#unusually for me i will b drafting this BEFORE posting it at 4am

[nosfelixculpa]

Prompto, Gladio, Ignis. I leave it to you. Walk tall, my friends. FINAL FANTASY XV (2016)

[greatsandwichprince]

This is a piece I’m submitting as part of an assignment for Uni. My only source for playing it back at home in stereo was a pair of headphones with a semi-broken jack, so apologies if the panning’s a little weird - I tried.  So basically my process was this, detailed in roughly-chronological order: I originally had a COMPLETELY different theme in mind, one I’d composed a piano-only draft of many years ago, with a much more industrial and generally far darker tone in mind. However, when I was setting up my tracks in Garageband 6 and looking for good synths to use, I happened upon the bitcrushed-fifths that you hear open up this track, with pretty much the exact same melody I’d nonchalantly tapped out while trying to test the sound of it (with one difference - the last minim in the intro). I immediately realised that that descending-fanfare was rather a lot more fun that what I was planning, and just rolled with it:

R.I.P. my Original Intentions, 2019-2019, you will not be missed. Once I had that riff down, I had to figure out a good harmony to it. Due to the nature of fifth-synths, the hard work of figuring out a chord progression was already completed by accident, so I only needed to find some good counterpoints. I immediately laid down the first few notes of the synth at ~0:20, and improvised from there. This led to the creation of both the Intro and the A-section:

Now, I quickly realised I had absolutely no idea what time signature this was in. The only ‘beat’ I knew I just had to include was a 2-beat kick after every long note in the fanfare. My bars were still on the default 4/4 and there was clearly half a bar left over in each loop. 2/4 made it fit as a round number but was clearly not the actual rhythm. Eventually I figured out that it’s something in the realm of 15/4 (or rather, one bar of 3/4 followed by three bars of 4/4) but since I didn’t realise this until roughly a week after conception, if you’re wondering why the percussion doesn’t seem to follow any set bars in the first A section... well lets just say I was very tired and there’s a reason it’s called “4am Fanfare”. I still like how it sounds though, it disorients you a bit whilst still keeping it flowing:

You’ll notice that this “kick” isn’t a kick at all - it’s actually an extremely low bass-synth. I wanted to have a softer sound than a true kick for this first part (compare it to the one that carries the B-section), so I went with this. It gives a sound more like someone having a wild party but in the next house over. 

I was trying my best to keep layercaking in mind for all of this, and to keep most things generally in different ranges to the other things around it, or if that wasn’t possible then to just pan them differently - the high-strings halfway into the A-section are there solely because I realised I didn’t have anything actually playing specifically in that register. I also remembered to keep the different layers as polyrhythmic from eachother as I could, so you’ll notice that aside form the building-up on the melody in the B-section and the call-and-responce in the A’-section, most of the instruments have their emphasis on very different beats. One of the first tracks that I laid down with this in mind is the warbly one with the gated-1/16th filter that starts to follow the main ‘fanfare’ halfway through the intro. I wasn’t fully happy with the synth it had originally, so I changed it to a live-horn preset but left the filters on:

I’ll admit I’ve never done anything remotely in this sort of genre before, and I’m still not even sure what it is - is it synthwave? No it’s too modern, not 80′s enough. It’s not ambience either, there’s too much that actually grabs your attention. What I did know was that it needed a bass (and despite it following the bars perfectly, I still hadn’t realised what the time signature was). Following feedback from Damien, I doubled this up an octave below with a different bass for the A-section repeat and the A’-section. Note too that the bassline’s repeat in the A-section isn’t identical - theres a single difference. This is because I originally loved the dissonance it caused combined with the unusual harmony from the first counterpoint, but I felt it resolved a lot better with the fundamental a semi-tone lower on that chord:

Probably the most difficult thing I had to deal with was trying to execute the echoes on the extremely-80′s Jupiter trills. I wanted to have them not only cross-panned, but also a specific beat-length apart. This would likely be perfectly simple to automate in anything except GarageBand, which wouldn’t let me set the echo to the right beats using it’s native echo-settings. So, I ended up just creating 2 duplicate tracks with different amplitudes/pannings, and keying in the proper delays manually. I ended up leaving the GB echo on the final of these however, just to give it a final flourish:

Moving on to the B-section in the next post - I fear for crashing unceremoniously into the image/text limit on this one. https://greatsandwichprince.tumblr.com/post/184432459929/so-with-the-b-section-i-knew-i-had-to-have