Emotional Turmoil

My artistic vision for this work was to create a through-composed track using melodic riffs that came to me while going about daily life and represented how I was feeling at the time. I was partly inspired by Paul McCartney waking up with the early stages of Yesterday in his sleep. I deliberately didn’t think much about traditional compositional structures like harmonic progression, pentatonic melodies or 8/16 bar phrases, so the result is very experimental and relatively unstructured.

Over the course of a few days while going about other chores, I’d find myself humming melodies inside my head. I went to my keyboard to play them and found a suitable bass line to match. From the bass line, I worked out a chord progression to harmonise the melody and recorded it in my iPhone voice recorder. Later, I played them with my midi keyboard into Logic Pro X and stitched the riffs together into a single work. One of the sections is swung, because that’s how I heard it in my head.

I added a syncopated drum beat that locked into the bass groove. To maintain some consistency through the piece, the drum rhythm remains mostly consistent throughout, with three consecutive cymbal crashes generally announcing the start of each next section.

To make the bass guitar punchier, I added compression with a fairly long attack time that accentuates the attack of the instrument. 

To avoid the bass guitar clashing with the kick drum, I sidechain compressed the bass from the kick using a producer kit that gave access to the simulated kick drum microphone.

I had a go at adding some improvised vocal Whoa’s to create a counter melody, but disliked the sound of my own voice so much I ditched it. Instead, I added a second melodic instrument with a Japanese plucked sound and played a pentatonic counter melody in response to the first melody from the original riffs. I upped the compression on this instrument to boost the softer sounds and help it cut through the mix.

On the output track, I added a Multipressor to enhance each frequency band, ChromaVerb for reverb and Adaptive Limiter to set the desired output level without clipping.

The resulting work accurately represents my varying emotions during the time I created it. While it seems disjointed at times, that matches the experience of emotional turmoil I was going through, so that’s what I called it.

Here’s the final track:

I’m not particularly enamoured with the result, but it was an experiment after all. I approached this piece with pretty much the complete opposite of my normal style of composition, where I start with a typical pop music song structure like Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus, create a beat I like, add a standard chord progression from a MIDI chord pack and then work out a melody. While the idea of writing songs in my sleep appeals to me, an obvious difference between Paul McCartney and I is that he’d written a lot more quality songs than I have before Yesterday came to him. Also, each of the riffs represented here could be developed into its own song; they don’t necessarily all work together in a single track. What I learned here is that the best way to compose music lies somewhere between the two extremes of stock formula and unrestrained creativity.