Sonar Vortex

This week the Disquiet Junto proposed writing a track following the local weather forecast.

As you can see, it was a nice day. I took this snapshot soon after the Junto went live, then went swimming.

Summers haven't felt so hot since the heatwave in '09 but the current season is warming back up again after cooling down at Christmas. Looks like it'll reach 40 next week.

Anyway, this Junto was rewarding for me creatively, I had a couple of chord progressions that took shape and a melody that I started to write lyrics to suit too. It went from being rap to a ballad to a few permutations of electronic music before this version.

In the end this progression in E worked best and I experimented with synth sounds, starting three Live files from scratch in the process. The portion of the forecast in green goes quicker than the forecast in black, as a way of introducing a chord change with a little melodic part to loop back to the start.

The chord changes reflect the points on the line, from left to right: E, D#, A, F#, E, B, C, D, C, B, A -- those last few notes are quick and, now I look at it, the line seems a bit wonky.

After programming these changes it was a matter of making the track dynamic and interesting, adding drums and some modulation. I also made a few little changes to the MIDI loop in places, which repeats through three synthesisers in the track.

Sounds come from Massive, Absynth, one of Live's drumkits (saturated something?) and this really nice 808 sample set.