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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / Arcana's music / Muster the Power

Muster the Power

By Arcana on March 26, 2016 3:16 pm

Muster The Power

Discipline, strength, and willpower. Take all that you have learned and summon the power to do what you know is right.

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Initial notes: I wanted to do something more ambient and spacey, with good use of arpeggios and loose song structure. I listened to the FTL soundtrack a little this week so I was hoping to do something more like that - a little more thoughtful and reflective.

However, I found that doing this style this week was really frustrating. In fact, all of my music projects this week haven’t turned out that well, and it makes me wonder if I’m overthinking things too soon before getting “good habits down” so to speak.

Again, there's not a lot of structure to this but I think it's because I never "really got into it" as much as I could have, so I kind of just wanted to finish it and move on to the next project (hence the day and a half early submission). Sometimes I just want to cut my losses and call it a day. I learned a number of things from this project at least - have a structure in mind, explore ideas early, watch out how complex your riffs are at the start of a track, and apply reverb, it makes everything better (hahaha).

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Mon, March 21. 9:30 - 10:20. Interestingly enough I spent most of my time doing research on music that I kind of like to get a sense of what their harmonic and melodic structures are like. As a result, I didn’t get almost any songwriting done.

I’ve been listening to the FTL soundtrack and rather than figure things out by ear, I figured that I’d do a quick search and just get precise, correct information.

Milky Way - FTL. Source: http://benprunty.com/2013/07/11/a-guided-tour-through-the-ftl-soundtrack-analysis-of-themes/

Chords: Em D Em D or i - vii^o in the key of E minor.

I’ve also been getting a better sense of the Chrono Cross soundtrack on guitar. I didn’t analyze the chord structure there yet but should look at it.

Tues. March 22, 9:00 - 930 PM. Starting with an arpeggio of some sort. Let’s do this. E D C A (B A G E on the fifths).

Thurs. March 24, 8:15 - 9:00 PM; 11:20 - 12:00 AM.

Friday 8:15 - 8:45 PM. 9:30 - PM. This is not coming together and I’m not very clear what to fix or what direction to give the song. I think it’s time for… magical BS ending and to stop and try again next week.

Saturday, 10:30 - 11:00. Doing some mixing touch-ups. Mostly concentrating on mixing and applying reverb on different tracks.

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Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)

By the looks of the arp, the chords seem more like v-IV in Am (possibly iii-II in C) than i-viio in Em. It's also impossible for D major to be a dim chord, since it's already a major chord.

What you could take away from it is that the first chord isn't necessarily the scale you're playing in.

Thanks for the correction.

This is really nice!

Nice Athmos!

Thanks for listening!

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