I wasn't feeling inspired this week, so I decided I'd try the same technique I used last week--start on Saturday afternoon and see how far I could get in an hour. After a few minutes, I tried to make a small sound in a small room and thought back to an idea I had in WB 2022 and tried kind of the same thing but with 2 years more knowledge and practice.

The general idea is to start with a sad sound in a small room, the make it more happy and open through successive verses. I had no idea what I was doing in 2022, but this time I decided to try all the techniques I knew at once by changing:

• The mode: first in C minor, then C dorian, then C major.

• The brightness by adjusting the low pass cutoff

• The delay and chorus parameters to make the instrument more open

• The panning to make it sound more spacious

• Inversions on the chord progressions: first sounds descending, second sounds up/down/up, third sounds ascending

I also had to plan my chord progression carefully to make sure that I would get a 4th in there to help reinforce the dorian sound, but also didn't want a diminished chord in there. In the end, I settled on using a 1 4 2 5 progression, which did end up with a 2 diminshed in the first verse, but I decided that was okay since it was supposed to be the saddest verse anyway.

I went to bed on Saturday with only the verses done with blank spaces for a chorus. I didn't really have any ideas for that and finally got back to it about 3 hours before the deadline on Sunday. Once I started playing around and got something I kinda liked, I wish I had more time to do a lot more with it. So of course, this definitely doesn't sound "finished" to me, but I do think I met my goals better than I was able to in 2022.

I also wish I had time to try a few different things--like instead of sticking with C and switching modes in C, I would have liked to try different keys instead: Using A minor, D dorian and C major just to see how that sounded. I ended up doing that in the chorus and I think that sounds alright, but again--I wish I hadn't waited until the last minute so I could have played around some more.

I did throw in a little bit of bass at the last minute to make it a bit more interesting and less repetitive

Wish I had the idea and started sooner--I would have liked to fill this out with bass, percussion and sound additional effects. I would have liked the chorus to be more interesting as well and do more with the melody in the final verse.

Oh--and finally--drumbender started a discussion on discord a couple days about how people compose. For this one, I did end up writing a lot out on paper. I wrote up all the chords and how using the same chord progression in different modes affected the chord specifically to try to get the diminished chord to not be in my progression. I also then manually moved notes around on paper to get the sound of the progressions the way I wanted (sounding like they are ascending or descending), though if I had been using a DAW instead of an M8, that's something I probably would have just done as I was entering it all.

Edit: I’ve now realized that rushing at the last second helped me make 2 mistakes I’ve noticed so far:

• I entered two chords in the first verse wrong. The root note was supposed to be Ab, but the M8 doesn’t show flats by default and I accidentally entered A# instead. And since all the notes of the chord are based on the root, the entire chords are just totally wrong.

• I meant to widen the sound in the last verse with some reverb but I accidentally used chorus instead. I knew I wasn’t getting the effect I wanted and “chorus” didn’t sound right as I was typing up my notes, but I was in a hurry and didn’t notice until the next day what I had done wrong.

Edit 2: After talking to my guitar teacher about this song, I discovered I made even more mistakes that I didn't notice:

• The instrument I use for the chords in the chorus is actually an FM synth algorithm B (A+B+C+D) with mods set to semitone offsets. I have the instrument set to 0 3 7 for a minor chord and use the FM MOD operators to adjust to a major, diminished or 7 chord when necessary. But I didn't notice that the FM MOD commands are relative, so when I tried to set set FM MOD 1 to 4 to make a major chord, instead I added 4 to the existing operator, making it a 0 7 7 instead of 0 4 7, so all my adjusted chords were wrong.

• Even if that operator had worked as I expected, I used the wrong algorithm for the diminished chord and dropped the top note down a whole step instead of just a half.

• And for an E7 chord, my command to add the 7 worked correctly, but I forgot to also make it major, so I ended up with an Eminor7 instead.

And now I've spent way more time analyzing and fixing this song than I spent originally writing it. But I guess this is all the good stuff because I've learned a lot of lessons!

Tags: m8tracker, week 7 2024, View by:gunnbr