#chaosdesigned

Production Notes:

This is one of the first tracks I've made this year, and the very first to be upload worthy in a long time. This song was built around a melody I created a few months back and just left it sitting around in one of my Reason files. It was originally suppose to be the basis for a standard trap song, thus the many trap elements from the song but I ended up turning it into sort of a less drum dependent song and really wanted to build the song around the journey of the melody.

It took a lot of rearranging to really get the song to flow the way I wanted to. The rough mix was about 5:30 minutes long, so I ended up chopping about a minute off the song and mostly tacked it back on in the ending fade. I used a lot of layering for the lead synth to give a harmonic feel with mid ranged and high pitched frequencies really shining over the bass and drums. I used some light trap elements in the snare trills and hat patterns. Previously I've always had trouble mixing my 808's and I feel that this song really shows the improvements in my ability to mix 808's better, the high to low mids are really important for a very clean sounding 808 if it's mostly low end it just sounds muddy and everything has to be carefully eq'd so that their frequencies remain unsullied by the raw power of a very bright 808, and laying a night mid range kick over them and lots of side chaining and heavy compression to really get a good sounding kick/808 mix. 

Listening Notes:

I really like this song and I'm really glad I got to put a full song to this melody I've always had floating around in the back of my head. I am really a fan of the heavy flanged kick drum (Comes in at :13) with a little reverb that makes it feel really heavy and full like a group stomping on the ground and clapping. 

After listening to this song more than 100 times in a row, I've heard some places where I let little volume automations slip a few times in the intro and after a few build ups. I'll probably change them if I come back to add vocals to this song. I am really going to try to aim for more vocally oriented music from now on.

The arpeggiator came in as a sort of afterthought to the melody. After messing around with some of the settings on the midi arp in Ableton I found a really good swing setting to set the pattern to make the arp feel a little more dynamic than a straight 1-2-3-2-1 kinda pattern. I like the way the chords echo in the in the background to give the instrument the feel that it's playing plucked chords but it's really just the attack delay from the pad that plays the chords of the song.