Dying Ghosts

Layering

The whole exercise with this song was layering.  I wanted to see how many instruments I could add before things felt overwhelming or muddy.  There's nothing really fancy going on here, just a 2-bar chord progression in Em.  This song was somewhat inspired by the later half of Daft Punk's Giorgio by Moroder insofar as using the orchestral bits and, in no small part, by to the message.

Core Learnings

Frequency Allocation

Ultimately, to keep instruments from smothering each other, there needs to be enough "room" in the general frequency space they occupy, and importantly that includes their harmonics.  The reason that orchestral music works so well is that each instrument in an orchestra "owns" a piece of the frequency spectrum.  Of course, some will inevitably overlap but their harmonics, which dictate their timbre, are such that, even when played together there is usually enough space to differentiate them.

Human perception of the amplitude of certain frequencies can complicate the matter (see Equal-Loudness Contours) by requiring some frequency ranges to be boosted overall to make some instruments more audible.  I found that I would usually boost the harmonics of an instrument while increasing its overall level if it was predominantly in the higher frequencies.

Lastly, though it may sound obvious, providing instruments more dedicated space to play their notes helps keep things understandable.  The more pronounced instruments were given portions of the bar where the other pronounced instruments would not be playing (or, at least, playing less loudly).

Samples Used

None!  This was done entirely with instruments that come with Logic Pro, though I did tweak some of the synthesizer parts.