This week my music theory lessons introduced "the sixes" and how to use them. Since this is week 6 of the competition, it seemed like perfect timing to use them! But then while working on this, I kinda forgot about that plan and ended up only throwing a few in the end. I didn't have any other song name in mind though, so I stuck with that.
I actually started out with an idea that sounded really good in my head and even made some voice recordings to remember my thoughts and try to reproduce them. However, the song I ended up with is not that at all.
At one point, I noticed my song sounded like pure chaos--like 3 different radio stations playing at the same time. I had a similar problem last week and thought it was mixing problem where some sounds were just overpowering others, but then I realized it's bad song design. One problem I'm having is that my music theory classes use a DAW where I can see all the notes on all the channels at the same time and how they fit together. I can't really do that on the M8, so I've been putting each track together separately without any real planning of how they work as a whole. So this time I did a lot of switching between channels to compare and try to get everything to blend together into a cohesive song. I don't know that I fully got there, but I can assure you this version sounds much better than my earlier tries!
I also noticed that I end up spending the first 2-3 days just trying to make some instruments sound like what I have in my head. I kinda know how to do that, but I'm still not really getting all that close to what I hear in my head. This kills a lot of time during the week though, so if I want to keep using only the M8 synth engines, I'll have to take some time to make a really good library of standard instruments I like. Then I should have a lot more time during the week to focus on the actual song composition. As always, I was pretty rushed at the end this week trying to just finish it up in time. I was having a lot of fun actually working on the song structure and blending this week though and I feel like with more time I would have eventually ended up with something a lot better here.
Also this week, I used the Akai keyboard a lot to play my M8 instruments and help generate ideas. I came up with a couple of phrases that I really like and feel like with more time, I could pull those out then create a better song based around them instead. But that will have to wait until another time...
But for next week, I think I'll go a different route and use either samples or preexisting instruments which I hope will give me more time to work on the composition itself.

Tags: m8tracker, week 6 2022, View by:gunnbr