I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately. I blame psytrance.
Turns out, this genre of music is considerably harder to work with than I expected.
My approach up ’til now has been to start with the chorus, and work my way back. That way, I know most of the parts that will be playing, and that I have room for them all. After that, it’s mostly a matter of teasing them out through the intro, verses, and so on.
Only with psytrance, there’s no real chorus – more of a continuous evolution of ideas. LOTS of ideas.
Which is awesome – I mean, it seems to tell more of a story that way, which I love – but that means a lot more transients and effects than I’ve worked with before.
And designing each of them by hand feels a bit at times like trying to empty an ocean. With a plastic bucket.
You might be wondering, why are you making each transient from scratch instead of using samples, ya dangus?
First of all, rude. Second, I WILL use samples more in the future – once I have a better idea of how they are made. If I know what goes into making them, I can more confidently tweak them when necessary.
And finally – and I realize this is a personal preference thing – it feels good to know I built every part of the song, rather than feel like I’m riding on another artist’s coattails, you know?
Yeah, guilty as charged. Still rude though.
Anyway, the good news is I finally got out of my own way yesterday and threw some stuff together. I was getting stuck trying to envision and create every sound I thought might work, instead of just focusing on what I needed now.
What came out was something that needs a lot more tweaking, but at least there’s a framework now. More to come.
Credits:
‘Toddler Walking on Shoreline’ by Svetlana Parkhomenko from Pexels