seventh sabre "devlog" & other things, also

preface

I used to think releasing music was easy. There was a period in my life where I would release at least one e.p. per year, and was constantly working on songs and showing them to my friends. The thing about this, though, was that at this point I had never shown my work to someone who I had something to learn from, e.g. another music maker or composer or producer or what have you. And so I never got substantial criticism or feedback. I only got feedback along the lines of "Cool! It reminds me of [thing]!" which is lovely, but not productive. And so for the first couple years of my journey I felt "safe" releasing music. I wasn't worried about the mix, or the mastering, or comb filtering, or phasing, or clipping distortion, or any other pro audio things one would be worried about before releasing music, because I had no idea about any of that stuff. I just decided it was finished when I felt like it was finished and so of course there was no more work to be done, except making the cover art and uploading it.

I arrived at music school (public university music building) wide eyed and on a little too much Adderall. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had substantive observations about things that could be improved. I never received unfair criticism or hostility, and I loved participating in discussions and giving my peers feedback. There was no negative experience that caused me to stop wanting to release music, but I just started feeling more self conscious and aware of all the "mistakes" I made when I released music in the past. People could hear those! Since then, until now, I had only released one single, multifacet, after I started my undergrad program.

I want that to be different. I finished something again after a couple years, and I put it out there because I am proud of it. I want to keep doing that. 'seventh sabre' isn't perfect, but it's mine; it's me. That's good enough.

Anyways, here's some things you might find interesting.

production

I have been finding myself approaching tracks from a particular strategy that I have always followed but this year started doing a bit differently.

A fact of my music and workflow is that it is "chunk" driven, or loop-based. Most modern music is. When I am making electronic music, I like to create a self contained, looping segment of sound that on it's own might not be that interesting, but exists to be contextualized by other things. That's why the beginning of seventh sabre starts with just a simple ostinato with a filter sweep. It plays once through the entire two-part chord progression and then you never hear it like that in its entirety again throughout the rest of the song.

Here is said ostinato written out. I did not label or consciously name these chords as I worked on the music; they were given names as part of me writing this blog post. I'm sure you could nitpick which chords I decided to give sharp names and which I gave flat names, but I am less interested in being perfectly correct and more interested in why it's difficult to be sure of their "correctness" in the first place. In fact I didn't think about note names or keys or anything while writing this - I rarely do, when working in a piano roll. It is far easier to think about the spaces between notes and chords than keep track of the notes and chords themselves. In the pursuit of creativity, I see no need to do so; in the pursuit of accuracy/covers/arrangements, it's another story.

The melody I wrote is centered around the pitch Eb. For most of the song, I do not use the tonic chord Eb major (or minor*). There are only a few times when it comes in, in the second half of the chord progression. This was an intentional choice on my part to use the second half less, but I wasn't completely consciously withholding that oh-so-coveted tonic resolution on purpose. I actually only let the melody continue on over the second half of the chord progression and "resolve" once, at the end (around 2:50), which I found very satisfying. I could pretend this was all 100% intentional and r/iamverysmart r/musictheory but I am not going to. I have only found music theory jargon necessary in my process after I have already done the creative part of being musical and simply need a way to describe what I did.

*I wanted to note something regarding the tonic key in order to avoid confusion. Due to the mixed mode nature of this chord progression I can't really say the key is Eb major or minor. The melody is mostly Eb minor, but the tonic chord that occurs in the chord progression is Eb major. A lot of the music I write tends to not commit to the major/minor dichotomy. This is because I am genderfluid.

The ostinato you hear throughout the whole track is the very first thing I wrote, which the whole song developed from after. The reason the song is in seven is because, simply, the pattern felt good to me in seven note groupings. Four notes ascending, three descending, with the last note scooping below to "predict" or "prepare" the next grouping. I sent the midi out to my Roland S-1 synth and recorded the audio clip, which is then chopped and reused. From there I put together the drums and wrote the pattern. The percussion is a little unorthodox, in that I can't point to a singular style of drums that it is most similar to.

After the basic components of a "section" are mostly complete, the hardest part of the process for me takes place. Most of my music doesn't make it past this point. That point is the "development" - basically, it comes down to this: do the ideas I have on the page have enough substance to be iterated on?

In this case, I got lucky, because I realized a melody I wrote for another track that I didn't finish, "watercolor headlights" would fit perfectly (some significant adjustments were made) with this new project. It would be just different enough that if I finished the old track at some point, it would be more like a reference or point of continuity than a repeated idea. It was also at this point when I decided that a majority of the time I would use the first half of the chord progression only. A little Magical 8-bit & pan flute later, I was out of the woods.

The rest of my process involves less notes and chords, and more sound design. My music will fall flat without just the right combination of synths and samplers - the variety and structure of the song is rooted in timbral development, not harmonic/melodic development. The sound for this track that cemented it as something I knew I wanted to finish and would gel together really well was a DX7 emulation recorder patch, that I put through parallel (Ableton stock) grain delay and echo. This really made the ostinato sing. You can get the delay rack I made, as well as an audio file of that recorder sound with the delay I used in the song, here.

finishing up

I spent around a month and a half on this project in total. Or rather, it took me a month and a half from starting the project to finish and release it, which isn't too bad. Part of what was holding me back was the mix/master, and part of it was the branding.

A couple weeks ago I went to the studio I work at to work on the mix for a couple hours. I asked a couple peers for feedback, and experienced something I had not experienced at all since I started higher education. They had no notes. They said I had addressed the issues I was concerned about and that everything sat well in the mix. I was so dumbfounded by this, expecting to need to continue working on it for a while, that I decided to release it the next day, after checking the LUFs and doing a quick, hands off master (limiter on the master fader, sorry Chris).

As this had been happening, I was on my third attempt at making the cover art to release 'seventh sabre' under. It took me a while to even come up with that name and decide if I liked it. Normally names come to me pretty easy, and so does the album art, for that matter. But I struggled a bit with this one. I thought it might be fun to show some of my previous drafts.

Here is my first draft. The idea was kind of clever but left me underwhelmed in my execution. See, the octagon only has seven sides visible, but there's a space there where the eighth side would be, which was sort of a reference to the fact that sometimes there is a bar of eight instead of seven in the song. It would have been fine but I didn't love it. It also continues the geometric theme from my last single, multifacet.

Here's my second draft, clearly still unfinished. I am not a visual artist by trade, but I pride myself on making all of my own art assets and promotional material. This cover would have featured my CATWIZARD character as a knight, holding an orb and a sword. I was referencing coronation paintings, you know, where the king is holding a staff and a holy hand grenade orb thingy. Except, of course, CATWIZARD would be holding a (completely secular) sword and magic orb. Monarchies are evil but they kind of went off with the stick and ball coronation thing. Anyways, I maintain that this idea is really badass but I lack the artistic skill to really make it work, but I have been learning how to 3D sculpt and made a pretty okay CATWIZARD model, so I might be able to pull off a 3D rendered version of this concept someday, or commission an artist to help me.

Here, of course, is the final cover art. I uploaded the timelapse here so you can see my process. Drawing a black hole is hard, but I thought it would be cooler than a planet, although I'm not really sure it reads as a black hole. I am at peace with how this one came out, not because it's perfect, but because it's done, and I like it. Maybe you'll find that inspiring - I think more people should make their own promotional art.

Here's the aforementioned 3D model I've been working on this week of my character. Hopefully this goes somewhere; I would really like to use it for art assets/promotional graphics in the future. (Maybe even animations...?)

If you liked 'seventh sabre' and want access to some of the parts I used to make it, you can find a small sound pack I made here for free download. <]:3