Finally the 1st song of 3 for the reserve lounge is nearing completion. This post will be for the purpose of documenting some practical techniques used within the song and to show how my research influenced some of the creative decisions that went into the product. Below is a demo of the first song. There are some more parts to be added and some finishing touches to made but this is just to give you an idea as to what I’m aiming for:

So lets start with the ambient qualities of the song. A natural recording of forest animals, rain and streams run the entire length of the song, achieved by a mixture of my own recordings of birds when visiting my family in North Wales using a handheld Zoom H2N and copyright free recordings of rain and streams from the internet. The purpose of this particular feature was to attempt to replicate some of the ‘designer music’ created by Jeffery Thompson. The use of ambient natural backgrounds proved to be a particularly thought invoking method in Thompson’s music as you can see in my previous research post named ‘Genre in music psychology’. Not a lot of work went into the processing of this section as i wanted to keep the most pure version of naturalistic sound to avoid it sounding fake. The only process used was an EQ plug-in, rolling off the bottom end frequencies to avoid any disturbance or clashing with other instruments sharing similar frequencies within the rest of the song. As well as this I used a pad synthesiser from the Komplete 9 plug-in collection to create a gentle drone in the foreground of the track changing from ‘C major’ to ‘F major’ every 4 bars. The prominent use of major chords should help evoke a positive mood on the customers as opposed to using minor chords. Once again, pad synthesisers and the use of drones was common in Jeffery Thompson’s designer music and took an interest to adopt this style in my own work. For some finishing touches to the ambient sections, I added some reverberated wood blocks and shimmering chimes panning across the stereo field just before the main part of the song to keep things interesting and to help build up to the main phrases of the track. Obviously once again the processing took a back seat in this as i wanted to preserve the sounds natural qualities.

At the 42 second mark the genre collaboration research gets put into practice and you start to hear the influences of the ‘downtempo’ genre. The defining characteristic of downtempo is the use of an electronically programmed beat or groove, usually less prominent in the mix than other electronic genre’s. Baring this in mind I used a mixture of the Native Instruments drum sampling plug-in; Battery 4 and Kontakt 5’s realistic drums package. I wanted to ensure that the rhythm section was not overly complicated as i didn’t want to draw attention away from the ambient sections too much. I used Kontakt 5 to program the basic rudiments and ghost notes that constructed the beat and then doubled the kick drum with a tuned 909 kick with Battery 4. This was then polished off with some EQ taking the bottom end of the realistic drums, fairly heavy compression often desirable in downtempo music and finally a medium sized reverb to give the beat some depth in the track. Keeping to the characteristics of the downtempo genre, I composed a bass track using a double bass often found in jazz arrangements, something the producers of downtempo are particularly fond of. Some simple EQ and compression was used here just to keep the bass frequencies in line as the double bass is an extremely dynamic instrument and required taming to stop it ‘muddying’ up the track.

Finally I wanted to add my own personal mark on the song by bringing something new. Neither ambient or downtempo music tend to feature the electric guitar as it tends not to bond with the electronic aspects of the song so well. Despite this I decided to experiment with this and managed to write something that really helped add a more positive emotion to the track. I started with some heavily reverberated volume swells, once again using the C and F major chords and then panned each C major to one side and then each F major to the other. I then accompanied this with some clean chord strikes with an added tremolo effect patch along with another long reverb. These were panned to opposite sides of the volume swells which in turn created a particularly atmospheric and stimulating effect on the ears. Although this technique was not an exact representation of the earlier researched ‘binaural beats’ it does share some similarities in the way that it helps stimulate the brain.

After some finishing touches, some level and panning automation and gentle mixing to ensure the instruments sat well together while still sounding natural, I felt the track was nearing the completion of production stage. Chances are I will go back to it and add further parts to the song, in which i will update the blog if this occurs. The track should now be ready for the mastering stage once the other 2 tracks are completed.