I figured since I have been sharing
quite a few random exercises/songwriting practice sessions, I should probably share an actual song or two with you guys haha. I have been writing a few electric piano/synths/electronic drum songs recently, and was pretty stoked with the results. This track is just the piano, 3 tracks of essentially "ambience" (noisey/droney weirdness), and a percussion track. Simple enough, but it seemed to work nicely here. Let's go through it!
Listen to A Lightyear Beyond here.
Track 1 begins with 2 notes,
a low A, and a higher F# (pictured in BROWN in Track 1). Essentially, that will continue for the whole song, while other things build on top of it. When we reach the first blue-green section, on every 1st beat of each 4 bar section, we add a D# above the F#, adding some more color to whole thing. After 2x of this, we hear the D# for 2 bars and then we add an E onto the second 2 bars (2x). I really like how this brings out that Dorian mysterious-ness, using the sharp 6.
Track 1, with the D# and E described above.
Track 1, with the D# and E described above.Listen to A Lightyear Beyond here.
Track 1, the light Blue section described below.
Track 1, the light Blue section described below.The next sections add even more
notes to Track 1, as can be seen above. Basically a little melody emerges slowly, in the higher register, while all the lower notes continue as they did before. It starts to sound very mysterious here, I love how the harmonies came out in this song. The next 3 tracks, 2 3 and 4, are all basically ambience. They fade in as the drums pick up, the halfway point of the song, and add some strange, creepy sounds to the background.
Tracks 2, 3 and 4, as described above.
Tracks 2, 3 and 4, as described above.Last up is Track 5 which is
our drums, and begins with a simple beat, just the clave and a kick (pictured in Yellow in Track 5). When we reach that Green section of Track 5, the beat picks up a bit, adding a shaker hit, and snare hits. I like how heavy it gets, and then sort of just drops out, moving back to the original beat before the song fades out completely.
