Our articles about the LA-based pop band “Lights Over Paris” have attracted a lot of attention. Read the articles below to see why.
Progression
In November 2008, Dr. Echo Bloom gave me a laptop that he was no longer using. The conditions were that if I accepted the laptop from him, I’d be responsible for working on music again. I had been neglecting music for a couple years, so I accepted his offer. A couple of days later I was on a flight back to Florida, and I opened Reason on it for the first time. The battery on the laptop would only last about 30 minutes or so, and I had tested it in the airport prior to the flight. That only left me with about fifteen minutes to compose something on the fly (literally). This was what I came up with (*Note – click the file name for the player to come up):
This is what the song looked like when I got off the plane (it was one loop):
The song "5" in the early stages
So after my flight, I started adding elements to the track. I isolated bits that I liked, and change the bits that I didn’t like. It has been over five months since I wrote the parts above, and every once in a while I fired up the track to work on it a little bit here and there.
That’s five months of fine tuning, adding bits, taking out bits, tweaking everything. That’s the main process with Reason and I since around 2005. I’m hard pressed to finish tracks, but I will tweak them beyond limits.
Yet after some recent work, I think I finally got the song going in a good direction. Here is the same song after all those months of work, off and on. The song has not been mastered, so please excuse the low quality.
I’d like to know what you think, so post some comments. For those curious, this is what the song looks like now:
The song now.
Bonus link: here’s some music TMFJ and I made a little while ago.
Dr. Echo Bloom asked a really good question in the comments, and as I was answering it I realized I was writing a novel. This was the question:
“How do you put a piece together? Do you start with a melody? A beat and slowly add and subtract elements over time? Do you think there’s a narrative component to your work?”
All music tells a story to me, one way or another. Normally I like to approach it like I did when I was in a band and played traditional instruments. I start with the instrument. I pick out something, like what synth I’m going to use, and then write a melody. Sometimes it is something I thought about, or I just explore and create something unexpected. A lot of unexpectedness happened with this particular track. That being said, I think this song is more about expressing emotions. As you can already tell, though…there is a story behind it as well.
It all began when you gave me the laptop, and I fired up Reason on that plane. It was crude, but it was something that was happening because I was given the tools at that particular time. The song is upbeat because it was born from a good thing. The more I worked on the song, the more I focused on the positive energy: the gift, returning to music after a hiatus, trying new things. All of that influenced the song over the months. It still isn’t done either, so it will continue to develop.
Thanks for the comments.
Comments
Hah damn, the song is completely different from the first draft. Great track… Dr. Chuckles will be blastin this in his car soon. Where are you gettin your loops?
There’s only one canned loop in there, and its the hi-hat loop. The rest is all Redrum (drum machine) and all of the synths you see in the screenshots
nice one … you need to start sending some tracks to the hospital podcast
Very nice, and glad my old beast is making some noise again
I’m often trying to parse out what the different functions of music are. For me (most of the time) it falls into two categories:
1 – Telling a story (e.g. Bob Dylan)
2 – Conveying an emotion (e.g. Sigur Ros)
In that sense, the repetition at the core of electronic music in the style you’re working in seems to share more with African kora music than it does with rock and roll.
How do you put a piece together? Do you start with a melody? A beat and slowly add and subtract elements over time? Do you think there’s a narrative component to your work?
The evolution of the track is pretty dope-a-tronically T I T (tight!).
The beginning of the evolved track is so awesome and it just keeps building up. If I had a car I would be bumping that shit on an urban highway at night.
Lakeshore drive
with the t-top off
hittin super pursuit mode
before hittin turbo boost
fuck yeah.
the only thing i didn’t like was the guitar part in the middle you kept from the original track. but that’s just me.
great post! good narrative! me likes
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