So this song came together last night
beginning with the first couple of tracks, and me just slowly building up more and more on top. I wasn't worried too much about Verses or Choruses, just more of a constant beat that builds up till the break, then fades out after returning. Sort of like it was a live set or something. Let's go through the tracks.
Listen to Technomaniacal here.
Track 1 is the first instrument to come in,
playing a single C for every 3 bars. The rest of the song is built around this idea, 3 bars of 4/4 for each section, which makes certain parts feel like they are 1 bar too long, and others 1 bar too short, which I like a lot. It's an easy trick to make what would otherwise be a straight 4 more interesting. Track 2 is our drums, which stick to the same beat for the entire track. During the break, I used an EQ to slowly drop out the low and mid range, giving us a cool drop back into the beat. Track 3 also just drones on a C, but this instrument has a lot of rhythmic stuff happening, which gives us the glitchy, distorted effects in the background.
Track 4, the bass, described below.
Track 4, the bass, described below.Track 4 is our bass part,
which comes in a ways into the song. The screenshot above is of one variation of two: the second one has a different ending, where instead of dropping from Eb to D, we go up from a G to the D, before repeating. I thought the bass worked well here, adding a really cool rhythmic element that the drums weren't doing. Track 5 is actually a group of 4 tracks, all of which are plucky staccato synth parts, which sort of alternate between each other (seemingly at random, although I did map it all out). This just adds some nice variation towards the beginning of the song, as it gets a bit repetitive before these come in.
Listen to Technomaniacal here.
Track 10 is our second grouping of 3 tracks,
consisting of a piano, a spacey, reverby ambient pad sort of effect, and a beepy synth that follows along with the piano part. I have attached a screenshot below of the piano part, which the synth mirrors, just without the low C held out. Our final tracks are 14 and 15, which both are used alongside the highpass effect in the drums to build us up and drop us back into the beat. Track 14 is just 2 C's, 2 octaves apart, which swells in. Track 15 uses a reversed audio clip which also swells in volume and in pitch.
The Piano in Track 10, described above.
The Piano in Track 10, described above.