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How I Did It

The Shark and The Surfer (fea...
by Beluga Ten
Recommends (11)
Sat, Aug 13, 2016 @ 3:00 PM

Uses samples from:

 

Tools I Used

I used an old copy of Sonar as my DAW for this work. Final mastering was done in Goldwave.

Samples I Used

The guitar and drum samples are all from the Hayburner sample pack provided by Blue Wave Theory. All licenced CC-BY (attribution).

Original Samples

The piano and the bass line are original parts that I wrote from scratch.

Process

I started with a number of guitar samples that I liked the sound of, and began slicing them into segments that were slightly off the original rhyhtm. I then worked out the chord structure and what would be possible with it, which is when I took the decision to take the piece into E minor.

A slightly jarring bass line was needed to underpin the guitar to give a moody feeling and an air of uncertainty. I deliberately chose a very basic bass drum pattern to echo this at the start of each bar.

I processed the guitar parts with reverb and flanger.

Initially I thought that the piano line wasn't perfect for a piano, but I was stuck for alternative instruments that sounded any better. So I used an old trick and layered the piano with a Bottle Blow preset shifted up by 3 octaves to give some soft high-end definition, and an Echo Drops preset to give a slightly softer feel underneath. This little bit was inspired by Night Birds by Shakatak, which happened to be playing on my car stereo at the time that I was mulling this over. Inspiration from the 1980s!

During mastering, I added some soft compression, a cut to the lower bass frequencies to stop them being over-powering, and a boost to the top end to create a bit more sparkle.

Other Notes

The un-nerving pre-echo guitar sound is from a different part of the guitar sample. I cranked up the reverb so it sounded a bit weird.