Waveform 2: Sci-fi beat -> morbid falsetto -> ambitious crossover??

Looking for inspiration, I found this piano thing deep in the cobwebs of my voice memos. It felt very loopable and I liked both the rolling short-short-looong-looong-looong feel and the harmony (on a macro level I think you see a Bb dominant natural 11 chord “resolve” via voice leading to a Bbm9). So here’s the kernel (has some nice authentic background distractions):

Then I inputed the loop into Waveform using the Subtractive oscillator, and I really liked the Africa Horns (like, the Toto song) synth as a basic piano sound. I really liked the punch, but the pitch was a bit too grating and squishy, sorta. Lowering the frequency cutoff of the lowpass filter basically solved almost everything. To make it more piano-like, I also made the attack of the filter envelope agressive and shortened the amplitude release so that the sound didn’t accumulate and get soupy.

Africa Horns before and after (it’s subtle!):

I also added quick 808 drums (drum sampler) and bass (I chopped up and rearranged the Brass Brigade Sub Bass loop). Lastly, I added in some eerie quartal harmony in a pad that I made in Subtractive. I really liked the sound of a lead synth called “sub bass,” so I turned off the monophonic setting and made just a few adjustments (faster attack in general, and less detuning). Reverb and stereo widening especially helped the surreal effect.

At this point I figured out that we’re in 6/4 and we could repeat four cycles of the groove like so:

As you can hear, I also sped up the tempo at this point from 100 bpm to 140 bpm. Instead of feeling just sluggish, the groove suddenly felt both like it was plowing ahead and like it still had a heavy, behemoth quality. Especially once I added some dramatic strings, it became, as my floormates put it, “very sci-fi.”

Let’s talk about the strings. I wasn’t going for cliche or anything– not tryna make generic clip art–but it just needed some film-score dramatic strings. I settled Orchestra Loop #1 because the chords worked, and pitch-shifted it way down. I spent a lot of time *fiddling* with the string sounds in Elastique Pro, first of all, because the chord changes needed to align with the beat (I didn’t realize how hilariously out-of-sync it was until I showed my non-overthinking-musician friends, who noticed immediately). It was also frustratingly weird that the key you transposed the samples to didn’t match. It’s not that I have perfect pitch, which I only ever use as a party trick. It’s that, when you input a key that is higher, the program literally transposes the audio to a lower key. Same goes for bpm, in fact (higher bpm = slower speed). Ah well. Let me know if I’m missing something.

I followed the exact same process with the high strings, splicing up, transposing, and time-stretching the “Nightingale Drive String Line” loop. This is where it became very movie score.

Meanwhile, I ordered the entrances of the players (piano, drum, bass and pad, strings). We started out with just the original piano groove, with some claps that fade in. My non-overthinking-musician suitemate thought that the claps were too confusing, and I agreed. Honestly, I feel like clapping on the 2 and 4 is way cooler, but here everything is just way too fast for it to lock in. Compare the offbeat claps:

With downbeat (what I went with):

For the drums I used a notch filter to reduce the annoying pitchiness of the ride cymbal. I relied on a low pass filter for now to make them tolerable before I found something better, and I really liked automating the frequency cutoff of the lowpass to rise so that the drums intensified until a mini drop, where I said “hey.”  For the “hey” vocal, I phased it, panned it hard-left, and added a wonky “energy” filter. Then I notched out a bunch of extraneous frequencies, creating some nice stalactites:

The drum build sounds like this:

I didn’t know where to go next so I asked myself, what’s the opposite of this? I listed adjectives like suspended, glassy, high-pitch, falsetto, human, hovering, slow, fragile. Subsequently, I had an existential moment during a sorta boring music theory lecture. I saw myself in my Zoom window appearing to be suspended in the sky and tree leaves that were above me. Feeling poetic, I imagined falling from the sky and not knowing who I was. Then I pulled out a rhyme dictionary and got this:

Falling from the sky

Who am I?

Gonna die, say goodbye

Who am I?

Time goes by.

Not exactly Robert Frost, but extremely laconic and morbid, which I liked because it felt so fragile and open-ended. I set the text to a melody and took like seven takes trying to ensure that my falsetto was 90% rather than 100% unbearable to listen to. Afterwards I automated pitch shift on the vox to fix some wonky notes (so much for perfect pitch lol).

I also made a pad sound to go along with the piano. Going for a warm but not too heavy sine sound, I made a sound in 4OSC with four sine waves with a steep (24dB slope) lowpass filter. I tuned one oscillator to an octave above pitch and another to 2 octaves above, to make sure the sound wasn’t too flat/low/heavy.

One of my favorite discoveries was adding in a mellow wineglass hit (with emphasized partials in the mids and reverb) when the first words enter, as a subtle bell tolling effect:

To transition to the second theme, I knew I wanted to drop out all the instruments in the initial groove until the high strings were suspended… suspensefully. Showing this to my non-overthinking-musician (are you sensing a theme??) suitemate, he came up an incredible transition into the second section. “The lyrics are ‘falling from the sky.’ What if you have the high strings fall down in pitch?” Genius. I added some beautiful wind chimes and wind from Freesound and got this:

After the second theme, I simply tried doing the reverse of this transition (the chimes, chords, and wind pitch-shifted upwards by a whole tone). This gave me the idea that it would be really cool to have the original theme enter back, in full force, in a new, brighter key (2 degrees sharper on the circle of fifths – think C modulating to D). I sent this reprised first theme to a bus with an automated Low Pass filter where the frequency cutoff gets higher (mirroring the original entrance, but this time with everybody involved).

At the end, I wanted the vocals from the second theme to join in with the first theme, with so much cathartic distortion that they felt almost electric-guitar like. I got a bit more of a “third grader trying to do mouth trumpet” sound, because I didn’t really understand what the distortion plugins were doing, but at least I tried.

Finally, I really enjoyed the end part, where I brought some of the sound effects (wine glass, chimes, nice chords from the 4OSC track) together on a V-I cadence that was both jumbled (lots of elements) and resolved (harmonically pleasing). It was actually really hard to keep them all in tune with each other, and I automated the pitch shifter at tiny microtonal levels on many many tracks throughout the piece!! I hope that that felt appropriately in spirit with a piece that basically puts two contrasting themes together and attempts an ambitious crossover of the two with a sorta gross-sounding screamy vocal.

Here’s the final product. Hope you enjoy!