Stephen Natale 3620 B19

Description

My submission for the final composition. I created this song using Logic Pro X, Massive, and Battery.

I wrote the song to be aggressive and dynamic. I made the bass synth to sound like one that you might hear in dubstep, it "breathes" (swells up and down) and also sounds bit like a siren in the intro and outro. I also used effects pretty heavily, using a vocoder filter to make percussive textures, a tape delay, a reverb which shifts size (@4:17—it's pretty cool sounding). I made use of a lot of organic sounding synths—ones that sound like guitar or piano, for instance—to add texture. You'll hear a lot of weird little notes in the background if you listen carefully.

The main inspiration for this song was the album DrukQs by Aphex Twin. This album is my goto for when I want to make new friends listen to something I am almost certain they are not going to like. But truth be told, it is genuinely one of my favorite albums. DrukQs has a dark and mechanical sound throughout, and the percussion is frequently frantic and constantly evolving. If you want to listen to an example of this, check out 54 Cymru Beats. What I tried to implement from this album is mainly the way the percussion often defies expectations—sometimes it sounds like it's skipping or glitching, sometimes lands a half-beat away from where you were anticipating it.

I wanted to try to write a percussion part that had a similar effect, and the rest of my song was built from there.