Re: SONGWRITING COMPETITION - SWC077 January 2024 - Submissions until 24-JAN-2024 23:59 UTC+1/CET
Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2024 11:52 CET
Hello,
First of all, thanks to everybody providing the samples, there was some really cool stuff to play with.
This time I went back to my musical roots and made an R&B/ Neo Soul tune. I really wanted to add some vocals and I had some ideas for melodies but it was very hard to find the right lyrics. It was too cheesy (and my signing not good enough) what I got so I thought an instrumental version would be better. Because of this there is a longer intro and only one „hook“ part.
Main focus for this competition was on creating a nice drum groove, I always thought about building my own drum sample kits so this was a good opportunity to test this how it could work. This was fun and it’s going to be my next project.
The drums were made with Logic Drum Machine Designer, all other instruments were created with Sample Alchemy, except the bass which was made with Sublab XL. The bass also needed a lot of distortion to be audible on tablets and such.
I first started creating a kick. And to get a certain power and punch I had to use several sounds and layer them, always trying to get an optimal phase relation between the sounds. I applied a lot of of distortion, compression, tape saturation and clipping but I also had to use some deessing, mainly on the shaker and hat sounds to get away with harshness and poking sounds.
The drums weren’t quantised, I wanted a little sloppiness in the groove which is typical for Neo Soul so I dragged most things by hand or left as they were played by me.
After I had the drum groove together I used Scaler 2 for the chord progression, I changed the voicing for the pluck synth to build a „quasi“ counterpart to the main piano. The rest just came naturally as I was more and more feeling the vibe.
I also used some panning + volume automation and a few other fx (e.g. Shaperbox at the beginning) throughout the track to make the arrangement more interesting. I added a few snapshots if you want to know what tools I used and feel free to ask for further information.
Here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Samples I used:
First of all, thanks to everybody providing the samples, there was some really cool stuff to play with.
This time I went back to my musical roots and made an R&B/ Neo Soul tune. I really wanted to add some vocals and I had some ideas for melodies but it was very hard to find the right lyrics. It was too cheesy (and my signing not good enough) what I got so I thought an instrumental version would be better. Because of this there is a longer intro and only one „hook“ part.
Main focus for this competition was on creating a nice drum groove, I always thought about building my own drum sample kits so this was a good opportunity to test this how it could work. This was fun and it’s going to be my next project.
The drums were made with Logic Drum Machine Designer, all other instruments were created with Sample Alchemy, except the bass which was made with Sublab XL. The bass also needed a lot of distortion to be audible on tablets and such.
I first started creating a kick. And to get a certain power and punch I had to use several sounds and layer them, always trying to get an optimal phase relation between the sounds. I applied a lot of of distortion, compression, tape saturation and clipping but I also had to use some deessing, mainly on the shaker and hat sounds to get away with harshness and poking sounds.
The drums weren’t quantised, I wanted a little sloppiness in the groove which is typical for Neo Soul so I dragged most things by hand or left as they were played by me.
After I had the drum groove together I used Scaler 2 for the chord progression, I changed the voicing for the pluck synth to build a „quasi“ counterpart to the main piano. The rest just came naturally as I was more and more feeling the vibe.
I also used some panning + volume automation and a few other fx (e.g. Shaperbox at the beginning) throughout the track to make the arrangement more interesting. I added a few snapshots if you want to know what tools I used and feel free to ask for further information.
Here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Samples I used:
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