Donate to improve the experience

Search This Blog

Thursday 20 February 2014

4th Week - Your Own Soul (269th Song)



Hey guys, I did this song, potentially one of the best songs I've ever made but man... the voices just messed it up! I've been absorbing everything about Jpop these last 2 weeks and I was ready to make this one, I swear but I forgot that voice is the main instrument in pop and mine is not the best and when I realized I couldn't get another singer in time. Anyway, Jap vibe, good melodies (someone could recall Rick Astley because of the melody) and a lot of childish dancing. I just love it. I take advantage here to welcome a new team member to FORTUNA Quest, we were one (just me) and now two. His name is Nacho Gago, he'll be in charge of illustrations for covers, he's a great drawer and he's here to learn from this as I'm doing and as everyone is invited to do. FORTUNA Quest is not about me showing how cool I am because I do music, it's a school where everyone is invited to participate, I'm just the conductor, the head chief, the director, the big kahoona. But don't hesitate if you are an artist and you wanna take part. And never, ever, hesitate to ask any doubt you have in life, I'm friendly and I like to talk to anyone and very glad to help anyone and to have learning mates too. Said this let's start with the reflexions about this week's song. 


Thoughts: After all it was a very nice week, I've been very motivated and with lots of energy to play around and mess with Ableton Live, I spent so many time doing it and it didn't take any effort. I think I really love Japanese music. I was thinking that it will be a will to go there and live for at least one year of my life. I can't believe that I'm not gonna do it on day and that it'll be the best and more bizarre stage of my life. They normally uses the cadences that always touch me, the most typical uses to be first minor, sixth flat major and seven flat major and,  now I can say it, there's no doubt that that's my favorite cadence in the world right now. 

The recording was in-the-box based, just using FM8 and Live features. I spent so much time being sure that the structure was what I wanted and the melody that I was humming over and over till I get what I needed. I got now harmony and structure settled and some of the arrangements; I always lose a lot of time focusing on details and I don't lay back to see the big picture, but this time when I thought I was getting stuck just on those things I pushed myself to go back and continue with the rough form of the the song. Yet I did stop so many times with details, I'm kinda perfectionist with details but it makes me anxious and I forget about the whole thing. 

Anyway, at the end I had room enough to think about arrangements, sound creating, etc. Was cool to spend time with small sounds that normally I wasn't able to get so deep because of the time basically. The way to create sweep sounds that I roughly tried before was now much better getting into different parameters that I had never touched before. 

When this was finished I had two days, one for voices and one for mixing (I'm avoiding mastering so far, I'll do it later). My first idea was to sing it an octave higher, but I couldn't, too high for me, that's when I thought a female voice could fit very well, but now female singers around 24/7 in my studio. So I spent the first one firstly writing the lyrics, and then singing but, hey, I hadn't thought about the backing vocals yet. Anyway, I started to sing, and I thought everything was being good, I made up some backing vocals too but they didn't make me happy ever, I tried a lot of variations, but any how I went to sleep that day thinking I did a great job. But when I woke up the next day I realized that voices were rubbish! Hahaha, really bad. I didn't think that the difference of opinion between to days in a row would be so huge. But that's what I got and I had to mix it. Everything was quite good but the voices, not only pronunciation was bad as usual, and pitch was bad and modulation too but also the the recording or something, or I just wasn't able to make it work with the resto of the music. Mixing wise was a nightmare, I tried everything but nothing seemed to work, that's why I blame the recording, because it never happened to me on this grade of obviousness. Or maybe I have an ear that makes hears better when something is not cool than before, anyway, I've never been a good mixer and the voices are for me the most difficult thing to mix. 

When I finished I sent it to Nacho and he had a cool cover ready for me, I just told him a couple of things that could work better and some of them were crap right out from my brain but someones worked good. So I'm very happy with him joining the team (hey, now were can be called team), it looks so professional compared with my last photoshopped pics. It seems like a new whole era for this School of Arts.

Enjoy it!

No comments:

Post a Comment