any genre, any time length, any format. solo projects, projects with bands, one-off mp3s, anything!
as musicians, ideally we want to make music that we enjoy, and if others also do, that's awesome. i'm sure most of you have at least one standout track you've worked on that you're really proud of and want people to listen to!
i'll start with what is my absolute favorite off my latest Noctoran release, "Reflection of the Pale Moon's Eye" from the Thy Curses We Bear Eternal demo in April of 2023:
as the closer of this black metal demo, i really feel like i nailed the feel and the production that i wanted in this song. the riffs don't particularly diverge much from their structure, but i think it really works for the sort of raw-but-atmospheric vibe i was going for with this material.
i'm also really happy with the drum arrangements; there's a sense of flow that i wanted to nail between the start and looping into the main riff with the super aggressive blast beats. it's also the only song on the demo that has a slower, more doomy sort of dirge feeling to it a little after the middle. i am also really happy with how the vocals turned out, going between the shrill highs, deep lows, and the moments where i just scream my lungs out.
overall i've been really happy with this track, and it also feels really good to play live. i think you've accomplished making a truly great track when it gets stuck in your own head.
mine is probably the track "lost woods" from my album LP Zero, which i did most of in late 2016.
a lot of songs from this period either started out as things i intended to make as actual songs with singing and not just instrumental pieces, or they were random sketches/bits i had lying around that i repurposed into video game soundtrack work i did. this one was the former - it was a sort of glitchy, sort of suspenseful tune kinda influenced by a certain period of Björk with high strings on top of a sort of melancholy melody, except more lo-fi and minimal. it was about 1:30 long or something and i had it sitting around for several years, but didn't know what to do with it.
when i was going to finish up the last few tracks for LP Zero i basically decided to grab the few things i had lying around to try and do something with them. and this one was the first up. but i had no idea what the hell to do with it. that 90 seconds felt pretty self-contained and i didn't know where to go from there. i was listening to a lot of the album "Engravings" by the artist Forest Swords at the time and i felt like that kind of tribal/woodsy influence would work well to this track... and i could extend it into conveying this sort of surreal woods environment similar to the "lost woods" in Zelda. i grew up around a lot of dark woods in a pretty rural area so that kind of imagery is very potent for me. i also considered naming it "the endless forest" cuz there's a Tale of Tales thing named that, but i decided "lost woods" was a better and more concise title.
i ended up solving the problem of not knowing what to do with that first melody by not really solving it at all. i made a bunch of little sketches by noodling around on the keyboard using the same project file with the same instruments and in the same key, but not entirely related to what was going in that first second. eventually i had a few parts and i just kinda strung them together. the first melody (which is developed a little more from the original sketch) kind of descends into something more vague and ambiguous and impressionistic. one of these parts references the earlier melody, but more subtly and transposed in a different way. i really played up that sort of Forest Swordsy sound, in a more loose and lo-fi way in these sections too. the detuned flute sound i was able to get and used heavily really was the key to conveying that kind of mood of a sort of vaguely whimsical, vaguely sinister flutist creature.
but the reason this is my favorite thing i've done is the way it breaks down at the end. the glitchy sound fx and tribal drums sort of just take over everything and the strings sustain which i feel like feels like the fabric of reality of this place tearing apart. i played a bunch of nonsense on the keys in this part that was pared down in editing to be a little more strategic and less random. then at the very end, a completely unrelated melody kicks in - one i just had lying around, with no way to integrate it. instead of just end the song right after the breakdown, i threw that melody in at the end song just fades out on that while the flute noodles vaguely with it and vaguely in its own world over the top. i just feel like it has this interesting jarring and mysterious effect that really tied the whole piece together. and it felt like a new sort of universe to me creatively i had never explored in this way - different ideas that felt like they still belonged together. so maybe is something i hope to explore more of in the future.
anyway, i'm sorry if this sounds overly vague - it's hard to describe the music in clear terms. there are also elements i think i'd do less of now, like the high glitchy sound/distortion on a lot of the track. but i was also just kinda going intuitively and not thinking about the technical stuff or what genre it fit into as much, which was kind of the point of the whole process.