Life has an annoying habit of getting in the way.
Along with some personal family issues, I had two freelance clients decide that they wanted updates this week. That does put a crimp into the creativity time when it's needed to complete work for clients. I ended up completing that work early last night, and jumped back into my piece of music I've been building on with @LNADoesAudioStuff's 12 Days of Creativity Challenge. My previous blog entries were specific to the particular challenge I was working at that time, but this particular entry is going to wrap up the last few days all together. I'm writing this, having done (what I consider to be) steps 7 (vocal production), 8 (Arrangement), and 9 (Lifts, Drops, Swells, and Fills), and will publish this entry after completing 10 (Adding Life To Dry, Boring Production), 11 (Creative Automation), and 12 (How You Know When Your Track Is FINISHED!). I have to complete all of this tonight... after tending to some of the aforementioned family issues. Tomorrow is a friend's holiday party, and then it's Saturday, which is the last day of the challenge, and I need to submit my piece, for better or worse!
As stated in the previous entry, I've opted to go with a vocal sample from Loopcloud. I found a cheesy little vocal that has a nice hookey (hookie? hook?) poppy-vibe to it. I duplicated it, pitched it up by an octave and gave it some EQ to remove any lingering low harmonics. I also discovered in Loopcloud that you can adjust the timing of the clip. That was handy, as I spent way too long trying to get the 115bpm clip I'd found to sit nicely within a 128bpm tempo. Loopcloud took care of that for me.
I found a second "filler" vocal and chopped that a bit as well, and plopped it down in a couple of places.
I've never been good at structuring a song, so this has been one of the more challenging parts of this, er, challenge. I did manage to take my original 8-bar loop, and structure it more like a song, with definitive sections. I have an intro, in which I add instruments, a middle section where most of the instruments are playing, drop some during the breakdown section, and then an outro, where I remove tracks until I have only three left. It seems to work.
I found a finger pop sound (not a snap or a click, but you can definitely tell it's a finger noise) that I turned into a small 32nd-note run down in one part, and then reversed it and sent it up later. It adds a bit of "what was that?" to the song and keeps it from becoming monotonous. At least, that's the hope. I also have the typical reverse cymbal that rises into a --what else-- cymbal crash.
I used Valhalla Supermassive in a couple different parts of my track, along with Bitwig's own Reverb and Convolution Reverb devices. I also added delay to specific instruments and I'm hoping I didn't go overboard. That seems easy to do when adding everything in, so hopefully I didn't make the track too muddy. I also attempted to add some panning in, specifically to the finger clicks I mentioned under Day 9, but either I was doing it wrong or the fills were just happening too fast; I couldn't get it to accomplish what was in my head. A challenge for my next project I suppose. There is panning on some of the percussion elements so hopefully that comes through.
My automation starts right off the bat, with my swell at the beginning of my track. I use automation to cut the reverb in and out, adjusting the volume from ∞ to -4.8db. I'm sure there was a more efficient way to go about doing this, but it's how I accomplished what I wanted. I also added some automation to a cutoff filter on one of the synths during the break to give it more oomph, and get it towards the front of the mix.
After spending some time adjusting the volume on various tracks, and spending even more time on various minor issues, I decided to call it done. Let's face it, I could have (and should have) spent a lot more time working on this, but the one and only goal I had here was to finish a track. I wanted it to be structured like a finished song might be, and have a definite beginning, middle, breakdown, and end. And that's what I got. Is is polished? No. Is it's mixed and mastered properly? No. Is it good? Hell no. But it's DONE. And that was my end goal.
As expected, I've learned a lot through this process. I've taken some notes, and even screen recorded my process as I was putting together the pieces of this track. I'm hoping to do a "postmortem" entry here later, and maybe I'll even manage to put together the screen recordings into a pared down video with some narration about my thoughts over it.
Big thanks go to Liina, from LNAMusic for creating this amazing challenge. It's purpose was the create a track, which is what I've managed to accomplish. Amazing.