Explorations in D Dorian
By gunnbr on January 30, 2022 4:13 am
This week is kind of a mess. I tried to do way too many things at once without yet having the skills to even do a single one of them well individually. After getting some advice to cut back to concentrate on just a single thing I wanted to work on, I really should have started over from scratch, but instead just kinda kept working on the same song and focused on parts of it without getting rid of the cruft I already had.
Here's what I started out trying to do:
Use a mode other than C Major (Ionian).
Push myself to expand my song creation skills by making a longer song that includes more variations on the melody.
Do something more interesting with chords.
Make a concept song. I envisioned a somewhat sad cartoon character sitting in a small room plinking a song on a toy piano, which then evolves into a song of empowerment with sound that really fills a large space.
And my own evaluation of how I did:
Longer song length: Totally failed at this. Still only barely hit the minimum length.
Mode: I attempted (and maybe succeeded?) in making this in D Dorian.
Toy Piano: Meh. Not quite the sound I was going for, but kinda gets the point across.
Small room sound: Also not quite as good as I wanted, using just a delay on the piano and adjusting it for a small room sound. Still didn't turn out as small and sad as I heard it in my mind.
Song of empowment: Well--it definitely sounds "better" after the intro. Not quite as empowering as I hoped, but I also gave up on trying to flesh this out as much.
Evolution of the song: Total failure here too. Much too big of a jump from a lame toy piano in the intro to a much bigger sound. But I also gave up on trying to make this better too. Almost left out the intro, but it did help me meet the minimum song length by taking up 20 seconds.
Chords: They are "more" interesting that in week 2. I did actually like some of the results I got from playing around with them.
[*]Overall mix: Still pretty muddled. I played around some trying to balance the parts and try not to let any instrument dominate too much or get too lost, but some parts still aren't so good.
I'll try to be less ambitious and more focused next week...
All instruments are from the synth engines built into the Dirtywave M8 Tracker, but please don't judge the ability of the M8 based on my track!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
