Nightstep

Clarity

The main focus of this song was keeping the instruments distinct and "legible"; that is, minimizing the amount of overlap between elements in the song.  I forced myself to only have a few active instruments at any one time and that they occupied a different part of the frequency spectrum.  The result is what I think is a very clear song which doesn't suffer for the lack of "action".

More Guitars

Once again, I come back to sampling guitars!  Part of the reason is that there is an abundance of samples to choose from out there for guitar.  But the fact is that they really have just such a great audio character.  In any event, I went to town on this one carefully slicing up a very long bluesy sample and putting it back together in a way that fit the song.  This part took quite some time as I wanted to have all the played notes or syllables available to me when composing the guitar parts.  Ultimately I ended up using maybe a dozen individual samples from all over the original recording.

Spectral Layered Sampling

Logic Pro has this pretty great sampler called "Alchemy" which is limited in some ways but absolutely powerful in others.  One of the features that helped me come up with the textural sound at the beginning and end was the ability to simultaneously sample two parts of the same piece of audio then "bow" their playback (basically a yo-yo playback where you play forward to the end, then backward to the beginning again, repeatedly).  I coupled all this with a tempo-locked rate of 1/4 which, with a bit of effects, produced what I think is a really interesting texture.  It reminded me a bit of walking down streets with several bars and clubs all playing different muffled music that blends together; this mostly informed the name "Nightstep".

Samples Used

From landr.com:

• TS Cymbal Fake
• DN RS Breeze Music 02 KeyEbmin 74bpm
• 04 Electric Guitar SG1 02 - 120 BPM - Cm
• CRHV6 14 Em 116 bpm - (Full Loop) Guitars, Synth
• Mojave 120 Male Vocal Aahs Em Normalized