'SATURNALIUS' - NEW ORIGINAL MUSIC! - ELECTRONIC/AMBIENT/SPACEY + THEORY WALKTHROUGH!

grapthar (74)in #music • 6 years ago

Overview of all 4 tracks.

This is another instrumental which

I wrote around the same time as the previous song I shared. No percussion, just 4 instruments, 2 of which fade in for the first half of the track, then we close with all 4 of them. Kind of a sudden ending, I figured it would eventually either flow into the next track, or some kind of outro at some point. Until then, it is what it is. Let's get into the walkthrough!

Listen to Saturnalius here.

I'll just do the tracks in

Number order, although they were written a little out of order. Track 1 is our bass line, which turned out cool. Because of the glide/portamento effect, I was able to get those strange tones out of it. Essentially, it just holds a low C for the entire track, and other notes above it (in C minor) cause it to pull up and back down, giving us the strange rhythm the bass line has. Check out the screenshot below, and you can see/hear what's going on at the same time.

Track 1, the bass, described above.

Next is Track 2

which provides the main chords for the whole track. I really like the timbre of this synth, super saw lead, worked nicely with the spacey, 80s theme of the song. This instrument basically plays a high and low C the whole time, while the notes in the middle move around: Eb, Ab, A natural (which gives us some dissonance), then down to F# (the tritone, even more dissonance. The second time around, instead of Eb, we play an E natural, which gives us a full C major chord, but the notes that follow are all identical. I like this progression, it's sort of confused as to whether or not it wants to be Major or Minor, with the Ab/A natural, and Eb/E natural.

Listen to Saturnalius here.

Track 2, described above.

The last two tracks,

#3 and #4, both fade in through the entire first half of the song, and then continue at a higher volume all the way to the end. Track 3 just plays and holds a C, but this instrument has some cool effects on it, which fill in the whole song a lot more. Track 4 also plays a C the whole time, but the instrument here has a Chord effect, that arpeggiates random notes off of the single note you're playing. It isn't super audible here, blended in pretty well, but it definitely adds some weirdness to the thing.