Phase issues
As a learning experiment and a way to balance my stay-at-home dad life, I’m releasing a track every two weeks. This is the third track in the series. Read the first post to learn more about this project.
There was a bit of pressure on this one, because the previous track turned out better than I expected. I know it’s impossible, but I want every track to be better than the previous.
Here’s the third track:
It’s got this synthwave sound; my significant other says it reminds her of Knight Rider, the 80s TV series about epic cars and epic mullets. I like that association. As before, I’ve used OSCiLLOT as a sound source and plugins from Waves and Ableton for processing the sounds.
Driving on ice
I didn’t have a strong idea for the track in the beginning, but I had a beat in mind. A bass line and a lead got added to that, which I then expanded to a two minute arrangement. I would have wanted a longer arrangement at this point, but I had to stretch the material pretty thin to get even this much.
The lead evoked a mental image of driving on ice on a clear day, so I started building on that feel. I wanted it to be a rock song made with synths: synthesised sound, but the feel of a pop rock song played by a band. This was probably a bad idea, so luckily none of it ended up in the final track. You have to start with something, though.
I wanted an airy electric guitar sound, so I read about synthesising plucked strings from Sound On Sound’s Synth Secrets article series. Synthesising electric guitar isn’t easy, but SOS got me to the right direction and I managed to build a patch that sounded pretty good. After lots of iteration, ditching most of what I’d initially created, I had a roughly three minute track.
Even though the track sounded pretty polished at this point, I lost confidence in it. I didn’t like the song I’d created, and wanted to start over. There was no time for that though, so I kept the elements I did like: the drums and the guitar synth. Everything else got deleted. I replaced the deleted lead and bass with a different lead and bass, reworked the beat and tweaked the guitar synth. Then again, I lost confidence in what I’d made and deleted most of it. I almost completely reworked the track twice before stumbling on a bass synth and a simple arpeggio lead that faintly resonated with me. They felt like a safe thing to settle on, so acknowledging the time limit, I forced myself to work those into the final track.
Without the two week time limit, I would’ve probably continued rewriting the track forever. Again, the time limit saved a track from limbo.
Losing balance
Because of the several rewrites, this track progressed slowly. I got afraid of running out of time, so I started working on the track during evenings. This was normally family time, but now I was disappearing into my own world with my headphones on. This created tension between me and my significant other.
I thought I could make it work; jump in and out of the world of music, being present when needed. But making music requires an intense focus and headphones create a strong isolation.
Doing this was also detrimental to the creative process, because I was tiring my ears and my brain. Everything started sounding silly and dull.
Write drunk, edit sober
I’ve been reading Making Music. One of its chapters titled “Write drunk; edit sober” made me realise that I had failed to keep the two phases of making music separate: writing and editing. Writing means that you record as many ideas as possible, without restraint (being drunk is optional). Editing means curating and developing those ideas into a song. Not separating those phases made me analytical when I should have been just banging away. This in turn caused a constant shortage of raw material in the editing phase.
I’m recognising this as a bad habit of mine: I’m eager to get the song finished, so I go into editing phase right when I think I have just enough raw material for a whole song. This leaves me with too little leeway, forcing me to create new things while editing. Trying to come up with a bass line when focusing on the arrangement feels annoying; like realising that you forgot to buy something from the grocery store while cooking. I want that bass line to just be there, not to create it. Working this way is inefficient and feels like I’m constantly squeezing ideas out of myself.
Towards a process I can trust
I’m happy with the eventual track, but not the process of how it got made. With the next track, I will try harder to maintain a separation between writing and editing phases. I’ll try to stay longer in the writing phase to get more raw material to distill into a track.
My hope is to be so confident in my process that I don’t feel tempted to sacrifice time from my family and friends. Also, if it yields interesting songs, that’d be nice too.
Please comment the track on SoundCloud or in this post. Any tips and critique are welcome. Also, if you want to know more about my production techniques, working methods and the tools I use, I’m happy to share.
I’ll post all the tracks under the name DMM on SoundCloud, so follow me there to get each track directly to your SoundCloud feed.
