How I Did It
Uses samples from:
Tools I Used
Orion Platinum + plugins, Sony Sound Forge
Samples I Used
Ran Dumb Dots acappella, Nebulous Advice.
Original Samples
All other sounds/samples owned by myself.
Process
I started by loading the raw vocals into Orion Platinum as an Audio Track with it's own channels. I had noticed that teru had used a bpm of 92 for his mix of these vocals, so I loaded that as the tempo. Next I created the beat, and synced the vocals to it. Then I loaded up a softsynth called KarmaFX for the bass line. One of the things I like about Orion is that you can choose to record a sequence live or by punching in the pattern manually. I usually record the sequence live, and then go in manually and adjust the individual notes so they're perfect.
Next, I loaded up another softsynth and chose a nice airy pad to play the background chords in. I created 4 different chord sequences that serve to build the emotion of the song as it progresses. I then created the nice plucky arpeggio sequences in another softsynth, and added those to the song. Finally I added a nice low ambient pad to fade in/out the song. The real work was in the production stage. Getting the vocals to stand out with some strength without drowning them in reverb was a bit challenging. Alot of tweaking was done in the mixer. Something I did to spice up the vocals and give it a dreamy feel was to add a filter delay, which adds resonance to just the echo, not the original. Then I programmed the filter delay cutoff to slowly rise in intensity toward the second half of the song, and then fade back down at the end. Gave it a nice surreal feel. I added a slight bit of the same filter delay to the beat, to create little 'after-beats' that fill out the rhythm section and make it feel more organic.
Finally I used the mixer to fade in the airy chords from the ambient bass at the beginning of the song, and used real time adjustment of the filter delay to make the airy chords 'hang' in the air towards the end of the song when they stop playing. Listened to everything a few times and then streamed it to a wave file. Encoded it to mp3 at 256kbps (nice quality!), and uploaded it. :)
Other Notes
As stated in the comments for the song, this was such a pleasure to create. The song evokes almost a 'fatherly' feel. Very emotional, yet surreal and laid back. Hence the 'quiet contemplation' in the name.
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