Winterlude
By Earp Lug on January 16, 2026 3:29 am
For this piece, I was really feeling how cold it is now that January is hitting. I didn't intent to make such a wintery piece when I started out, but it's cold in my house and it snowed last week, and everything just kinda came together to make this Winterlude.
The drone melody that repeats throughout the song was created with the Ellitone Multi-Synth. It was one of the first synthesizers I ever bought, and I think it's really fun to run it through my M-Vave reverb pedal. It doesn't have a lot of the controls that more traditional synthesizers have, but there's a lot of great happy accidents that you find within minutes of setting one up. I let it play uninterrupted until the end, when I turned down the volume attenuator I had between it and my pedal.
I created the drum beat by connecting the output of one of my Stylophone DS-2 oscillator outputs to the Overdrive input on my Behringer neutron. I used an SQ-1 sequencer to trigger the filter, which I set to be rather quick. As the track progressed, I brought the beat in and out by attenuating the cutoff and volume. The other oscillator went wild, with its cutoff LFO connected to a secondary LFO in order to keep the energy shifting throughout the piece.
I created the "snare" that you hear at the beginning and throughout the song with my volca drum synthesizer, and I sequenced it to trigger in tandem with the drum.
When I showed my wife the original version, she said it felt like something was missing, so I created an additional recording of me holding different notes on my Crave with the arpeggio hold function and the Glide knob cranked all the way up. I thought it sounded kind of like a wintery siren going off in the distance, and it created a really cool synth lead even though I had it mixed much quieter in the mix than I would normally.
When I was mixing everything, I thought it would be fun to animate the panning of the snare and the Ellitone drone melody so they would move back and forth in opposing rhythyms. I may have overdone it a little, but it was still fun.
The video is created by a quite lucky clip I recorded last week when it snowed for the first time all winter. I caught two lightning flashes on camera, and when I put the video to the music, I realised they lined up perfectly to bookend the beginning and end of the video. I shot the footage at like 6400 ISO on an old DSLR so the image is really grainy, and I raised the contrast and modified the colors a bit to enhance the effect.
https://youtu.be/kuopMyDF1fg
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)