How I Did It
by shockshadow
Tools I Used
Orion Pro, various vst synth plugins, Sound Forge, garlic bagel chips w/ green onion dip...
Samples I Used
the piano piece from Keyborg (Mario Mattioli), and the vocals from Be Brave by Norine Braun.
Original Samples
everything else was original...the rhythms, sequences, chords, etc.
Process
I was listening around ccmixter and heard New Earth Atomic (Aftermath mix), particularly the little snippet of piano sampled from Granados: Spanish Dance n. 2 by Keyborg. I downloaded the full piano piece, and loaded it up in Sound Forge to slice out the piece that I wanted. I inserted it into a stereo sampler plugin in OrionPro, which allows you to play samples as one-shots. I just sequenced two hits of the piano sample, one normal, and one two notes down (A#, i think) to get the piano the way i wanted. I played it looped with a metronome on and adjusted the bpm until it fit right. Then I got to work on the beats. Layed out 2 different versions of the beat, and a fillin or two. At this point I really wasn't planning on creating a melodic piece...I was actually shooting for a rap song, but I just couldn't find anything that really jumped out at me. Then I revisited the vocals by Norine, and Be Brave just clicked. I loaded the vocals into Sound Forge and pitched down her voice by 2 semitones, added some nice soft reverb, and a little light echo...really made her voice sound sultry like Sade. Saved that file and inserted it as a straight audio track into my OrionPro song, and tweaked it a bit to get it fitting right. BIG TIP #4663: when working with a vocal track, try to match the amount of reverb on the snare drum with the the amount on the voice. It gives the song more presence and will 'fill out' the whole thing.
Anywayz...so then one of my friends (thx Randy!) suggested that I add some DnB style hi hats over the top of it to give it some spice. So I increased the number of steps in the hi hat sequencer and started plugging in random hits as the whole thing looped until I had a good rhythm going. It sounded good, but was way too repetitive and too 'clicky' for the song, so I ran the hi hats through an LFO filter with a white noise waveform tied to the pitch parameter. That is how I got the hi hats to randomly change pitch, and not sound so repetitive. Then I increased the attack and the resonance to make it less clicky and more organic. Played with the EQ a bit until it sounded like some sort of cool resonant digital 'scratching'. Then I added the deep bass notes at the end, and the little digital pad in the background for ambience. Assembled the song, adjusted the EQ and effects one last time, and rendered it to wav. It was a relatively small .wav file, so I was able to use a nice 256kbps compression on the mp3...above cd quality. That's all! Hope this helps.
: )
Other Notes
i love garlic bagel chips w/ green onion dip!!
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