This is a song I started producing a year ago, however it got left unfinished and forgotten about.
It started off life as a simple guitar melody that I acquired off of bandcamp and I just heard the melody and was instantly inspired to create this piece of music, I am not exactly sure what genre to assign this to but it makes my ears happy. I put some atmospheric chord parts and a piano underneath the melody to make the intro melody and harmony complete.
At a certain point in the piece I edited the guitar melody to play in double time as a change in the chord progression before the drop of the song always makes things more interesting. I also recorded a bass guitar, equed all the sub low out of it and added a square wave filtered to play the sub 180hz frequencies. Along with this I also layed some very basic drums down for the intro.
The next part was designing the drop. I had the changed chord progression and changed it a bit once again to have a series of these really emotional and powerful chords. I also added a very simple note melody on top of the chords to create more movement and tension. Once the chord progression for the drop was established, I designed the drop sounds on xfer serum.
The chord synth was made using a saw wave and a square wave with the unison voices turned up to 7, which I edited the waveforms of in the wave editor to have the frequencies I personally thought sounded good, once that was established I added some high pass to create a slightly more thin sound, I added some distortion and eq to boost the high mid frequencies especially, and some other post processing.
As far as the main melody sound is concerned it was just a saw wave with the unison turned to 9, I once again added and removed certain frequencies in the saw wave to create the perfect sound and used similar processing to the supersaw.
I made 2 basses, I made a mid frequency saw bass using chaos modulation to effect the pitch and create a much more chaotic sounding bass, add a narrow high pass around 100hz and some distortion and eq to boost the mid range and you have a mid range saw bass. This worked in tandem with a sub that I designed using a square wave and a narrow low pass filter.
Once I had all of these sounds I added some very simple drums, just kick snare and a couple cymbal sounds which I processed all together with a bit of compression and eq. I also took some tom drum samples I had and created some tom fills to add variation into the drop as well as for transitioning between the buildup and the drop.
I then had the idea to add in a less ‘chaotic’ sounding saw chord at the start of the drop, as well as a little 8 bit arpeggio to hit when the snare drum hit sometimes and a few American dubstep sounds, one that I designed myself and a couple that I got in a sample pack. I cut up the drop chords and added these elements in with them and before I knew it I had the drop.
Smart Targets
I will attempt to get grade 8 on the guitar and potentially the piano, this is both for the purpose of getting the qualification to put on my CV etc, and just for the personal goal of being that level at instrumentality.
I want to get better at documenting and evaluating my work. I normally get the highest grade for my practical ability but the written work usually lets me down so I really need to improve and get my documentation skills as good as I can get them.