My first jam session in a couple weeks. Sorry for so much silence as of late. Thankfully I haven’t gotten sick or been caught up in the riots going on... I’ve just been working on other things. As much as I love making music, it isn’t making me any money at the moment. So my wife and I are looking into other businesses we could start at home.
In these shitty, shitty times, I’m having trouble focusing on cyberpunk. We’re a little too close to it right now. So instead I decided to do another 80s style synth track, something that I hope sounds a little more hopeful. Not bright and poppy, that’s not really my style. But something that isn’t smothering and hopeless.
For some reason I just had this very basic arpeggio, an 8 beat one that goes 12312312 pop into my head last night and refuse to leave. It’s been used a million times before, and it’ll be used a million times again in the future, in all kinds of music. I’m pretty sure I’ve even played it back when I was in an early music ensemble in college. But no matter how simple it was, no matter how often it’s been used, it just nested itself in my brain and wouldn’t go away. So I decided to plug my keyboard in and give it a new place to live.
It starts out with an inverted minor chord, leading to a the minor 5 chord... but I wanted to give it a little something else after the main loop, so I had it transition to the major 6, then major 7 before returning home.
Once again I was going for minimalistic, with only one synth for arpeggio and lead, one synth for the counterpoint, one for bass, and one for percussion. And since this was just a little piece, I didn’t do much mixing. Just a quick fade in and out at the end, and some minor dynamic tweaking in the second half.
