Perfectly Pleasant Pleats
By Ipaghost on April 15, 2018 11:55 pm
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / Ipaghost's music / Perfectly Pleasant Pleats
Oh my goodness, words cannot explain how much I dig this, sounds right out of a Nintendo game. 
DO THE MARIO! but, of course with all the flourish and beauty only Ipaghost can provide :V
Devieus wrote:
Perfectly adequate.
Perfectly adequate is what I strive for.
This song oozes personality! Strong compo and that mix is so crisp!! Definitely Pleasant 
Is this from the Ipaghost cartoon about your elementary school misadventures? The show starts with you gaily strolling down the street, clutching a lunchbox with your own face on it. I love this track!! Favorited and downloaded and I am going to put it on my MP3 player and drive around to my errands listening to this.
Real Talk: How do you compose music like this? It seems like there are a lot of different elements and textures. How do you organize that in your mind? I come from a rock music background, so I think I tend to think of the "performers" and there's going to be drums, bass, guitar, vocals. I'm trying to teach myself music theory and it feels like there is some cool stuff going on here with chords and note combinations. Can I hire you to help me on some of my tracks one of these days? Maybe a studio visit?
orangedrink wrote:
Is this from the Ipaghost cartoon about your elementary school misadventures? The show starts with you gaily strolling down the street, clutching a lunchbox with your own face on it. I love this track!! Favorited and downloaded and I am going to put it on my MP3 player and drive around to my errands listening to this.
Real Talk: How do you compose music like this? It seems like there are a lot of different elements and textures. How do you organize that in your mind? I come from a rock music background, so I think I tend to think of the "performers" and there's going to be drums, bass, guitar, vocals. I'm trying to teach myself music theory and it feels like there is some cool stuff going on here with chords and note combinations. Can I hire you to help me on some of my tracks one of these days? Maybe a studio visit?
Hah! Gaily is the only way I know how to stroll!
So real talk, the way I compose is pretty simple actually, I start with either a simple melody in mind, or a simple chord progression I like. It's pretty standard circle of fifths stuff. Lately I have been very into 7ths, r&b progressions, jazz theory and turnarounds. I find working with more complex chords than simple triads give you a lot of places to go melodically. Then I just layer on instrument after instrument, not unlike traditional band stuff, but instead of guitars, I choose whatever sounds float my boat. Sometimes I write it out, sometimes I just improvise on a keyboard. Starting with a key and chord progressions make writing a lot easier, and can give you some unexpected but cool sounding directions. Sometimes chords can seem a bit confusing, but it get's really easy when you just pay attention to the bass note, which should help you stay grounded (if the bass line of a chord progression doesn't sound right, then the chords probably won't either).
I also have amassed quite a library of instruments and softs synths over the years, and I might make new ones depending on what I'm feeling. Usually a good instrument gives you melodic inspiration, sometimes the process of making an instrument will too. I'm pretty sure most people start at a song from different attack points. After I have a very instrument heavy basic loop, I write a couple new melodies in the same key. Then I split them all up and arrange them on the playlist timeline where I work by subtraction, kind of similar how you would solo and mute tracks but I find I have a bit more fine control this way. I don't really keep most of this in my head, and it's fun to find new ways to put different melodies together. I try to keep it very simple in the beginning, and build up to an almost completely full arrangement at the end. While ideally every part of the song will be completely unique, most of these wb leave me rendering down to the last few minutes, so I settle with just making sure while a chord progression might repeat a bit, the instrumentation is always changing as much as possible to keep me interested.
I used to struggle a lot with chords and theory, but I always had a great ear, so I still use some tools that assist me with composing. Some of my favorites are the internet (info, tutorials, and stuff like reverse chord & key finders etc). There are also vsts for this stuff too, I like chordspace, tonespace is also very good. I have played with improvisator, but don't like it much except for classical stuff. midiChordAnalyzer might be useful. I also really like using fl's arp and chopping tools, I have created a lot of simple arrangements that then can be used on your chord progression to create new melodic movements.
Something that really helped me improve is simply reverse engineering songs I like! I started doing this a few years ago when trying to make stuff sound more analog. I simply transcribe the music, and try to match the instruments and mastering process the best I can, or as close as I care to (PsychedOut is an example of this, I emulated Abbey Road production techniques, although there wasn't a song in particular. SpaceFries however was based off of a very particular song!). There is a huge amount of info out there on producing process, especially famous classics. It's not different than an artist studying the masters! After transcribing, I try to figure out how the chords relate to each other on the circle of fifths etc. to better internalize this stuff. An added bonus is now I can save my instrument and production bones to fill with whatever music I want to write!
Anywho, hope this helps, I'd be glad to chat about it more!
WOW
Thank you so much! I will have to visit you and buy you dinner and bend your ear on some more topics. But thanks for writing this all out! Man! You are a huge inspiration.
orangedrink wrote:
WOW
Thank you so much! I will have to visit you and buy you dinner and bend your ear on some more topics. But thanks for writing this all out! Man! You are a huge inspiration.
I'll actually be in MKE Thursday, would you be free sometime in the afternoon?
Email me your #
Ipaghost wrote:
Rare footage of Orange Drink and ipaghost hanging out IRL
