On the Hobnob with Gilly

a songlet written in 120 minutes or less

For new visitors: I occasionally set myself up with the challenge to write, record and produce a songlet (not a full song) in the space of 120-minutes, starting from scratch. I try to limit the song to about a minute in length.

As a result, quality varies greatly and I don’t promise that there are any hits that will arise of this personal challenge. The quality over time will vary dramatically, depending on how my creativity level is faring for the day.

Last night, I was modestly inspired by having read about the Nine Inch Nails song, “Closer” [“I want to f*ck you like an animal/You bring me closer to god”]. I liked the feel of the drum, that kick/snare walk. So that’s where I started for tone. The end result, of course is nothing at all like the borrowed inspiration, as you’ll soon discover.

For those of you less interested in the songlet’s construction, here’s that audio. If it does not appear in your WordPress Reader or browser, please visit this post on the full site to listen. [edit: back to the old boring audio player that works in Reader on web and in-app instead of the neato-groovy one. *sigh]

The first twelve seconds are my personal variation on that drum beat with a fade-in of a complimentary rhythm on a guitar. As you can hear, my intentions were originally in line with the sonic quality of that song. Crunch and heavy on-beat rhythm. The guitar is actually a waveform synth meant to sound like a saturated guitar inspired by Hendrix [Patch name: “Kiss the Sky”] and sequenced G5/D5 progression, with incidental C5/A5/F5.

Aside: AI informs me this is a “Circle of Fifths progression — with a twist!” My theory is a little on the rusty side (which is why I asked AI), but the progression is in the key of C major/A relative minor and follows the progression of V-VI-II-I-II-IV and back to V to rinse/repeat. The apparent “twist” is my decision to go V-VI, however briefly. A standard variation would go to II right off from V. I’m trying to refresh my memory on such things when I do these songlets, so bear with me when I post these asides. If they sound like nonsense, they probably are.

I actually wrote the melody next, but arranged it so that the bass lines came in next. The fade in on the bass is a pre-arranged sequence from my Oberheim softsynth purchase, a patch called “Berlin”. It is in the same key, but I attempted to beef up the progression my choosing complementary chords and, as a result, probably pulls the song back to the “Circle of Fifths” and removes some of that twist.

Still with me at the 24-second mark? Cool.

While I was horsing around with a melody, I had fully intended to continue to mimic Nine Inch Nails, except that I couldn’t find a patch that suited what I was looking for. With the clock ticking (I think was past the half-way mark on my 120-minute limit), I stumbled upon a voice and pattern that felt right, although it turned my aggro to something more on the lines of whimsy. Well, I figured: Who am I to argue if it sounds okay and is fun to work with? I went with whimsy. Besides, my timer was running down and I (at the time) still had to come up with bass and making is seem more like a song than a loop. And engineer and add effects so that it didn’t have that “dead” feeling (reverb is my friend…)

I changed my focus with the melody to exploring off-beat notes and on-beat spaces — not to the point of sounding reggae or ska — but to pull away from the steady beat a bit and give it more of a human element.

The melody ended up almost sounding even more like whimsy when I tweaked and sequenced the track.

I added reverb, tweaked volume levels, put some automation into the fade-ins and -outs, panned a bit here, panned a bit there, added some variation to the drums and the melody to make it feel off-kilter and… here you have another one of my songs of questionable value in your laps for a gander.

Otherwise, let me know what you think or if you have any questions. As always, I am up to exploring ideas if someone wants to toss a challenge my direction and I have the skill to chase it down (sadly, no flamenco… although, it might be an interesting challenge at some point to emulate flamenco in my own way).