Technical Details

 AUDIO NAME: FOCUS.22
ALBUM NAME: Reqs <-- Newgrounds
TIME SIGNATURE: 3/4 & 4/4
KEY SIGNATURE: D Major & E Melodic Minor (sometimes)
COMPOSITION BPM: 180
TIMES LMMS DIED: 19 Times

Author Notes

Here we hear the artist lose control of their online persona that nobody thought was even a thing. What a dips**t.

So funny story I cut my ring finger on a shaving blade right after completing the song. Though luckily it happened after I was done, unfortunately it means typing a lot in the author notes is a pain. I cut it real bad.

But despite this, I'm still going to try anyways, cuz I got some things to say.

Firstly, voices. I haven't done voices since like a year ago and it shows. Not to mention I was trying to voice act with sugary drinks... I've never thought the mic could pick up on so many disgusting sounds of me just smacking my lips subconsciously.

I also accidentally did a noise reduction on one of the samples and lost the original file. It was somewhat fine, except the occasional crackling ended up being really distracting, so I artificially added noise to the sample. I mean I could've re-recorded the line, after all it's not even a full sentence, but it also meant I had to change like 20 variables to sync things up again so...

Speaking of being a pain in the ass, the piano. For some ungodly reason whenever LMMS crashed (which happened often), the volume of the pianos would change to become too loud or too quiet. It was literal hell to deal with. I also wanted to use a vinyl effect that came with LMMS but that thing is borked and almost took out my eardrums on numerous occasions.

Next I want to talk about is the gimmick. Last one was all about the 3/4 4/4 switches, this one not so much. Instead the gimmick here is the style/genre changes. The joke here is that the main focus is never achieved. That's about all that I want to talk about it, only because I can't think of anything more at the top of my head.

If you listen in any capacity, you'll notice the similar instruments and structure(at least in the beginning), and a few motifs from the previous track. This was fully intentional to show the "relationship" this track has to the previous, sort of like a "sibling" or a "spin-off", or if there's anything about the final part, even a "prequel" (that was started after the previous song). Bonus points if you recognize the motif of a much older song. This second motif is a callback to my attempt at multiple different styles done across five tracks. Though it was unintentional at first (before I even fully embraced the idea of having different styles in this song), I ended up keeping it as it ended up being rather relevant; deeper meaning blah blah thoughtfulness wahoo. And on top of all that, this is my first time I deliberately used 4 note chords. I'm so maybe proud of myself I think.

What else do I want to talk about... let's see.. AH the "jazz-like" section. I've learnt a lot since Rest Assured, and I made sure to show that to some extent... even though I opted to use it as a backing track for my depreciating meta joke. One of the things I improved on (that may not have mattered in the end) was humanization. All manually done by mouse (I'm never getting back that 2 hours). Another thing was the brush snare thing to put it closer to a jazz drumset. And another, most noticeably, the instrument panning, inspired by my favorite Oscar Peterson Trio album "We Take Requests".

Finally, I want to show you something. Here's the project file(s) for this track.

Why so many copies? I made one each time LMMS crashed or whenever I cleaned up the project... 80% of those are from crashes that I wasn't sure was more up to date than my last save. The program also crashed more times than the number of copies I made. That's what I get for being impatient and using the nightly build.

That's it, I'm tired, my finger hurty, I'm going to sleep now and hope my finger recovers. Bye.

Author Comment Ending

Thanks fer listening! While you're here why don'cha take a gander at the rest of my music?

A comment would be appreciated too! I take requests!