An Electric Feel

During this trimester I want to really hone my skills in electronic music production, so I've set myself a goal of creating something that has a lot of designed sounds in the style of a downtempo electronic piece. Kind of a blend of trip hop and chill out ambient songs. The structure will have a mostly steady running pace throughout, no real chord progression. This will be the driving theme, though the elements I plan on putting in should help keep interest as well. The pulsating synth uses an interesting set of reverb processes to get it to sparkle that little bit more. The bus has a few things on it, firstly I've band passed the reverb, with a fairly wide band just to get rid of any super high or super low tones. Then I've given it a pitch shift to add some high frequencies and sent about 50% into the mix. This octave helps to give some difference in tone between the original and the reverb and makes it stand out that little bit more.

Then I added the reverb, which was a built in plate reverb called "Nice Plate" and like the name implied it was actually pretty nice. I set this to 100% wet and 0% dry because it will be easier for me to mix in this way. Finally the last important piece of equipment; the tremolo. This acts as my pulsation, I didn't want to use a side chained compressor because I wanted it to be a much faster pulse. As you see below it's at a rate of 1/8 note, and both side are in phase creating a quick on/off sound.

For the lead synth I've used a preset called backwards bowed piano, which is a phys mod synth that's been chopped into a sampler to maintain the sound quality and get rid of any high pitch squeals that sometimes come with phys mod synths.

This preset sounds just like a piano strike in reverse, with a little touch of bowed a bowed instrument. It's a good start but it's nothing like the synthy sound I am looking for. So I set the glide up a few hundred seconds and started adding my effects.

Firstly I added an autofilter just to take away the initial key hit sound and round it off a bit. This then sounded a bit like a dull guitarI also wanted to cut any bass from the synth. I added a compressor to boost the sound and also give a little bit of distortion. A reverb with 80% wet signal and a very slight 1/4 note echo, that is barely in the mix. Then pitched the whole thing up an octave which gives the ghostly pitch. And added a scanner vibrato to get a bit more stereo image. The result is a synth that sounds somewhere between a screaming ghost and a ghostly whale singing a song. BEAUTIFUL!

I wanted the track to have a steady volume run by the bass line and drums, everything else was mixed around this.

In the end I'm happy with how the song has turned out, the light synth peaks it's head around the steady bassline every now and then, while the lead synth creates a sad atmosphere.