music makers”
In this track he uses a voice line from gene wilder film, “Charlie and the chocolate factory”. As well as this its quite a simple song , its a lot of repetitive rhythms and melodies, being simple but effective.
So in my track I’ve decided to use another one of his voice line from a film of his called start “Start the revolution without me”
When starting the track I wanted to lean towards simplicity , I wanted a simple bass and melody as well as drums.
I started by choosing a key , which I decided on A minor as its a very recognisable key and is used in a lot of music.
wilders samples –
First I decided to download the audio and cut it up into chunks
I then gave the audio some reverb to make it fill the track some more and give it more body.
bass line –
I wanted to keep the bass line repetitive and simple , I kept it within the scale and used only 3 notes, A, G , and B, It was created on the chip synth ops 7 plug in ,and the instrument is a “simple organ”. I think this is perfect for what I wanted , not complicated whatsoever, its fits very well and is effective with the drums. I didn’t have to try many instrument for this one as I thought this felt and sounded really nice.
drums –
Again, I wanted simplicity, the tracks starts off with a 4 to the floor distorted 808 kick, and is then followed by a heavily reverbed 16th note pattern, I used all 808 samples.
The bass has also added effects such as a drum buss and overdive.
When experimenting with other projects I spent too much time trying to overcomplicate the drums, putting beat repeat effects on them and changing them to audio and stretching them out , which in the end just made them to experimental and wasn’t a good drum beat anymore, whereas here I cut it all back and kept to a simple composition , which in the end was 10 times better.
melody –
For the melody I used the notes A, E, G, C, D , I went through a few iterations of the melody and what instrument to use , but ultimately decided on this one, the added effect is where I wanted the melody to shine a little more but I couldn’t really find any to make it better, I added a small amount of reverb and for one of the sections gradually increased the wetness which then leads to another section, I also tried an auto pan effect which worked for another synth I tried but the one I ended up with it completely ruined it so I took it out.
Final arrangement –
This was a last minute decision to start this track, I spent a long time on another which I couldn’t get to work whatsoever, so I decided to make this, I kept it simple which made it easier for me. all in all the track took a day to make, I understand that its far from what I originally set out to do, however I still used the synthesizers, and used inspiration from aphex twin in the use of an 808 kit, and his use of samples.
When creating the other track I made things too complicated, and realised to get the sound I wanted, I don’t have the skills of tools to do so , I tried copying methods off the internet from youtubers such as Steve rush, who makes electronic Ableton tutorials, and used some of the methods he taught. Some was successful for example selecting different kick samples and matching each one to its own velocity value, which gives a really good sounds of that IDM randomness in tracks, but pairing that with others sections of a track, I just couldn’t do, I’ve learnt from this that sometimes you just have to keep things simple, hence why I did the track I did
The track which I’m going to call “Wilder”, turned out better that I thought it would, especially in the time I created it, I really like the bass line together with the drums and the little break down section which used an extra bass part which sounds like a bass used in Aphex twins track, “Windowlicker”. However, there’s still some bits which I would like to work on a lot more, I feel the melody synth could of been a lot better, I feel like it might not entirely fit well with the rest of the track, I did revise which synth I was going to use, and the one I ended up with sounded the best, so I stuck with it, I would of liked to experiment with more effects but it turned out okay in the end. I also liked the ending, it was simple and the melody switched and faded out, perfect for what I wanted.