How I Did It
The Shark and The Surfer (fea...by Beluga Ten
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.
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