Sleepless (Instrumental Version)

Mirror

Naked

Samantha Glocker - Mystery Track

Civilisations is one of my few new tracks. The trouble I find with not writing for a long while is I get rusty. But I'm really happy with how this song turned out.

I didn't have any particular goals when writing this. I'd just refurbished and modified an old Korg Poly 800 synth, was playing around with the sounds, and this idea came up.

I especially love the halting drum beat, and the Cyclone TB-303 clone towards the end of the song. This song was also an experiment in my never-ending learning of psychoacoustic sound engineering.

I've just added a few additional details to the second half of the track, and removed some annoying clicking every 4 bars (which being that most of this was hardware, not loops, I've no idea what it was), so this is revision 2 of the track.

There may be a little too much competing for attention before the breakdown at the end, I'm not sure yet, but I think the end is much more interesting.

Civilisations

I added this one last track to the series, however it's not really space-themed. Perhaps its for a relationship theme inside a sci-fi movie.

This song captures for me a sense of isolation, without much release.

Alone

For the technically inclined, I mixed these three tracks on a pair of Yamaha HS8 speakers.

At the time I thought the speakers were good, but not fantastic. Now after having a chance to work on a variety of other studio monitors for extended periods of time, these really were fantastic monitors.

Speakers really are only as good as the tracks you can create on them, and everything I wrote and mixed on the Yamaha speakers seemed to translate perfectly to other speakers like the car and headphones. Which is a tremendous feat of engineering from Yamaha really.

As a reminder to myself, I need to add a syncopated note to the bassline about 1/2 way through.

Continued on next track...

Prologue

These tracks are an excerpt from a larger idea of scoring a sci-fi exploration of space and new planets. At the time I wrote these I'd refurbished a bunch of synths from the 90s, a Roland Juno 106, an alpha Juno, and an XP-30 (Roland fan-girl much?)

When I wrote them I wanted to bring back the expansive sound of music from the 80s.

Listening to these now, they remind me of some of the newer soundtracks like Stranger Things and Russian Doll—only I wrote these about 10 years ago.

Continued in next track...

Space

This song was an experiment in a number of things. I was listening to the soundtrack from the original Dune computer game (by Philip Ulrich), where he's managed to distort bass in the most magnificent and unusual way.

I managed to create a similar sound, which adds a lot to the unusual atmosphere of this song. I was also experimenting with a more abstract song structure and build-up. I'm really happy with the results.

This is actually one of my favourite tracks, especially the seemingly stochastic bassline, and crescendo of iterative strings as they build in waves.

I originally didn't like when some of the tracks came in, but it's just grown on me and now I can't imagine the progression any other way.

It's a style I'll be coming back to as one that I think is very unique and recognisable, and very me.

Unfold

The song idea came from seeing "dragons" in the sky, which were probably plasma formations, and sometimes accompanied by natural disasters. Thus "dragons" became associated with fire, and inspired the civilisation to find a way to leave and look for safer planets.
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More experimenting with mix engineering. This was the Roland XP-30 (lead), Korg Wavestation (huge alternate lead), Juno-106 (accompaniment, bass, chorus), MFOS Mini-Synth MkII (wind).

This is revision 2 of this mix. I was never happy with the bass. I don't have a studio right now, but I found a flattened export of the bass track and was able to overlay it and address problems with the energy and pacing of the track. I think it's a lot better now.

Dragons In The Sky

I write film scores. These tracks are all intended to accompany a visual counterpart.

My example tracks here are each experiments with various goals while I was learning audio engineering — trying to get good enough to record what I hear in my head and the music that plays in my dreams. I now feel like I have the requisite skills. I'm taking a break right now, but I will be back.

Samantha Glocker

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