Story of A Song: Campfire Song?

Alright!

I like to make weird compositions! This post is describing my process of composing a song aptly titled (in my head at least...) Campfire Song?

My process of composition? Well, I know it's good to have one, some people start with a melody, some with harmony, some with lyrics. The answer is I DON'T KNOW. I can start with one the things I mentioned or it could also be something like "what about a hip-hop song with an industrial beat" or "I am in the mood of some saxophone" or "I just watched scenes of The Room, let's do a song about that". I am sure this is the reason I don't get anywhere with most of my ideas, well who cares I like it...

Ok so this song, how did it start?

I mostly play on my electric guitar, but I also have a very shitty acoustic (about ~60$, so...) with exceptionally good strings on it. I sometimes just strum on acoustic trying to do something without any thought or when I am waiting for a code to finish compiling. 

This song started with such a scenario.

I was trying to find a cool lead transition from a C chord to Am, well I was unsuccessful. However, I found a "chord" which sounded cool between C and Am, I didn't know what that chord was...... So I went here (I often end up here) and put in the notes I was playing, and lo and behold it was Bm with some weird stuff (see image on right). Ok, so I have C, Bm-whatever and Am, not feeling adventurous I just put Am7 at the end. That's our 4/4 progression.

More twiddling with it and I finally reach my chord progression, possibly the best chord progression of all time (alteast this week..).

C6(11) , Bm(11,b6,b9) , Am , Am7

Cool! Very Cool!

So I like this progression so much that I just keep playing it, and coz it is pretty bad acoustic it has some weird fuzz and rough/lo-fi sounding elements that I love quite a bit. I am keeping my playing deliberately sloppy which gives rise to this very amazing sloppy but organic aesthetic, like a campfire guitar without any cringy singing. I am in love with it (I loved this aesthetic partly coz at the time I was digging into Glow Pt 2 by The Microphones, an amazing album. A certified classic at this point give it a listen.) and that's when I knew I want to record this.

But where is this going? Let's just keep it LINEAR, which is a song structure that follows the same pattern the entire song. 

I did the most obvious thing, I started playing soft and gradually increasing the intensity with slightly changing strum patterns till it becomes really loud. I kept internal timing without a reference, so the tempo is almost constant again adding to the sloppy aesthetic. 

This sounds cool but is not enough, additionally, I need an ending. So after playing around I arrived at the transition I liked.

I play gradually increasing the intensity and slightly dynamic strumming --> Reach max intensity play for a bar --> Immediately slow the playing down to the lowest and fade out --> 1/4 bar silence --> start with max intensity again play for bar and end with a smooth slowing of intensity.

Ok so now I have a solid middle for a song, now I need a backbone, I add a simple bassline which elevates it. But now I need something organic playing in the background which will be noticeable when the silence comes in, keeping the theme in mind I use an autumn sounds sample I found for free online, which works very nicely.

Now what the track needs is a kick, which is mostly called a bridge. I call it a part of a song that causes one of your eyebrows to raise. Me being a fairly contrarian as a person, I think this translates into my music as well, I wanted to find something which cannot possibly be played at a campfire. The answer = Orchestra. After the fake stop in the song I bring in the acoustic instrumentation with a full strings section and after a bar, I put in a SAX SOLO that I am pretty proud of. 

Oh Yeah, and BTW this is why the song is called Campfire Song?, the question mark after the most generic name ever.

Now the track is ready, the rest is just dressing. I add several different percussion but never overshadowing the main rustic guitar. Added a layer of acoustic guitar lead and an electric guitar touch up. I added a prepared guitar track as well to add in a cool percussion but it's not an important part. At the very end the song gets discordant and ends in that manner, I though it was (and usually I think like this) cool to add some out of scale notes to a pretty rustic and lighthearted track otherwise. 

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Now comes the important part, mixing! For me, it is a very visual process so I drew it as best as I could. Think a stage with right and left speakers represented on x axis and y axis is the distance from the listener (can also think in terms of volume).

Ok I see it is terrible but bear with me, few people sitting at campfire playing their instrument and you listening to them? Think about that and it makes sense now, all I had to figure out is the placement of the orchestral instruments.

Some production stuff later, reverb, echo , pan ..... EQ, EQ, EQ, EQ...

And we have a song ready!

HAVE A LISTEN!

I think I spent about 2-3 hours actually recording the different parts, about 2 more hours of mixing and production. And a whole 2 days or more with the ideation. This was a fun track, I have not done something like this before and the drum free composition is very very freeing.