The Beauty of a Filter

I have to say, I am super in love with creating music on the computer. I never thought I would love it this much, or even attempt to explore this genre, but it's actually pretty awesome. I can't say if am particularly good at it yet, but that's all part of the process!

So the past 2 weeks since my last blog, I have been exploring different options into what direction I want to take this song. The song now has 15 tracks on it which is more than I thought it would have. I found that once I got into it, the ideas kept flowing.

The first thing that I felt was necessary to do was to increase the tempo of the song from 120 bpm to 125 bpm. I felt that this slight increase in tempo really lifted up the whole feel of the song. I am yet to decide if I want to increase it more.

As you can see in the screen shot below, here are the 15 tracks in the song.

After adding in the ambience, wind (track 7), drums (track 8) and sogawni sound into the song, I felt a bit stuck on where to take the song. I showed what I had done to my friend (he was the brains behind the drop lead track) and he said “this needs a filter” to which I replied “of course, why on earth didn’t I think of that?” as well as suggesting the rise. As this is a whole new experience for me, I didn’t even think of adding audio effects to the different elements of the song. I was so focused on trying to keep everything in time with the tempo and with each other that I didn’t think to use audio effects.

So I added ‘auto filter’ to the drop lead track. I didn’t realise that something so simple would add so much depth to the song. The ‘drop lead track’ enters the song at around 40 seconds and is taken out of the song at around 1.30 minutes. The filter starts off closed and slowly opens as the song progresses. Near the drop, the filter speeds up until it is completely open and after the drop, you can hear the full sound of the track. You can see this shown in the screen shots below.

What I love about the filter on this track is that it connects the introduction of song to the middle part of the song and allows for the song to change direction in a smooth manner.

In the coming weeks, I would like to focus on mixing the different elements of the song to avoid clipping as well adding audio effects to polish off the mix.

There are some things about the song that I am still fairly unsure about. So here is a list of things that I would like to think about in the next couple of weeks when finishing off this song:

Is the introduction too long?

Does the violin fit with the rest of the elements of the song?

Is the ending of the song too forced?

Are the drums too heavy?

In the mean time, you can listen to my progression so far!