Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged. Sign up or Login to get started or check our FAQ for any help or questions you may have.

Seeker

By Arcana on March 6, 2016 4:50 pm

Seeker
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Hold back your questions. Observe the world around you and make sense of its chaos. But don’t think too hard. When you find answers, keep looking.


Notes
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A pretty standard guitar-centered track from me. This one features some more upfront melodies than prior tracks, which is something I’m trying to work on, but otherwise it sticks to a lot of EDM stylistic choices, like a lack of modulation, structure driven more by introduction/exclusion of instruments, and DnB-inspired percussion.

I wanted to introduce a few recurring motifs  that don’t really resolve to keep up with this idea of finding something, but never really ending. That’s not that deep when you think about it but I’m not that good at doing thematic elements in my music yet so any thought about it is better than nothing!

As usual, the guitar and bass guitar parts are played live over many many takes. Synth parts were either programmed, or played on guitar and translated to MIDI.

Notes from throughout the week
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Wed. Mar 2. 9:35 - 10:24 PM. Laying down some basic concepts and ideas. This sounds like another high-intensity track.

Noticed that there was a significant dropoff in listeners over the past few weeks. I don’t feel that I’m getting more creative by doing WeeklyBeats, but what I think I’m improving in is in guitar technique. I’m getting things done in fewer takes and with better quality.

Main chords: Em D C Am B

Sat. Mar 5. 9:55 - 10:41 AM. I remember now why it’s a good idea to take notes throughout the week, it allows me to remember what chords and sections I laid down earlier.

1:00 - 1:25 PM. Redoing the introduction. Lots of random working around.

8:01 - 9:30 PM. Laid down the rest of the track. This was actually a productive hour and a half, in which I expanded on the main motifs a bit more and reused them across the track. I redid some of the weaker guitar parts and did some production work, some accents, and other trills.

Sun. Mar 6, on-and-off in the morning. Probably about 30 minutes worth? Final touches with effects/mixing. Giving it a final listen.

Total time: about 4 hours, give or take about 15 minutes. There’s about 157 bars in this song at 158 bpm.

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

Good track, the improvement in your guitar playing is apparent and IMO that's totally valuable in a creative sense as well. Proficiency means your brain can focus more on composition, you can try more ideas in a shorter time window, and you avoid being bogged down having to redo things. Plus as a guitarist your options are limited by what you can physically play, I don't run into that since I'm a MIDI drawing noob but I've still experienced plenty of times where my comfort level with my tools or lack thereof makes it seemingly impossible to do anything good. The greater your skill level, the more you can focus on being creative instead of technicalities and I think this principle is pretty true across most disciplines not just one instrument or even music in general. I know this is true in fighting games, when your tech skill is automatic you can be more fully committed to reaction and yomi

There's your answer to your question on thursday, music is Mortal Kombat

One little criticism of the track though, the plucky bell synth is really dry, like it's actually distracting from the rest of the song because it sounds completely out of place. Little reverb or delay(or more delay? it sounds like it might have a single echo but idk if it's an effect or just the way you wrote it) would be a huge improvement

NickC, thanks a lot for the feedback, I appreciate it. You're very right, the easier it is to play tracks, the more exploration you can do and the more ideas that you can try. I actually find that I accumulate better ideas when I play instruments than when I do MIDI, for example chord progressions and the like actually stick with me now. . Will look at the synth some more for improvement.

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