Voyage - the story behind my new track

Photo by myself- Hayling Island

https://on.soundcloud.com/3sbdnw2TA6XvbKBr9

Over the weekend I released a new track on SoundCloud and Wavlake, over the week I shall push it across to other platforms too to maximise it’s audience. It’s not my usual track, something different, if I knew a lyricist, singer and guitarist they’d complement this instrumental nicely. Anyway go and check it out. What genre would you place it under?

Come to think of it I do know such people as they are all here on Hive!

I decided to write a piece of music with the aid of the new session players in Logic Pro for iPad to see how effective they are. Now if you’re not familiar with Logic or these new features let me describe them a little bit.

When setting up a new track in Logic you’re given four choices Audio, MIDI, Session player or Pattern and this determines the regions that reside within. So audio is great for recording vocals, spoken word, guitar etc. Midi for sequenced stuff, piano roll programming of music or recorded from a keyboard instrument in realtime. Pattern is for sequencing drum machines or other.

Session players on the other hand stems from a feature that has existed for awhile, a drummer who plays along with you and I think this tool originated from Garageband and the now quite established concept of a “band in a box”.

However Apple has now gone way further by introducing a keyboard player, bass player and percussionist.

I gave them a really heavy test and i shall try and describe this in words for now, a video would be better of course but that needs time to plan and record.

So here we go.

I picked a chord progression in the key of Am as my basis for the track. Which I then programmed into a chord track, new feature for this version of Logic. This track doesn’t produce any sound but helps drive the other tracks in the right musical direction as you work on those.

I then started to add over time my layers of instruments and i started with the piano and bass, the drums and then later two other keyboards playing strings and a Nord-esque synth providing some extra beef to the track.

The players basically follow the chord progression and you can sculpt the way the chords are played for each phrase if you want to and to go even further can convert the session players to regular MIDI to edit by hand. I often find myself doing that to simplify some phrases that I feel are just a bit too much.

Each of the players are unique to their type of instrument. In the case of rhenkeyboard player you can control the intensity nd complexity of play. You can control the positioning of the hands, both hand or just the one or other. Do you include inversions? Yes, because I have already depicted those in the chord track, so in the chorus and second verse I chucked a few in just to provide variety and extra movement, to change the cadence at different points in the song.

I never considered myself a “songwriter” but with these tools my mind is blown, my idea in my head has been airlifted and deposited into a real piece of music. That makes me wonder if a collaboration could happen. Planting an idea in your heads.

I used the built-in mastering tool prior to exporting it as an uncompressed WAV.

Guys give me some favourite chord progressions! I will create some ideas for you. Seriously it could be an interesting experiment!

Have a lovely week.