PANTONE 314C is meant to have a kind of blues melody. The utmost inspiration/influence behind the creation of the piece is David Gibbs, Full Sail University Portfolio 1 Professor. Being a piano performer never lead me to the blues path; every Tuesday or Thursday morning that I heard him improvise before class, lead me to this creation. This piece is made to have its voice and path, not meant to have lyrics. Serves mainly as background/instrumental music, it touches the genres of blues, indie, and alternative.
The piece is created in the Logic Pro DAW written in standard time and has a tempo of 80bpm. It is meant to be slow-paced like a blues. The drums reproduce the sound of a vintage kit; I incorporated a kick, snare, close hi-hat, crash cymbal, and low toms. The first drum loop is meant to give a blues feeling solely; the second one is mainly to highlight an interlude part with a different rhythm than the whole track. The bass track is an electronic synth bass sound that follows the chord progression and wells as the drums’ two main rhythms throughout the piece. The choice of sound was mainly because of both (the drums and the bass).
As far as Harmony and Melody, the piece is written in C minor. There are two distinct chord progressions in the track. The first chord progression is Cm, Eb, Ab, and Fm7; the second chord progression is Cm, Eb, Bb, and Cm. The melody is meant to follow a blues shape and is led by 2 Synth keyboards and solos of a Pianica. The panic on this track was mere because the instruments’ excellent sound perfectly fits the genre.
There is only one recorded mic track on this project: the Pianica (Track #9), two synthesized tracks that I created, and a sampled track. The recording process of the Pianica took many tries; in my opinion, what’s essential is mic position and gain plus preparation. The first synthesized track is the «FM Piano Synth Layer» (Track #10), which serves the melody. For its creation, I used an ESP and chose to use the sub oscillators -1 and -2; modified the sound to have a low resonance and frequency, left a minor attack and augmented the delay, sustain chorus and overdrive of the ESP. The second synthesized sound, «BACK MELODY» (Track 11), comes from an ES2; to create the sound, I opened two oscillators -sine wave and FM synthesis- on the low frequencies. The sampled track is the «CHOPPY VOX» (Track #12) which I created with the quick sampler; I loaded a vox apple loop and sliced it to trigger different main parts of the sound.
After all of the recording and necessary creation, we enter the processing phase and mixing the piece. This creation’s two main dynamic effects were the EQ and Compressor on the pianica (Track 9). Since that was a mic recorded track, it wasn’t perfect; on the raw recording, one can hear noises of the place and my breathing during the playing. I isolated the low frequencies and compressed the sound to bring out the most in every second. As for time-based effects, the piece is based on a lot of reverb. The Pianica and melody tracks are routed to the same bus to the aux track of the reverb; the choppy vox is routed to a different aux track for its reverb of the sound. There is also a delay for the melody synth layer, which is not that notorious, but it gives it depth.
– Pantone 314C is the code for a type of blue color related to a groovy feeling as well as a mixture of calmness and trouble –
