realized while listening to this in the car that keeping the same drum pattern going through the B section is kind of grating and would probably get irritating on infinite loop in a game. so added a pretty basic secondary pattern and think it fits pretty well.
lots of percussion cleanup. spent a lot of time dealing with phasing on the snare, still don’t think it’s 100% fixed but it’s better. made some changes to the filter cutoff automation of the synth in the A section (weird filter envelope stuff caused by the velocity mod on the jupiter 8000 synth). made some improvements to the B section, still don’t know if the snare roll really works. still considering adding some kind of pad or arp countermelody. theRead More→
the main goal of this project was to make piano arrangements that were relatively transparent to the original source material, while still being interesting to learn and enjoyable to play. piano transcriptions have a tendency to force the hands to do bizarre things in order to maintain the melodic lines and texture of whatever complex source they’re working with. so i’m trying my best to avoid that while hopefully using the strengths of the instrument to enhance or pull somethingRead More→
the pluck chords could have more presence at the end of the A section. is the sidechained “pad” necessary at the beginning of B? maybe a bit more breathing room. fix the accents on the snare roll
small change: had the idea to make the transition back to the loop point with a slow fade “wall of static”
16th hh no swing, no hit on downbeat. cutoff rising counter melody has some kind of sc modulation on filter env? takes away from presence. second time around filter cut should not go so high, it changes with counter melody. (fixed) B section krog low half of the melody could be a different instrument. (not yet fixed) is there key mod on krog? really obscured by lpf in low range (fixed) more perc and sweep build to transition back to A,Read More→
wanted to add a gradually opening hihat to transition back to A. kinda copped out and went with a reverse noise sweep instead. might still try to record the actual hihat thing i’m thinking of someday, but doesn’t seem like a super priority to me, and plus it might become wonky trying to blend an additional hihat pattern with the already-existing ones (there are three already lol)
modified “forest temple” rising melody to be clearer. dunno if there’s a B section or if it just trails off after the postchorus
just a couple final changes i wanted to make to this one. re-did the B section sub bass on the mopho, just a simple triangle bass (trying to be conscious of making the sub bass audible if it’s being played through mobile speakers, for example). also made a very simple transition from B to A, and added a little more melody support in the B section. there might still be some mixing work to be done, especially removing some extraneousRead More→
thinking about having a consistent palette across the soundtrack. layered the mini “horn” synth with prophet horn from clav. also experimenting with layering the clav bass sounds in the B section here. not sure if it’s overkill or not, we’ll see how i feel about it tomorrow. the B section is has kind of metrically uneven phrases (6 bars), felt natural to me at the time but i guess the theme here is “see how i feel about it tomorrow”.
