Composition Process

I don't claim to have synesthesia, but I do use colour as a descriptor when trying to note down musical ideas - Catching Snowflakes, for example, is blue.

The key words in my journal are icy, magical, sparkling, enchanting. I'd written "CRUNCH" in big wobbly letters - a reminder to somehow reflect the idea of boots crunching in snow.

I struggled to record these guide vocals to a click track, since it's a very particular style of poem called a Nonet Poem, so reading it without a click felt more organic. I then tapped out a tempo that worked so that I could start composing with MIDI.

I usually begin composing by loading a simple mallet MIDI instrument so I can really hear what it is I'm playing, and that's exactly what I did here. The notes of A Major seemed to offer me that enchanting, wondrous sound so I settled on this as the key for the piece and came up with a 4-chord loop. I loaded the "Cinema Layer" sound in AnalogLab, which is a blend of delicate piano and lush synth strings, perfectly laying the foundation for this gentle piece. Within Analog Lab, I am able to adjust some settings; reverb, timbre and movement so that it is exactly as I want it.

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Now that I had a recurring motif, I looped this and loaded a new instrument track to add a melody on top. This, I had some issue with. I wanted the melody to sound really natural, almost as if it was happening by accident, little sparkles of notes across the 42 bars. This was (eventually) achieved using an arpeggio called Simplicity, with a 6db/octave high pass filter rolling off everything below 8kHz.

The piece was feeling really sparse, but anything additional I was trying out in ProTools just felt like it was Too Much. When I'm feeling stuck like this, I've found that moving over to Ableton, with its different instruments, different FX plugins and different workflow, has really helped to spark inspiration. So over I went with a few bounced MIDI files and an audio rendering of what I'd done so far.

It took me mere MINUTES to figure out what was missing. Layers!

There's so much information already contained within those four chords that I could play about with and create different swells and sounds with. I found an arpeggiator called "Snow Peaks" that sounds kind of dance-y and upbeat, and far too busy with the full chord, but once I stripped the MIDI notes back to just the roots, it sounded really enticing and cool. Definitely the "blue" I'm looking for; something I'll use later in the piece as an emotional swell. I had a similar process for "Glacier Voices" and "Seashore", except both have a much more pad-like sound. Glacier Voices reminded me of echoing caves and height, with the filter cut-off creating a very distant footstep and the airy voices adding an icy, sharp tone. It will be perfect for layering, and manipulating with digital processors later on. The lush strings of Seashore complemented the other two well, filling out the low-mids with a slow attack and a sweeping reverse reverb.

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The screenshots below show the parameter settings of each instrument pad, and the MIDI notes used for Snow Peaks.