Sonic Experience: Tuesday Tidings

Please listen to the song while you read 🙇

INITIATION

Nearly every song I have written has some interesting bit of lore to how it was made.

I've always enjoyed talking about how my music came to be, so I thought I might write about it in a blog post!

My most recent song is a soundtrack song for my game, Fidel & The Pauper's Paradox (which you can read more about it here)

ABOUT THIS SONIC EXPERIENCE

Originally, this song was going to be written for Saturday and not Tuesday. So, for my Saturday concept, I had the idea of making the soundscape of something like a busy market street (because Saturday would be the day everyone is out and about, going shopping, to restaurants, events, etc).

TEXTURES

To achieve this concept, I had the idea of building up layers of repetitive instruments to create a texture of noise.

To help create the textures I did a few fun things for the production of the song.

First, of note, are the (non drum kit) percussion elements.

I have no word to describe this other than "The shit in my drawer". It is comprised of a ratchet wrench, the top to a wooden box, and a plank of wood. The wood box and wood plank were struck with a cork mallet that I had constructed myself from a wine cork, wood dowel, and some 5 yen coins to counter-balance it.

to further create the rising texture I wanted an array of random notes.

The problem with true randomness would be nothing short of a chaotic and atonal mess.

After some searching I found Droplets by Geraint. Mister Geraint has some really wonderful JS plugins for Reaper. Droplets takes a MIDI chord and will play random notes within that chord, with a few parameters to adjust the pattern and frequency. But the result is something truly random, just like I wanted.

Droplets was used on the piano track -- which is mostly buried in the mix, only there to provide the texture -- and there is a metallic percussion sound. This is actually a heavily modified music box sample (the envelope has been adjust to mostly just accent the metallic noise of the first string and remove the ringing afterwards).

As the instruments build up, short melody passages creep though, which was intended to be as if you catch just a brief few words of a nearby party speaking on the busy street. These passages mainly come from the flute and the guitar.

FLUTES

So fun fact about the flute!

1) I have never used a flute in my music before!

2) I don't have a good flute sample library to draw from.

The flute itself was a pretty cheesy sounding soundfont drawn from Zenology. It comes with a wide variety of soundfonts, of which is a legato flute and a "jazz flute" (which is just staccato playing with a breathy layer added to it).

In order to create an acceptable range of articulations for the flute, I combined these 2 soundfonts on separate tracks and side-chained the staccato flute to the legato flute. This, in effect, causes the legato flute to "drop out" when the staccato note plays, and thus blends them together more naturally.

CHANGE THE DATE: SATURDAY TO TUESDAY

So why did it become a Tuesday song instead of a Saturday song?

As the song developed, I found that relying primarily on more pure-toned instruments (bells, flutes -- you know, instruments without a lot of harmonics) helped reduce the chaos in the mix. The result is that, these pure tone instruments tend to be reified in usage; bells tend to be wintery, flutes tend to be springy. The overall vibe of the song shifted from "busy market street" to "winter giving into spring" (appropriate given the time of year I wrote this song).

Without going into obsessive detail, the daily songs in the game assume a typical schedule for a person's play time (busy weekdays, free weekends). So I am very particular about the Saturday and Sunday songs, but weekday songs I'm more lenient with. I feel like that the song does not have the right "steady energy" for Saturday and may become tiring to listen to for really long play sessions.

CONCLUSION:

This song quickly became one of my favorite songs. There are lot happening -- both intentionally and unintentionally thanks to the texture of notes. It makes every listen to the song interesting as you pick out something new you didn't hear before.

My only criticism of this work is that the build up comes and goes too quickly. I think the song would have improved if there was one last passage that included a melody and the choir before ending.

Regardless, I am very happy with the song and I hope you enjoy it too!

Following, I will share the tools I used for this song in case you are curious.

TOOLS:

You'll need to forgive me, as I am writing this list off the top of my head and may have missed some tools used.

These are not affiliate links, they are simply giving you quick access to learn more about the tools I used.

DAW:

Reaper 6.30

HARDWARE:

Roland JP-8080

Arturia Keylab 88 mk. I

Donner Noise Killer

The random shit in my drawer

SOFTWARE

• INSTRUMENTS:

  • NI Kontakt

    • NI Session Nylon

    • NI Noire

    • NI Studio Drummer

    • Orchestral Tools Berlin Strings

    • Soniccouture Vibraphone

    • Strezov Sampling ARVA

  • Roland Zenology

• EFFECTS

  • ReaEQ

  • GFader

  • GClip

  • Melda MEQ

  • Melda MComp

  • 112db Redline Reverb (I am using the discontinued legacy version, not Version II)

  • Arturia LX-24

  • Arturia TridA

  • Arturia Fet-76

  • Arturia PEAK

  • Decidedly (Decent Samples) Refractions

  • Valhalla Delay

  • Oeksound Soothe 2

  • Venn Audio Utility

  • Geraint Droplets