Gliding

February 03, 2018

I wrote this while we were in Lake Tahoe at my parents’ house for Christmas, around the time I resolved to make more music in my life. My parents gave me a Korg nanoKey2 as a Christmas gift to use with Reason while traveling. I ended up making a lot of music on that trip to California; most of it wasn’t very good but I’ll probably end up sharing most of that here anyways. Besides, I was just trying to form the habit of making music so that I could bring routine back to Boston with me. However, I actually like how this one turned out!

When I first made this, it was not entitled “Gliding”. I gave it a name combining two artists I thought it sounded similar to, however I no longer agree with my original assessment of that. I’ve been thinking about how these various pieces of music make me feel when I listen to them, and this one made me feel like gliding through a sea of clouds. There’s a certain feeling of freedom and adventure that really kicks in for me when the drums and strings start playing. Until this piece of music, nothing I made really transported me anywhere, but I found myself in the sky with this one.

I know I said in my last post that my acoustic drums are really bad, but I’m sorta into these drums. It’s a dry brush kit, and I feel like at least in this setting, the sampled-ness is not completely distracting! I also like the string pad I used, which feels rare, since it’s hard for me to find decent sounding strings in my sound banks. And then I potentially ruined it towards the end when I introduced that lead line that floats over everything. Or not! I’ll leave it up to listeners to decide. I do think I have a problem with adding lead lines to everything though. Note to self: if I find myself searching for a good synth lead as a “final touch”, I might already be done.