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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / cailen's music / grasshopper summer (a house is not a home)

grasshopper summer (a house is not a home)

By cailen on April 5, 2020 10:46 pm

i wanted to do something totally different this week. i started off with an idea i'd been working on for days, reflecting an interesting cross-section of contemporary music Spotify has been feeding me (stuff like grandson and Arrested Youth, blending EDM and trap motifs with 90s grunge alt-rock spirit and riffs).

that fell flat on it it's face. i mean, it really sucked. i had to make the hard call between hammering it into at least *Something*, or cutting bait and starting over. i chose the latter, and what came out was in a totally different direction. the first iteration sounded very much "synthwave"/"retrowave" and then it drifted into different territory as i added more organic elements.

all in all, i think it still falls somewhere adjacent to modern synth-wave/pop (Grouplove+Paramore meets Fury Weekend et al?)

i've never done anything remotely this goddamn peppy or upbeat, so that's another bit of new territory.

my partner chipped in some vocals which made me even happier, and i had time/energy to actually work on the mix (thankfully, there are easily twice as many tracks on this compared to my average)

overall, it's strange and outside of my comfort zone- but i really like this one.

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC0 Creative Commons Zero (Public Domain)

April 6, 2020 1:35 am

cailen

well, upon listening outside of headphones i realized despite the extra mix time, i really f'd up the final result- vocals are slammed to front and all the sour spots dominate what previously sounded harmonious. ah well, i still enjoyed making it and some repairs will make it decent i think.

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April 6, 2020 2:20 pm

onezero

It's definitely cool to hear you work up-tempo, and major-key! It's a good song!

The harmony vocal could definitely come up in the mix.  I think the mix seemed a bit crowded in places.  Do you have a frequency-spectrum analysis plugin? You could put it on different tracks to see which ones have overlapping frequencies, and try to attenuate some of that the overlapping tracks with EQ. (That's why I do so much rolloff on my bass, to try to give the kick more room, for example.)

If you're concerned about pitch-tracking in the vocals, you could do the old B-52s trick of having a keyboard playing the lead and harmony vocal melodies on separate tracks, which each vocalist listens to in headphones while tracking...then you strip the keyboard out by mix down.

Still, really cool, particularly for something you started with late in the week!

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April 11, 2020 4:10 am

Devieus

On the bright side, at least the lyrics are clearly audible.

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