Taking it easy with some simple instrumental ambient vibes. A brief reprieve, like a water break in this marathon we’re running. Somewhat inspired by the atmosphere of the video game Lunacid. No promises on what I'll do next week since my interest is so fickle, but I've been kicking around some more goth ideas this week and would like to explore more of those in future songs this year.
‹ Song Notes
So, my original intention with the “Song notes” section was to actually include notes about the song. Sometimes that involves aspects of personal life and how that influences the creation of a song, but I’ve been using it more as a blog space. So here’s my effort in actually providing some details.
First in foremost, in the spirit of last week’s songs and personal revelations after unloading all my mental baggage, I wanted to take it easy this week. I figured I’d utilize the Deepmind 12 again for another tune and probably just do something kind of easy. Sort of like 2022’s “Fountain Simulation” where I just found an arp I really liked and tried to conjure up an atmosphere that I could get lost in. Also, continuing to use a hardware synth has been a nice personal challenge.
Even though I have midi routing set up so I can work on a melody in my DAW and route it back to the synth, it’s not as easy to just make small adjustments like you could with plugins. Since I have to record raw audio from the outputs of the synth, I can’t typically just interject a small section of a melody that I changed because you’ll hear the jarring sound of the take getting cut off since trailing resonance or reverb will just disappear. Maybe there’s a trick to it, but I haven’t figured it out yet. So I make a lot of edits to the midi and then just rerecord the whole section/song over again, letting the synth play itself. Actually, I’m typing all this up in between these recording sessions.
Technical challenges aside, this song is inspired by my time playing Lunacid. Lunacid is a callback to King’s Field (the spiritual precursor for Dark Souls games) with more of that PS1/Dreamcast aesthetic vibes that I’ve been into lately. The music in the game actually varies quite a bit thematically, but the earlier parts of the game felt a lot more atmospheric. So that’s mostly what I was going for here. Some slow building chords, a sparse melody that connects the chord tones, a subdued beat that you should ideally feel rather than notice. Some knob twiddling to add some texture to the sound. In some ways, the song is also influenced by another goth-adjacent artist I’ve taken a lot of influence from called Demen. I’ve had a terrible migraine this week and sometimes I just like to lay down and listen to some music I can get lost in, so she’s usually one of the go-tos. Seriously, it's gorgeous and life changing. Check it out.
I typically like songs that evolve into different things. Sometimes its a crutch for when I run out of ideas for a section, but the net result typically feels like a journey to me. So towards the end I decided to introduce some of my standard moody guitar/bass stuff. The more I worked on it, I could see that part of the song turning into more a traditional song with vocals and stuff (I even started to bust out the acoustic guitar) but, alas, only 3 hours until deadline and I said I’d keep it simple this week so I am.
‹ Thank you
So, I really want to thank everyone last week for the kind words of encouragement and affirmation. I haven’t really responded to each person individually yet (at the time of writing) but I do intend to. I’m still processing my thoughts on the matter, as I am and was aware that a lot of my musical struggles are totally self-inflicted from crossing that threshold of being scrutinizing/analytical to being self-deprecating and a perfectionist. Maybe I’ll write up my thoughts on it in the future. I’m feeling less stressed about the weekly songs now and my overall mood has been trending upwards.
