Since I've had experience recording from days past, and knew most of the basics, I knew I could jump right in and start recording, but I needed to pick a DAW that I would want to work with for a while.
I've never really had first-hand experience with Pro Tools, and the cost has always been prohibitive, so I was in the market for some consumer DIY recording tools. I'd already done a previous scoring project using N-Track, which I liked - a good home-spun DAW maintained by a small team at a cheap price, and they seemed to love their product. Plus, there was a fairly active user community.
But since I was going to focus on electro, I decided to try Frooty Loops instead, which, by all accounts, is pretty good for techno and other electronica. And I did like how easy it was to program patterns at first. But beyond that... I got lost. The rest of it just wasn't intuitive to me. I don't have a lot of previous experience with sequencers (unless Cakewalk on DOS counts), so maybe that was it. But recording audio and automation in FL Studio was really giving me a headache. It's much more focused on sequencing and sampling than recording straight audio. Not the hybrid I was looking for.
And then I found Reaper, and new I'd found what I needed. A wildly configurable, affordable, "a track can be anything plugged into anything" DAW with a fairly intuitive interface; that had a bunch of in-house and community developers working on it; and a big user base, developing all kinds of music. So I dove in.
At first, I started working on a straight, 4x4 "rock/pop" song, just to get my legs. I needed to learn some drum sequencing, how to get good audio into my machine with my new setup, and to play around with a bunch of new VSTi synths I'd found.
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However, the song kind of flagged, as I really hadn't had a plan with it, or even lyrical ideas, so it stalled, and I realized I needed to pull back a little bit, and plan something out conceptually. Plus, I didn't want to do rock/psychedelia at first - I wanted to do something more physical, like dubstep. (Yes, I know. But it's fun.)
So, I started to work on some basic rhythms. And then I was monkeying around with a synth and found a fairly good wind sound, and then the idea for a song about a yeti having a bad day sprung into my head, and it just kind of went from there.
After a while I realized I could combine a whole bunch of aspects into this song: writing, voice work, foley, sound design, and hone my skills at creating something possibly danceable. Plus, the idea was to have 4-5 separate "movements" in it, which would each have a different musical style, while keeping to the same main beat.
Current version:
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The main drum samples are from EZDrummer, which is great and has some very nice clean kits in it, but which I think I'll grow out of fairly soon. It has a bunch of nice patterns, but I've mostly sequenced my own at this point. Then I put together a nice bass line that felt "yeti-like" to me and threw it together. At this point, I needed to start telling the story.
The footsteps in the snow were just me punching and scrunching a bag of rice, and pitch-shifted down and re-EQd. The yeti's voice was pitch-shifted down, with a tiny layer of an octave up as well. I think it came out pretty well.
After introducing the "character", I needed to move on to the Temple sequence, where the yeti encounters a Buddhist temple in which monks are chanting. Lots of fun to make this transition, and to layer my chants a number of times and have it sound fairly large. Since this is mostly a cartoon, I didn't get much more complicated than "Om Mani Padme Hum", but I think it sounds good. Most of the sequences in this project are going to be more representative than authentic, and slightly cartoony, anyway.
I had originally thought I would use recorders, pennywhistles, or simple flutes to add some melody to the Temple sequence (which I have a bunch of), but none of them sounded right. I knew the Tibetans had some reed instruments, but didn't know their name. Well, they're called gyalings, and they sound like a cross between a clarinet and bagpipes. But I couldn't find a synth instrument for the gyaling, so I set out to imitate it using a crappy oboe sound I'd found on one of the synth plugins I had. Five hours later, I had a pretty good facsimile in place. Still need to fine-tune the performance itself, but I think the sound works.
To be continued...
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