Week #52 - Accomplishment

Wow! I can't believe I made it. This is actually week #52. An entire year of songs. Appropriately enough, this week's theme is accomplishment - something I'm feeling a lot of at the moment having survived a sometimes brutal cycle of songwriting.



Description:

Accomplishment to me means coming to the end of a journey feeling satisfied. Not perfect, as there were likely bumps in the road and compromises to be made, but content and happy and ready for a nap. I feel this piece, though slow, is very upbeat but hints at the cracks and bumps in the journey through the glitching out of the guitar parts the second time through and the fanfare part being playing with a mellotron patch instead of brass samples. In a way I also wanted to represent the entire year of songwriting by using some of my favorite sound elements discovered this year - the glitchy groove on the guitars, the sampled mellotron, the nice, chunky synth bass, along with trying some new things - for instance, using Live and Record together on a piece.

Tools:

Propellerhead Record 1/Reason 4
Ableton Live 7
dBlue Glitch
Studio Devil AMP
Drumcore
Puremagnetik Microtron Livepack

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Notes:

- The progression for this piece (it goes through the whole thing twice) is:
C G | C G | C G | F | x3
C Em | Em Dm | Dm Em | C |

- The rather slow 60bpm tempo provided a nice pace, and allowed me to set up the glitchy effects the way I wanted.

- I started this piece in Record, using the Thor synth from Reason for the choir/bell and bass parts. Those parts really came from just noodling on the keyboard coming up with ideas.

- I then recorded the first guitar part (the top lead line) with the Line6 amp sim. At this point I decided I want to glitch out the guitar part so I rewired to Live and set that up.

- I also added two more guitar parts (a lower lead that I also put through Glitch and a chord/rhythm part) in Live using the Studio Devil AMP plugin.

- Then I used the Drumcore plugin to find a beat I liked and generate a few variations. Once I'd sequenced the drum loops, I converted the rewire channels to audio and dropped Record.

- The last element was the sampled mellotron brass sound which I kept as a MIDI track.

- Finally, I did a quick arrangement and automated some different patterns with the Glitch plugins. I'd have liked to do a bit more (like EQing thigns, and properly mixing it), but with xmas being this week and family starting to roll into town, I had even less time than usual, but I still feel like the essence of this piece captures the feeling of accomplishment.

- This is the first time I really used Record and Live together, and the only thing I didn't like about this method was that I couldn't use Record's mixer in rewire mode. It seems kind of tedious to have to run everything into Live to add effects that aren't available in Record/Reason, and then bounce everything from Live to audio so that it can be reimported to Record to mix, but I guess that's the way it's going to have to work. If only Record could be the rewire master, and I could run Live through it instead of the otehr way around, my world would be perfect. Well okay, maybe not, but I do hope they think about that for version 2.


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