Song#7 Eternity - Idea Stage

It's the fiiinaaall countdowwwnnn!!!! New Year New Song, and the final song to be exact.

Whassit blog about? (come on, seriously you're asking now?)

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording & Mastering Stage
4. Final Product & MV

 

Source

 

This time I had thought about the title beforehand as Eternity. So what best to exemplify Eternity than space? Talking about space, you have to get deep into electronica (to be honest i didn't know there was a genre called space music) to give it that feel of the infinite expanse of the universe.

Which brings us back to Earthly creations like:

1. Tom Misch - Crazy Dream [feat. Loyle Carner]
2. Fkj - Skyline 
3. Bjork - Hunter
4. Fkj - Vibin' Out with (((O))) 
5. Wintergatan - Starmachine2000
6. And lastly the master himself,  Nujabes - Aruarian dance

Basically, these songs almost sum up the electronica genre (Nujabes falls under nu-jazz but anyway). On the surface the songs seem complex, but actually consists of repetitions on the same theme. The complexity and the genius comes with the application of specific sound clips/ instruments at select parts in the composition. At the point the listener gets bored of the same loop, the music suddenly evolves into something totally unexpected - that's the beauty of electronica. And then comes in the solo - the mic drop event!

The next post shall cover my thoughts on the genre and what I have chosen as my final opus!

Auf wiedersehen!

Stay tuned for Part II of  IV for this song!

Song#6 Mei Mun Hang Fook Di Mei Loi (美满幸福的未来) - Idea Stage

Up for another song in another language? I present to you song number 6!
Intro desu~

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording & Mastering Stage
4. Final Product & MV

Source

I was always fascinated with the Cantopop Mandopop power ballad scene, where most song structure was pretty much the same, ie after the bridge, there is either:

1. Intro/recap of the main chorus, but in a simplified/softer version before dropping back grandly to the original chorus instrumentation and beats.
2. Grand dropback to the original chorus after a short pause or recap of the bridge final phrase.
3. Changing up the key of the chorus

which is rather predictable to say the very least.

Here are the list of well-known hits from this side of the Earth which I got inspiration from like:

1. Justin Lo - 命硬
2. Alan Tam - Friend of Mine | 朋友
3. Guang Liang  - Tong Hua 童话 (Fairy Tale) 
4. BEYOND【海闊天空】

and many others, too numerous to list her. This round I had to engage my friend Clement to write the lyrics in Cantonese, because my Cantonese level is only conversational level. He copied ideas from other songs for the lyrics while I copied the song structure and pacing :)

Why Cantonese? Well, I guess its undeniable that the Cantonese dialect is the language of love just like French. (can't imagine love song hits in Hokkian or Hakka)


Till the next post people!

Stay tuned for Part II of  IV for this song!

Song#5 Yang Ku-cinta Itulah Kamu - Idea Stage

And so, as some may say, your life isn't complete without gypsy jazz and sweet duet. Which is what I'm going to set out to do. Dearest, if you're reading this (which you eventually will), here's the introduction to this blog!

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording & Mastering Stage
4. Final Product & MV

Source

Nothing screams gypsy guitar better than Django Reinhart himself. After listening to hours of his playing style, I tried playing it on my guitar to little success. I guess one could not simply replicate hours and years of training and practice :p

This round I tried minimising the number of instruments involved in my song. Based on Django's typical instrument setup, I gather that the very least you need is a guitar and a rhythm section.

Also, since this is planned to be a Malay language song, I tried getting inspiration from Malay hit classics like:

P.Ramlee swaggy dude

1. P. Ramlee's Getaran Jiwa 
2. Modern hits like Kau Ilhamku by Man Bai
3. And Aku ingin mencintai-mu by Edcoustic

just to get the feel and pacing of Malay love songs. It also helps that Malaysians study the language from primary to high school, which makes writing lyrics a breeze. Secondly, I intended this song to be a duet between me and my girlfriend, because nothing beats singing together with your loved one :)

I guess that's all for now, until the next post :)

Stay tuned for Part II of  IV for this song!

Song#4 Reaching (out for you) waltz - Idea Stage

After dabbling into electronica, I tried a a reversal with a classic waltz. For the uninitiated, here's the introduction to this blog!

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording & Mastering Stage
4. Final Product

Source

The origin of this tune originated from a commission for the Powahrangers (a composer group I'm in) by a cosplay group from Hong Kong.The motif was meant to be used in their steampunk themed cosplay skit. However, the commission fell through and I was left with the draft tune on my Ableton.

The other source of inspiration was Shostakovich's Second Waltz, a rather modern waltz compared to Haydn. The constant snare drum gave some sense of stability to the whole song, while the instrumentation plays rather close to the original tune I'm working on.

There's not much to say about this section but as far as inspirations goes, the classics are rather easy to manage, compared to modern songs nowadays.

Stay tuned for Part II of  IV for this song!

Song#3 Runaway - Idea Stage

Wasup people, here's another song! Welcome to my 1 year blog on making 7 songs to propose to my beloved!

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage
5. Final Product

Source

One day I was binge listening to funk pop or nudisco groups like Metronomy, Breakbot, Tame Impala and Two Doors Cinema Club, that I got the inspiration to compose a sort-of funk number.

To that extent, I started off with the notion of a disco beat below some newly gotten slick piano riffs from Cape Lion's Jennie which used XLNaudio's Addictive Keys VST (I used electric grand). I had the requirement of naming the song starting with the letter R, so what better than to randomly select a word - RUNAWAY.

Putting into context, I thought of lyrics like "runaway to you" or "runaway with you", but definitely not "runaway from you" :) The next consideration was whether I wanted to add electric guitar overdrive strumming to the mix, since I managed to borrow my neighbour's PRS Tremonti set (thanks Chu Gen!). After a couple testing rounds with different pedal settings, I decided upon using overdrive, rather than metal distortion in the chorus part.

Lastly, I drew inspiration from some EDM mixes where I attempted at filter passing and side-chain compression for the mix. I also tried applying what I learned from Wickiemedia (which I previously introduced in the previous song) to this song.

No one else wanted to sing my song except for myself. -Sadface-

Stay tuned for Part II of  V for this song!

Song#2 All on this farm- Idea Stage

I'm back with another song! In case you are new here, welcome to my 1 year blog on making 7 songs to propose to my beloved!

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

Source

My girlfriend has this toy sheep which sort of bleats with a built in weighted air bladder when you flip it upside down, then right way up again. So, I thought of like, why not make a song that can utilise that fake sheep bleat?

What better than Old MacDonald's nursery rhyme? You see, that song is kinda like under the country genre, and it involves most of the animals on his farm...so I went about binging on the latest country and bluegrass music available.

I came across talents like the family Sleepy Man which is god damn awesome with their banjo playing, and the Dead South, all great inspiration for my song. In all honesty, I considered learning the basics of banjo riffs, and all other bluegrass instrument playing but I concluded that's going to take a long-long while.

So, I settled for the next best thing, getting existing loops. I've used loops quite often in my songs, from guitar riffs to melodic lines from the giant Loopmasters's free 'Excite Promo 2015' pack that came with my Novation Launchpad Pro. It was then I got to know the original site called Loopmaster, being a platform for audio loop packs that can run individually as audio files, Kontakt files, Ableton and many more.

I just searched their site can Boom! came out the exact loop pack that I wanted - Bluegrass pack by Bigfishaudio.  They featured demo stuffs like 'old-timey, folk and country' tunes with sets consisting of acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, bass and djembe (which is some kind of portable lap drum). So, I went ahead with that pack and used it with Kontakt, which for those of you who aren't familiar with samplers, Kontakt is basically a plug-in for your DAW and it plays loaded samples or instruments. Kontakt has been around for ages and is much like a multi-platform plug-in (works with most of the DAW softwares like Reason, Cubase and Ableton) and thus have wider selection in terms of 'audio patches' and samples libraries.

But most importantly, I had to choose a name for this song.... which initially was a rather cringy name like 'And there was a lamb'. However, as you can see, the title of this post is somewhat different due to the phrase being plucked out of the lyrics (as this post was written post song publication). In the end that phrase was from the last line of the chorus, and it fit the #2 song's initial lineup of the M-A-R-R-Y-M-E plan.

Long story short: Song name is 'All on this farm', using bluegrass loop pack and is animal themed.

Stay tuned for Part II of  V for this song!

Song#1 Missing Piece - Idea Stage

Hi everyone! I'm finally back with an update! In case you are new here, welcome to my 1 year blog on making 7 songs to propose to my beloved! So here's how each blog on every song would be formatted:

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

Source

When I was thinking about what would best be for the first song of the proposal, I thought of doing a piano instrumental. After all, I'm an amateur pianist first before being an composer/arranger.

I actually had a few good source material from my old collections of Random Impromptu Playing (such a mouthful!). Try hearing my Random 3 below.




Ta-daa! I'd admit that wasn't very polished after all. I just made that up in one sitting at the keyboard some 5 years ago.

During the playing process, I utilised a simple Left Hand accompaniment style and a recurring musical hook (at 1'56"). I also jumped around the keyboard, using the higher octaves and lower octaves before changing the style nearing the end.

I guess this song has no conventional structure unlike typical pop songs (part A-part B-Chorus)

Next, I set about to transcribe what I recorded from MIDI into Finale, which looks horrendous like this

which is totally out of alignment (given that I didn't record based on the keyboard metronome) and looks terrible.

Transcription

And so, I transcribed the whole thing again into legible score (phew!) which you can download for free below!

PDF - https://www.4shared.com/office/OJQbehEYba/Random_3.html
XML - https://www.4shared.com/document/WY675QSVce/Random_3.html

Stay tuned for Part II of  V for this song!