Electronica – Luke Lindsley

<a href="http://east-of-earth.bandcamp.com/track/curiosity">Curiosity by East of Earth</a>

Curiosity is a medium to fast tempo song rocking at 140 BPM. For this song I wanted to incorporate a variety of different elements: ambient pads, natural sounding piano, pizzicato synth, organic percussion loops and soft vocals. The collaboration of these elements resulted in a mellow electropop song which was something I’ve been interested in writing for a while.

To begin, I started by creating an ambient pad progression which can be heard from the beginning of the song and played throughout in entirety. The ambient pitches I use are (B, E, F#, G#) which I retrieved from the major scale of B using the infamous I, IV, V, and VI chords. These chords (The Power of 4 Chords) lay the foundation for the song and create an uplifting and emotive feeling.

Next, I incorporated a simple piano lick to go over the ambient progression for both the verse and chorus parts. The piano is ultimately what gives the song the mid to fast range tempo and further provides a strong backbone for the melodic parts yet to be added. With the backbone completed, I went on to create the song structure.

When first listening to this song one might guess I’m using the song structure ABABCB, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. I would classify this song as ABAABBCBBD. The reason for this is because both the verse and chorus are double in length after (0:54). The greatest advantage of this song structure is that it gives a glimpse of the entire song early on (AB) and then it expands in more detail as it goes on (AABB). Finally there’s (C) which is just the ambient pad and vocals, the chorus once again, and (D) the outro of the song. You can hear the outro of the song with the change of percussion at (3:12) and the zoning out of multiple instruments.

With the song structure in place, I could focus on defining the main parts of the song: the verse (A) and chorus (B). For the beginning two verses, I wanted to define them by three things: the ambient progression, the piano lick and the vocal melody. The final verse includes these three traits as well, but adds percussion into the mix which you can hear at (1:22).

To define the chorus, in addition to the three elements and percussion, I added a second percussion element and two sampled melodic synth parts. Check out SamplePhonics for some great sample packs to add some flavor into your music. In addition, in order to focus purely on the instrumentation and let it shine, I removed all vocals from the chorus.

As per my usual songwriting habits, I finished with writing the lyrics:

Let’s lose our normality
And get a taste of insanity
Why do I flee from this feeling?
That world is calling

Everyone’s the same
Can’t seem to escape from their old ways
Free will’s to blame
But we weren’t born to regret anything

Forever and ever we live our lives on fire
Facetious desire we hold our dreams up high
One more step until I’m free
One last breath to breathe

Funny how the truth works out
When you open your mind and see
You can’t believe the simple things
If you have a bit of curiosity

This was an incredibly personal song to write. It’s a song about failure, passion, love and understanding. It’s a song about evolving as a person and reflecting on that growth. My goal as always, however, is to leave the interpretation up to the listener. To be perfectly honest, this has been one of my favorite songs to write lyrically in a while. I think my words reveal exactly what I wanted to say. That wraps up this songwriting 101 for the day. Until next time!

Songwriting 101: Waves

<a href="http://east-of-earth.bandcamp.com/track/waves">Waves by East of Earth</a>

Welcome to the second installment of my Songwriting 101 series where I dissect and explain the rationale behind the art of writing music. Today I’ll be going over a new Electronica song I recently wrote titled “Waves.” Let’s get started.

Waves is a slow tempo song that keeps a steady pace of 75 BPM. Slower tempos are often associated with styles like ambient, jazz, and soul in addition to some newer electronica genres such as downtempo and chill-out. These styles are frequently known for their relaxing and sensual feel. And this was exactly my aim while creating Waves. Electronica music, more than any other type, often begins with defining the tempo before doing anything else.

After deciding on my tempo of 75 BPM, I began to build a core foundation with a groove. For Waves, I decided on forming a groove around a simple drum beat and synthesizer. This core foundation is than repeated throughout the rest of the song, with the exception of a quick break in the middle of the song from (1:29 – 1:42).

With the core foundation created, I went on to form a song structure. I ultimately decided on going with a very simple structure of ABAB. For this song, “A” represents verse and “B” represents chorus. The reason for choosing this simple structure was because of the amount of instrumentation I planned on adding to the song. As a general rule of thumb, when I plan for 4+ instruments, the better it is to keep the song structure simple. In contrast, with less instrumentation, I like to make the song structure more complex to compensate. For Waves, I used 10 different instruments (including my voice) in total for the piece.

With the song structure in tact, the next step was to decide on how I wanted to define the verse and the chorus. After all, what’s the point of creating a song structure if there is no difference between the parts? Here’s how I broke the two parts down:

Verse: The verse is defined by the build of instrumentation. The beginning of each verse begins with the core foundation (groove), and gradually adds instrumentation every two bars. The end of the verse is recognized only when the entire set of instrumentation plays simultaneously (0:51 and 2:33).

Chorus: The chorus is defined by the simultaneous instrumentation and the vocal lyrics (1:04 and 2:46). The end of the chorus is recognized when the bass begins to play by itself (1:29 and 3:11).

I should also note that there is a short outro at the end of the song. The reason why I would still classify the song as ABAB over ABABA is because the length of this part is insignificant and it doesn’t fit with how I categorized my verses. For this reason, intros and outros (unless significant parts of the song), shouldn’t be included in the song structure.

Finally, let’s look at the lyrics:

Idealistic, utopian dream
The Sun and the moon blend into
Pools of emotion, A feeling waves
Can’t you see everything I do?

Like I mentioned in my first Songwriting 101, lyrics should make the listener curious. For this song, because of the minimal amount of lyrics, I really wanted to paint a picture in the listeners head. In order to do this I used several descriptive words like “idealistic” and “utopian” with words that everyone can relate to like “sun” and “moon” and “emotion.” As another general rule of thumb, I purposely like to be more vague for songs with a lot of lyrics because there are more words to play with. For songs like Waves that have few lyrics, detail is king.

Hopefully this 101 has been of some use to you. Make sure to check out my previous article Songwriting 101: Goodbye and to follow my blog for more songwriting tips. Thanks for reading!

Songwriting 101: Curiosity

Songwriting 101: Waves