today's daily song post is a doozy! a whopper! a real whang-danger! it's a long tune, easily in my top 5 favorite songs i have made and probably number 1 in most time consuming category. strap in, buckle up, or whatever it is you do in your song-listening vehicle to keep safe
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today's song is: I'll Never Bid You Farewell, written in pxtone (specifically the ptcollab version)
nine minute post-rock epic for pxtone!!!
well, i just said this, but this was an incredibly time consuming song to make from start to finish. first, the start: the instruments i used (piano, a couple guitars, violins, cellos, drumset) were all multi-sampled around every 4th or so, but pxtone isn't exactly built to handle multi-sampling in a reasonable manner. you can have 100 samples (they're called voices) and 50 simultaneous channels (called units) in a song, and each of the channels can have its voice changed... so depending on where the different lines went, i changed the voice appropriately to whatever sample was meant for that specific range. i also did the multi-sampling manually by recording plugins in FL, lol. i did some resampling to get them all pitched so that i wouldn't have to shift any octaves, which adds a little extra crunch to pxtone's already-kinda-aliased sound; i think it works well though! oh and the field recordings were taken outside my door in summer 2021; the few reversed bits were done at the very end by reversing the render, cutting out and importing.
another fun thing about pxtone is that there's no tempo change or time signature change functions within the song, just global settings... but this song has a whole bunch of different tempos and meters. so for the most part, i kept the tempo changes proportionally related to the original and also ignored the barline.
all of this meant that i had to do a lot of planning before even plunking down the first note, from the sample selection (there's exactly 100!) to the composition. i sketched out several different sections at the piano first and wrote down some stuff in my planning document about the ways i wanted everything to fit together; for the most part i stuck to it, although of course in the process of really writing the piece, new ideas emerged as well. i realized pretty quickly that i still needed to put together some kind of skeleton in the pxtone project, so i wrote out 1-2 instruments' worth of parts - whatever the main idea was for each section - and gradually went back and filled everything in with details and fuller arrangement (not really in order, either!).
most of it is built around two different themes, both of which are actually ancient dami-tunes that i wrote around age 18-19 (aka over one century ago) but completely re-imagined and re-written for the modern day! this is the same treatment that i gave The Last Few Months of Our Lives, which was written around the same time. all of them are really heart-on-sleeve type stuff that meant a lot to me at the time and it was interesting to find and revisit that state of mind so many years down the line... i wasn't sure if i could do it, and honestly partway through writing the song i despaired and almost gave up. i found a pocket of determination somewhere though and persevered and like 100 hours of work later here is something i'm incredibly proud of.
p.s. the end references the ending of one of my favorite love songs :o)