Strange Terrain [Music]

Posted by aeron on March 14, 2017, 12:02 a.m.

Surprised I am still finding time to make music with so much going on in my life right now. All good things, though I am overwhelmed and feel like there is quite suddenly very little time to myself. What spare time I do find, I spend reading books and writing music. I am looking bravely towards the many big changes on the horizon. I am entering new territory in my life that I have been working towards for the past several years. I will be moving cities, returning to my old university to finish my degree, and my occupation may change into something new entirely (but that is still undetermined). Not to mention the growth in my personal relationships. It is all changing so fast.

Anyway, I have to share some music now. First I have this very fresh, chilled out piece. Accompanied by calming timelapses shamelessly ripped from around the web. It tries to capture the feeling of being in the moment.

And if you're into this sort of thing, a spaced and trippy beat to dance to… if you like counting to 5. The music is moody and polished by my standards, but the video is kinda meh quality… I kinda want to shoot my own video for it one of these days.

Hope you find some enjoyment in these. As you may have noticed I have started to drift away from the heavy vocal sampling that has been a staple in my music lately. Makes it a lot easier to focus on the music itself. Right now I would like to improve on my form in particular and write music with more development, something I have always struggled with. Here's to another year full of growth and development for all of us.

Comments

twisterghost 7 years, 1 month ago

The first one actually reminds me a lot of Cave Story music, just higher fidelity, maybe more like the remakes in Cave Story+

Though to be fair, most things remind me of Cave Story

Really great work. I love the timelapses in the first video as well, especially the one with the telescopes, that was a dope find.

OBELISK 7 years, 1 month ago

I'm getting hints of this in the first track:

It reminds me of early Aphex Twin, which is a compliment in my book.

Your second track is even better. The time signature and the chords work super well together. I can jam to this, sounds fucking great

I think you can do better than the run-of-the-mill 808 snares. They're getting old, and not in a good way

aeron 7 years, 1 month ago

Thank you all for the feedback. Truthfully I like 808 style snares, I used to hate them but they have grown on me immensely. They are fun to work with. That being said… I may have fallen into a rut. The last 5 or 6 tracks I've posted use basically the same kit. I have built many track templates which I usually customize for new projects but my current favorite hardly gets changed. I will definitely use more variety in the future, and probably less 808.

Steven, I agree with your points. That is some solid advice you got there. I had actually written more on each track but scrapped it. The first originally had a separate bass track but I had to wrestle because I liked how the key track sounded in the low end. I tried using the line on the key track but I had used distortion, causing some issues with notes bleeding over due to long release time. I guess compromise was the reason for the boring bass line. Something I will consider in the future.

As for the repetition on 2, I did have a couple more variations that were scrapped. I tend to render WIPs and listen in the car and when I had the other variations I kept picking them apart. Something always felt off. Maybe it was just because they weren't the original melody. I wonder if that's a thing, where you hear something enough times that it becomes the only right way and everything else is wrong. I sometimes imagine writing a new piece is like working with clay and after an amount of time it just gets too hard to work with.

But yeah these are both things I want to work on. I am usually trying to write better basslines and currently I want to have more melodic variety. Particularly melodies that develop into something more interesting as the piece goes on. Hopefully you can give me more feedback on future posts :)