Dark Roots ... Old but still good!

While I was checking through some old folders and hard drives I stumbled across one of my finished tracks I never uploaded and shared with the world. Now that just isn't right, not sharing my music with everyone that might just want to hear it. So, here it is, with it's accompanying blog posts on the way!

The Composition

This track was essentially me, trying to write something a little more upbeat than some of my other stuff. I had actually composed this relatively soon after finishing The Dark Knight Re-Scored, which you can check out here. So you might hear a different in tone, emotion, mood and attempt to infuse some fun into the track. 

When I began actually putting 'pen to paper' as it were, I went for a trusty piano. I introduced, immediately, a repeating note, with chords in the lower two octaves to fill out the sound at this early part of the song. Which looks a little something like this (below).

Those of you who are paying attention to the music should hear an ostinato, which is essentially, an interesting pattern of notes that generally repeats in the same voicing or octave. In this case, as you can hear, that features on the short spiccato strings.

N.B  Spiccatto means very short notes played with the bow of the stringed instrument, Violin, Cello, etc. They have a very fast attack and quick release, which makes them shorter than Staccato, which is a slightly lazier short note. 

The above image is representative of more than just this first part of the composition but it does show a good example of MIDI playing the Spiccatto notes as described.

N.B MIDI is the method by which I write my music. When I play my MIDI keyboard, which is a normal keyboard connected to my MacBook Pro via MIDI to USB cable, I can play the keyboard and have it produce whatever sound I have selected on my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), Logic Pro X. 

Perhaps most importantly, we have a melody! Those are always important, right? So I was trying to improve my writing (you'll start to notice a theme here) and incorporated some woodwinds, which I don't generally do. I just had some piccolos and flutes layered together, to create this lovely melody.

Of course, we also have some lovely sustained long strings playing chords and these come in the form of Spitfire's lovely muted strings (which just means dampened for brevity's sake). 

There are also some brushes and sticks early on in this track, to just emphasise that pulse, the simple rhythm that the piano is so faithfully keeping with the repeating note in the higher octave. This develops further in the second half of the first Act, with more percussive drums coming in, to fill out the percussion section a bit more. 

 And finally, (for the first act that is) I created a rudimentary filter sweep to work as a transition from the first Act to the second Act. I will add, at this point in my composing education, so to speak, I wasn't very 'good' at writing transitions like this, from a music production point of view, so do forgive my attempt. 

Something I had recently learned to respect, at the time of writing the song, was the frequency spectrum. This also meant that I had learned to 'abuse' the psychology of the frequency spectrum, in composing. So the beginning of the second act, some areas of the arrangement drop out, to make the track sound smaller and thinner, less grand. So I left the pianos in, playing a new melody, accompanied by short strings and low sustained strings, basses and celli. 

N.B Put simply, the frequency spectrum is the range of frequencies the human ear can hear, from 20hz all the way up to 20kz for a perfect ear. So when writing any style of music, generally, to create a full and 'fat' sound, you want to try and encompass the whole spectrum. So when you have a rock band, you have a bass guitar and a regular old electric guitar, which when recorded or played together can comfortably reach most of the spectrum. The same is true of a drum kit, with the kick being in the low end and hi-hats and cymbals being right up in the higher frequencies. 

I used another little filter sweep to transition from this understated section, into a fuller arrangement, with brass and everything! I introduced cymbal crashes and legato Brass to add some power and warmth to the track. The brass is essentially playing the same melody as before but is now an added layer on top of the woodwinds.

At this point, I had the long strings, Violins to be specific, playing long sweeping chords in a high octave to fill out that portion of the frequency range. Doing this really did make the song sound a lot bigger.

I also had some synths playing some pad sounds here too. They add a different texture and fill out some of the frequency spectrum that needed padding out a bit. Plus they sound cool, which is always a good thing. 

And there we go, we're finally reaching that almighty climactic third act, with all the instrumentation going nuts and sounding big and fierce. 

The short strings almost start galloping (the feel of the rhythm), giving the track a sense of picking up pace and urgency. The percussion section gets bigger and more excited (below).

I even added a huge choir section and placed it in the back of the proverbial hall, using reverb. Choirs always find a way of sounding awesome and making the track sound massive. You can sort of see the chord voicing and the rhythm of the virtual choirs in the below image. 

The Brass section starts taking on some of the energy that the short strings were having to provide all on their own, with the Tubas and Trombones playing the same sort of galloping rhythm

There are of course some other bits and pieces. I had some Timpani playing along with the chord progression (they're tuned so they kind of need to be playing along with the bass line from the main chord progression). 

All in all, it was the first time I had used the choirs from East West's awesome libraries and they worked a treat. I really liked the third Acts chordal work, some of the big crashes really sound great as the instrumentation weaves together, melodies and counter melodies all over the place (in a good way). 

I will add a gallery to this post, with all of the images, so that those with a technical curiosity can look at some of the MIDI work I did for this particular track, maybe you'll learn something.

As ever, thank you for reading and thank you for listening to my music. I will be writing two more posts in this series for Dark Roots, discussing the Mixing process and the Mastering process I went through in finishing this track.

If you have any comments or thoughts, drop them below and please share this post with anyone and everyone, it'll really help me out.

Thanks!