In this composition I wanted like an 80's feel to it, but I also wanted it to me kind of relaxed or medium energy. I have been listening to a band called “Emarosa" and I love how they’re very modern but most of their beats sound like the 80's, but fresher. My song isn’t too fast or upbeat, because I wanted to add lyrics of my own vocals and see if this could be a draft for my standalone music.
For the meter and beat I went with a steady 4/4 time signature and I used a standard kick with some claps instead of a regular snare to introduce the song, after the first 17 bars it switches to snares, still with the same beat. The bass is really following the kick on this one as well.
This song is written in the key of G minor. I decided to go with the chords Gm|Cm|Gm|Gm|Cm|F|E-flat. I did the melody after doing the harmony by humming it, experimenting to see what sounded good at the moment. It was one of those things that you just grow alongside it. I was also keeping in mind I wanted it to be very subtle and low energy so my vocals would shine through.
We also have the audio tracks, I have some vocals of myself with backing vocals here and there. I also play the guitar so why not add to that as well! I did only do 1 synthesizer from scratch but no sampler audio as I didn’t have time.
For the overall mix, I have all sorts of compression on the vocals and EQ as well as a pitch correction plug-in for cleaning up the vocals. I also had time-based delay and reverb going to the snare, vocals, harmony and melodies; those would be the ones on busses 8 and 9. And then finally when I had all my tracks in place, I turned all the faders to the lowest volume possible and started my mix from there, bringing up the kick, snare/claps and vocals and then just molding everything to its own place in the mix. Always making sure that the output level did not exceed -3db.