How I Did It
Dance in the Rainby Quarkstar
Uses samples from:
Tools I Used
Ableton 9
Drums, Dirty Panda CM
Percussion, Ableton
Main Bass, FireBird (BAS Punchy)
Counter Bass, BassDolphin
Organ, Alchemy (SQ80 Attack Organ)
Lead Synth, Dune CM (Desert Sand)
Backing Synth, Ableton FM Synth
Pad, Dune CM (Infected)
Pad, Rob Papen RG
Process
Week 1: Having chosen the vocals I wrote the verse, break and chorus parts on Piano for the bass and melody. Then I worked on the Drums, bass and counter bass to give a solid backing.
I started cutting and warping the vocals, going back and forth to the drums, bass and melody.
Week 2: At this point I had about 3 minutes of tune and it wasn't going anywhere. Then I had the idea of using a 12 bar blues and added that with the vocals.
Week 3: I had 5 minutes of music and was trying to write an ending. I wrote several versions then came up with the 12 bar blues fade out.
I started equalising and compressing some tracks, getting the balance and panning right. I added Sidechaining from a ghost drum track to the bass and sidechaining from the vocals to the lead.
I did the individual track fades then mastered it all.
After doing all this and putting it up on ccmixter, I realised that I didn't have the vocals on the right setings and had to export another version.
The first half of the tune has the punch but is so complex that its not catchy, so the second half is simplified and, I am hoping, memorable.
Other Notes
Inspired by how some blues music made me want to dance, I listened to some blues tracks and tried to work out what they were doing.
It was interesting and fun to mix snowflakes tune with a blues/EDM theme, although I was concious that I was straying from the meaning of snowflakes song.
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