'A Lightyear Beyond' - New Original Music! - Electronic/Jazz-ish/Instrumental + Walkthrough!

in music •  6 years ago  (edited)

Screenshot 2018-05-08 20.22.53.png

I figured since I have been sharing

quite a few random exercises/songwriting practice sessions, I should probably share an actual song or two with you guys haha. I have been writing a few electric piano/synths/electronic drum songs recently, and was pretty stoked with the results. This track is just the piano, 3 tracks of essentially "ambience" (noisey/droney weirdness), and a percussion track. Simple enough, but it seemed to work nicely here. Let's go through it!

Listen to A Lightyear Beyond here.

Track 1 begins with 2 notes,

a low A, and a higher F# (pictured in BROWN in Track 1). Essentially, that will continue for the whole song, while other things build on top of it. When we reach the first blue-green section, on every 1st beat of each 4 bar section, we add a D# above the F#, adding some more color to whole thing. After 2x of this, we hear the D# for 2 bars and then we add an E onto the second 2 bars (2x). I really like how this brings out that Dorian mysterious-ness, using the sharp 6.

Screenshot 2018-05-08 20.23.16.pngTrack 1, with the D# and E described above.
Listen to A Lightyear Beyond here.
Screenshot 2018-05-08 20.23.31.pngTrack 1, the light Blue section described below.

The next sections add even more

notes to Track 1, as can be seen above. Basically a little melody emerges slowly, in the higher register, while all the lower notes continue as they did before. It starts to sound very mysterious here, I love how the harmonies came out in this song. The next 3 tracks, 2 3 and 4, are all basically ambience. They fade in as the drums pick up, the halfway point of the song, and add some strange, creepy sounds to the background.

Screenshot 2018-05-08 20.23.43.pngTracks 2, 3 and 4, as described above.

Last up is Track 5 which is

our drums, and begins with a simple beat, just the clave and a kick (pictured in Yellow in Track 5). When we reach that Green section of Track 5, the beat picks up a bit, adding a shaker hit, and snare hits. I like how heavy it gets, and then sort of just drops out, moving back to the original beat before the song fades out completely.

Listen to A Lightyear Beyond here.

I hope you have found the walkthrough interesting and enjoy the music! Thanks a lot for supporting my blog, it's greatly appreciated!



||| EP 1 - Bandcamp | EP 2 - Bandcamp | EP 3 - Bandcamp |||
||| EP 4 - Bandcamp | EP 5 - Bandcamp | EP 6- Bandcamp |||

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Lightyears beyond is a good song title, I like the imagery invoked by such an interesting name.

Your breakdowns are so thorough. To the note! Thanks for sharing. Truly inspiring. I wish I still had my desktop and Fruityloops...

Thanks, I really appreciate you reading them, glad you are into it!

I used to use fruity loops a lot, I haven't tried any of the newer versions. I've seen videos though, they look great.

What program are you using now?

Ableton Live.