Each week, I have been summarizing my adventures in making music. Lately, I have been composing tracks for the Disquiet Junto, the Naviar Records Haiku Music Challenge and, this year for the first time, Weekly Beats. I also have other projects and collaborations I have shared occasionally. This blog primarily contains slightly annotated posts originally found on Mastodon.
For a number of weeks now, I have been doing fast-paced, upbeat songs in odd time using chopped samples. I started another one of those tracks for this week, but I could not get inspired. I pivoted to a new project and just started layering ambient loops that I played out using presets. Before I knew it, I had something that I liked and decided to stick with it. It is a simple buildup of layers and I tried to add some movement by automating the pan settings.
I’ve been away from the Disquiet Junto for awhile, but I’m glad to be back with a drone track! I followed the prompt and read up on drone music first. I researched what might make a good BPM and went with 60, and I read that some drone music consists of a single held note, so I picked the note D3 on my MIDI scale and copied that over about a dozen tracks with different presets I found containing the word “drone.” I cut that down to eight that I liked and started mixing from there, transposing some notes higher and lower, but keeping them all playing a D. The complexity comes from how many tracks are playing at the same time as they fade in and out by automated volume levels. I also added complexity by panning the tracks back and forth - more drastically in the middle of the track and less so at the beginning and end. The less constant, more textural sounds are also more prevalent in the middle of the track and less so at the beginning and end. The song begins with one drone sound at a higher pitch and ends with the lower bass drone sounds.