Yeesh, I was cutting it really close to the deadline! I started this track shortly after the round began, yet didn't export the "final" track till today. I put final in quotes because, while I learned a lot of new things and pushed the threshold of my sound, I also ended up running low on time and energy as usual and saw a lot of my old flaws rearing their ugly heads again.

The most interesting feature of this track is the granular bass. In my last song I used a glitchy granulized version of the track as the intro. I wanted to expand more on that, so I experimented with throwing different samples into fruity granulizer. Eventually I landed on a bass that, with some knob fiddling and track flattening/rearranging (+ a bunch of effects), produced the basses. I honestly stumbled onto it by chance, so I was really excited when things started coming together.

But then I started getting into problems. I wanted to do a better job of controlling the low end this time by cutting the subs from the mid bass and adding a sub layer, but the loose unquantized nature of the bass pattern made it near impossible to make a sub that matched so I ended up with just a regular old sidechained sub. I'd experimented with things like using the fruity peak controller to let the mid basses control the sub bass, but there was a weird latency and overall the bass wasn't sounding right :( I DID use mid-side EQ for the first time, which is something I hadn't known about previously. I'm also being more liberal with sending my tracks through other busses to do things like keeping the reverb off the dry signal and making the main sub mono and clean but have a wider grittier layer.

The arrangement is also kinda doodoofeces, I focused on the drops and EQ for like 90% of the time and then struggled to do all the other things like intro, outro, break, b section, ear candy, drum variety, etc by the deadline. That's also why the calm break in the middle is so basic (uuuh I meant to say that the stark contrast from complex to simple is actually a reflection on how far I've come as a music producer orsomethinlikethatheuheuef).

I'm still producing on a borrowed laptop so even though I flattened things it was beginning to crunch quite a bit. I ended up not even using any izotope eq or any heavy plugins like that. The transitions were pretty rough too, I couldn't come up with any good fills or ear candy. This song was supposed to have like a hardstyle bit and then a DnB bit and there were a bunch of layers I had playing in my head as I worked on the song but never got the chance to get into the actual song like little vox things and stuff like that.

My bracket has some really good orchestral/cinematic entries so I fear this is the end for me lol but I had fun this year! I definitely want to keep working on this track but also I know if I do I'll just be tinkering forever until I ruin it so I might just let it rest. Hope you enjoy!