The Nothing
By Paisleyfrog on December 15, 2024 5:45 pm
Two weeks left! Where did the time go? Wherever it went, it certainly wasn't available to be found this week. End of semester/year is always a busy time, and my wife has been fairly going crazy. Anyway, it’s just as well we didn’t have time to do a folky song this week - we decided that the album is actually done. Hooray! Time to figure out mastering and art. Also, I find my stylistic whiplash flow the past few weeks to be amusing. 
I'm also thinking making a second album from this year with what I've done with industrial and dark wave. That's going to take a lot longer to finalize - I've learned a LOT this year, and I want to go back over those tracks from the beginning of the year, make some changes
It wasn't just my wife with a lack of time - I was finally sitting down to play around Friday night. This song built itself around that beginning arpeggio sound. I took a short sample of my guitar and stretched it out about ten times its length, chopped a section, then tossed it in the sampler. That instrument shows up on three lines - the initial bouncy arpeggio, a pulsing beat with a tremolo filter (which I paired with my waterfall instrument), and also a weird filter that turned it into something like a drum. The sampler instrument sounds something like an organ, a bit like Deep Purple on "Perfect Strangers". I was pretty happy with where the project was going Friday night - I saved it as "This is something but I don't know what" (which is damn near a NIN title by itself).
Waking up on Saturday morning, I decided to make the chorus 7/4 (which I defined in Logic as a compound 4/4:3/4) - I've never tried it before, and thought that the staggering feel would be good. The outro was actually the chord progression I was initially planning for the chorus, and had just shifted it later in the timeline. I was listening to the mix, and it flowed into the old chorus - and I had a "holy shit, that sort of works!" moment. It's just as well, I didn't particularly want to end the song in 7/4.
Lyrics. LOL. I wasn't in the writing mode last night, so I used a lyric generator to get me going. ("Write me a song about 'nothing' in the style of NIN.") Damned if I didn't get something pretty usable right out of the gate. I added verse 1a, tweaked its phrasing, and created the outro. The title felt like a logical thing if I was going for NIN again. Lots of vocal layering in here - ChromaGlow is absolutely fantastic at getting that vocal grit without losing a bunch of clarity.
Generally pretty happy with how this turned out, for another two-day-track. I'm not certain about the mix, particularly the chorus....and I want to revisit the lyrics there a bit. Some of the rhythms work well in 7/4, some feel a bit rushed.
Also learned a lesson about using space heaters in the studio - they tend to pop circuit breakers. Related: I got to find out just how good Logic is at autosaving, and MacOS in general about picking up where you left off (I didn't lose anything, including the unsaved document where I was working on the lyrics. Whoa.).
› Lyrics
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
