DAW: Reason 8
Date Completed: 10.30.15
Time Spent: 1-2 hours
Featuring: None

Final loop in this series — made 2 days before the start of November Sessions. Simple drum idea made in Reason.

Drumming

DAW: Reason 8
Date Completed: 11.19.15
Time Spent: 6 hours
Featuring: None

From project file notes:

"6 am. 6 hours. Looked up how to build basses. Tried to emulate the cool drop in Pursuit of H. Melody could be catchier. Bass drop still isn't super "on my feet" but side chain is better. C maj."

Key: C maj.
BPM: 128

10. (~[] & []~) (Nov. 19)

DAW: Reason 8
Date Completed: 11.7.15
Time Spent: 7.5 hours
Featuring: None

Did half in the afternoon and finished the song after getting back to my room from DJing. Played sax sampler live (while also adding some expression via the mod wheel). Made a radio edit which removed the 8 bar intro and jumped straight into the song. Googled how to do the triplet, jazzy ride cymbal playing. Went from 2-4 instruments in the first couple of November Session tracks to 10 instruments in this track. Still a rather heavy handed use of maximizers, no panning or reverb (not that every song (or any song) needs any, I just hadn't really discovered them yet lol), some EQing of frequencies in an attempt to free up space in the mix.

Key: C maj. (w a bit of blues scale thrown in there)
BPM: 100

B5. "Yeah — This Room Here's Got A Ring To It." (Nov. 7)

DAW: Reason 8
Date Completed: 11.4.15
Time Spent: 8 hours
Featuring: None

Goal was to hammer out a song in less than 5 hours, ended up taking 8 (lol). Was starting to get more into looking a song structures. Broke down Taylor Swift's "Back to December" and used a similar song structure to write this song. In addition, the chord progression, key, and BPM are also influenced by "BtD." I guess I liked the clave sound from the previous night because it makes a reappearance here. At this point, I was only on the 4th night of the Nov. Sessions but already felt like I went from not being able to write anything to writing pop-sounding songs. It really made me reevaluate whether what was holding me back was really a lack of knowledge/skill or that I just hadn’t been going for it. At this point, still found Reason's instruments to sound a little quiet on their own, so was throwing a maximizer on every track. Other than that, minimal effect use (no reverb, panning, EQ, etc).

Key: D maj.
BPM: 71

X. Work And The Weather (Nov.4)

DAW: Cubase Pro 8.5
Date Completed: 3.6.17
Time Spent: 3 days
Featuring: None

For months had felt pretty burnt out on music. Not that I was tired of making it, but rather, I was tired of what I was making. I hadn't really liked much of my music since Nov. Sessions, more than a year ago. Recently, when I went through and uploaded all of my music, I listened to each track before uploading and found that, given some distance, I actually liked the tracks more than I had previously thought. Even so, this feeling had become persistent — I was tired of the type of content that I was creating.

With this song, I set out to, “create the worst song never heard.” By that, I wanted to put no pressure on myself to create anything good but to instead focus on creating something new. My goal was for it to be something never really heard before; obviously I feel short of this (can’t just reinvent the wheel) and the song sounds rather abstract electronic/drone music-ey. Still, I was happy with the results and had more fun creating this piece than I had had making music in several months. For a while, I think that I was creating music just to create. I knew that I needed to keep outputting work in order to get better but I wasn’t really trying to get better; just trying to complete song after song. 

With this song, I felt like I was actually creating as an act of exploration, of trying out new techniques and testing new sonic limitations. I started by writing some piano lines. I discovered Cubase’s chord track function and was super excited to learn that I could change the midi note color from reflecting note velocity to reflecting whether or not the note was: in the chord, in the key, or non-diatonic. I usually structure my songs in pretty standard 4-, 8-, 16-, or 32-bar sections. For this song, I went with 12-bar blocks. I wanted to make new, “never before heard” sounds for this song so I forced myself to fill up all 8 of Cubase’s inserts for each VST instrument. I then went and automated many of these effects by drawing in automation. Around the 2:30 mark, I hit a note on the synth and drone it out for the next 3 minutes. I had a drum pattern come in over top of the drone but not in any way on grid; I waited till I thought it would sound good, hit the space bar (start/stop), and then drew my pattern right where the playhead stopped. At this point, all of these effects were starting to drive the final output way up. I had already dropped the fader on the stereo out channel several times in order to avoid clipping and decided to instead throw on a Brickwall Limiter onto the stereo out channel. This allowed me to slam up and distort any signals I wanted. Brought the stereo out fader back up to -1 dB to give myself a small amount of headroom. Using a Brickwall Limiter like this really went against my normal instincts. At times, the BWL was hitting as far as it could, dropping the volume in giant, 12+ dB chunks. My approach for this song was to trust that if it sounded good it sounded good, regardless of rules broken.  Having let this version of the song sit over night, I went through and added a bunch more automation. I had never really been comfortable writing in live automation (I didn’t like the fact that it made effects hard to manually adjust later without “writing” adjustments in; In reality, neither totally knew how to nor totally trusted live automation recording). I did live effect automation to several effects and then went in and created a small to medium sized EQ band on each instrument and played through its part, doing a single take of live EQ automation (often crazy, drastic variations). From there, tweaked a few sections of automation, did some final listens on over-ear, apple earbuds, and laptop speakers; then track was ready for upload.

Also, listened to a lot of Flume/Flume interviews while making this song.

Song title from Josh Ritter's "Thin Blue Flame" — an absolute masterpiece of songwriting.

Key: C maj.
BPM: 120

Lithium Dream

DAW: Live 9 Standard
Date Completed: 8.14.17
Time Spent: 7 days
Featuring: None

First song I've made in a while. First song in about a year that I've actually been stoked on(!!). Switched from Cubase to Ableton and saw a very productive change in workflow. Don't get me wrong, Cubase is great software, but after months of trying, their workflow still bugged the hell out of me. Anyway, this song is called 'seattle.' A bit of a generic name, I know. But it made me feel like I was in a place where it always rains and with lots of trees. And yeah, that's seattle, so that's what I named the song.

Notes:
Got really into this guy named Scott McCloud's theory about art having 6 levels (surface -> craft -> structure (story) -> idiom (style) -> || form <-> idea ||). I found it really helpful to write out attributes at each level that I found in music and try to incorporate them into my music. My self evaluation is that I am on surface and beginning to move into craft. I also let myself take a step back from music. In the past, I have tried to go way down the rabbit hole of sound design, production techniques, etc and it really bogged me down. I found it really helpful to just create and only worry about those aspects when a problem arouse.

Key: C Maj.
BPM: 138
© 2017 robbiegay

seattle

DAW: Live 9 Standard
Date Completed: 8.20.17
Time Spent: 5 days
Featuring: None

Week 2 of making a song per week. I am still really enjoying the switch to Live. The workflow is so easy and I'm able to tweak things and churn out new ideas at a much faster rate. 

In the past, I have seen well-known producers doing walkthroughs of their project files and have always been amazed at how they have so many tracks. Previously, my songs were averaging 8-12 tracks. "spells" had 41 tracks, grouped into 4 group channels. This also marked the first instance of using group tracks in Live. In the future I will group similar instruments and not just sections of the song.

Since I've started producing, I have been striving towards a "mature" sound, a full sound, particularly in my drops, which have always fallen a little flat. This song is the first instance where I have felt that a song has sounded full bodied and "mature."

In the mixing process, I did some HP/LP EQing to help sculpt sounds and make room in the mix.

I saw a YouTube tutorial that talked about building risers by: re-sampling the section you are transitioning into, reversing that audio, adding very long tail reverb, freezing and flattening that track, and then using the reversed (frozen) reverb tail to lead into the next section. I though this tip was magical. It also inspired a new love for pushing the decay time on reverbs up.

I signed up for Splice, which is where I got the vocal samples as well as a variety of other sounds that I used throughout this track. For $8/mo., I really like using it as a sample library, favoriting sounds I like, and digging through them when I need a new sound. (It's also like $0.08 per sample, which is very reasonable).

Didn't do as much live automation as I did on "seattle." Did dig into Live's audio and midi effects and was really pleased with a lot of them.

In the intro, learned how to bring sounds from the background to the foreground: sweeping in high freqs. (auto filter), boosting highs (eq 8), dialing back reverb, increasing stereo presence (auto pan), and increasing volume (utility).

Adding a saw synth with sidechain compression was sort of the big thing that has been missing in my drops in the past. I also used a really simple 808 sound that I made in massive, which gives the drop a lot of its punch.

The song was originally inspired by Flume’s track “Bring You Down feat. George Maple.” I liked the sort of creepy/witchey vibe. Both that song and “spells” make me thing of the color purple. I had also just learned that I was a big fan of Future Bass (I recently read the wiki on FB and realized that a majority of my favorite Electronic artists make some FB tunes, including two of my favs, Cash Cat and Flume, which are credited with creating the genre).

Key: C# min.
BPM: Varies (but 128 for most of the song)
© 2017 robbiegay

Spells

Every song I've ever made: 2012 — 2017
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
A major goal of this page is to track progress over time. I once read that every good songwriter has 100 bad songs in them. My plan was to make 100+ songs before publishing any. 

I've always found it encouraging to hear my favorite artists' earliest work. Being able to hear their "bad" songs, helped me understand that they too started from somewhere.

Although it would seem more beneficial to wait until I am more skilled, I wanted to start in the middle. On each track I included information ranging from the technical to the personal, often attempting to recreate the mindset I was in at that point in my journey. I think that if I attempted to do this project retroactively, I would forget many of the problems I was having, things that may, at some point, become second nature to me. 

For convenience, I have attempted to organize my tracks into clearly labeled playlists, each representing a period of time and mindset.

For a more in-depth look at my story, check out my "timeline" below:

robbiegay (old music)

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