Another Anthemic Track Is Born

This is the first of a series of posts describing a new track I’m creating both to fulfil the requirements of Assignment 3 for MUSC2653: Introduction to Digital Music Techniques at The University of Sydney, and to go on my first album I plan to release later this year.

Picking The Theme

We were encouraged to take creative risks and my two favourite intuitive ideas were:

A remix of my favourite death metal cover of John Cage’s 4’33” using all the digital audio tools and techniques taught by the lecturer this semester; which would be risky all right for an assignment worth 40% since all my manipulations would obviously be imperceptible.
Adding a Hip-Hop beat behind a sample of Kam Big Song that I was introduced to in This Is Music last year and making it into an EDM dance track. This was inspired by Disclosure’s Where Angels Fear To Tread remix of The Four Freshmen track When Fools Rush In, described in this Twitch tutorial. I went as far as contacting the lecturer to get high quality samples, before abandoning the idea because it was clearly going to be a piss-take that would offend pretty much everyone connected with the Dong community.

There’s creative risk taking, and then there’s just plain foolishness, so I didn’t proceed with either of these.

Instead, I brainstormed a lot of thematic ideas that I relate to including:

Loneliness
Anger
Extraction retraction orthodontics
Complex PTSD
Obstructive sleep apnea
Adult trauma
Feeling unsafe
I hope you like this song
What if they don’t like this song
What if nobody buys my album
Overthinking everything
Self-doubt
Trust/Distrust/Don’t trust myself
Hip-hop track
Having too much choice
Abandonment trauma
What would Beethoven do?
My father’s death
Grief
Fear
Vulnerability
Getting in trouble
Nobody wants to talk to me
Inner resistance
Chronic illness
Failure
Avoidance
Tension headaches
Ill for 10 years
My inner rebel
Nervous System Reset
The Topic Expert
Pissed off
Business failure
Insomnia
Judgementalism
Fear of intimacy
Boredom
People pleasing (The Rage in Placid Lake)
Things that piss me off
Might as well go read the paper
Tired and irritable
Need a decent sleep
Choked up in my throat
Fear of girls (Riptide)
Record someone else’s song
The Message
Don’t tell me what to do
FUK U
God I’m Bored
Unworthiness

The idea I settled on was to create an anthemic piece tentatively titled Didn’t Feel Safe that delves deep into my childhood trauma and expresses what it felt like as an impressionable young boy growing up around the conflict in my parents’ relationship, by combing everything I’ve learned studying music over the last 5 years and using the tools and techniques I learned in Introduction to Digital Music.

It’s due in a week. How hard can it be?

There are so many potential triggers and pitfalls in this plan that I’m really nervous about proceeding. When my father was died of cancer in February last year, the process of his death brought up for me just how frightened I was of his anger, and how deeply I’d been traumatised by his behaviour and his relationship with my mother. The result was a deep fear of conflict and suppression of my true self around other people. The catharsis of grieving his death helped me heal some of this, but my mother is still alive and frankly, I’m still scared of her; so I’ve got some more work to do on this. I’m hoping this song will help.

Part of me would rather run away and go to the beach or something, even though it’s winter. However, I’ve come to university as a mature age student to study whether contemporary music can be used to heal childhood trauma, and I’m my first research subject… so here goes.

Composing The Song

I’m using Logic Pro extensively for the composition, arrangement and production process. There’s no clear delineation between these stages and my process is very iterative and experimental. This suits me because with a degree in Computer Systems Engineering, I can “play” DAW better than any other instrument. You may call that an unfair advantage, but I call it playing to my strengths.

I’ve set the tempo to a relatively slow 80 BPM to reflect the grinding monotony of my childhood and the inescapable ever-presence of the conflict in my parent’s relationship which still haunts me to this day.

I started with the anthemic Chorus, using an easily-relatable I, V, vi, IV chord progression in C major, voice led as follows:

I:C (root)
V:G(1^st inv)
vi:Am(1^st inv)
IV:F (2^nd Inv)

This key works well with my voice because the highest note I can sing without falsetto is G4, making C4, D4, E4 from the C Major pentatonic scale available in my upper register with the occasional excursion to G4 available for high impact. It also means I can double the vocal down the octave to add greater texture to my layer cake orchestration.

I wrote the initial lyrics for the chorus while recalling what it felt like being a young boy kept awake at night by my parent’s yelling in their bedroom next to mine. Here’s what I came up with:

It didn’t feel safe
It didn’t feel right
Yelling in your bedroom
Keeps me up at night
It didn’t feel safe
What was I supposed to do?
I was only a boy
Walking eggshells round you

I repeat the chorus because repetition legitimises, and I need the track to be at least 6 minutes long.

I did a multi-tracked vocal recording of the chorus over a drum beat, synthesiser and arpeggiated bass line, and submitted it to our lecturer for feedback.

The Logic session looks like this: