You in Your Room with Your Music

It’s Sunday afternoon and you don’t feel like doing homework. It’s not that you don’t have any to do. On the contrary, you could probably work from now until midnight and still have plenty more to do. But the fact remains, you’re feeling creative. You want to make music.

That decided, you pull up the French House track that you’ve been working on, grooving to it for a minute as you refamiliarize yourself with the sound. It’s slick and it’s simple and… that’s the problem, isn’t it? It sounds good, but that sound doesn’t evolve. For a track to have life, it needs more than just a catchy 8 bar loop. But what does this song need?

You play around with a few patches, trying to create a fresh sound, but you find yourself frustrated after half an hour of experimentation leads to nothing good. You take a short breather, and then head back to what you originally had, that core loop built off of an indie band sample. You realize what you need to do.

It’s time to head back to your cratedigger roots. You take a listen to some old records that you’ve collected over the years, laying back in your bed, when you suddenly stumble across a killer line on a John Foxx album. It makes a strong impression in its current form (the bass and the drums sit just right!), but you suddenly hear a way to twist the sample into something punchier, something that will land with the energy and the _oomph_that you’re looking for.

You leap out of your bed and get back to your computer, isolating and then cleaning up the sounds that you’re looking for. Now, to make it hit harder. On a whim, you put an OTT on it, and that sounds kind of good, so you decide to chain 13 of them together, and… yeah, that’s Over The Top. But after a couple minutes more work with a multiband compressor and a phaser, you finally have what you’re looking for. This is a sound that will get a club moving.

Taking the momentum from that success, you keep working on the track, figuring out a way to transition to the bridge, and before you know it, you’ve got a solid four minutes of material that you’re happy with. You kick back and listen to the song, happy with what you created. Now, if only you could find yourself a vocalist…