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castle deep south of nowhere

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Author Comments

here's a mess of a song!!


I feel I need to find a way to incorporate elements of consistency in the music I'm trying to make, but at the same time -- i had fun, i have achieved some semblance of coalescence with this piece, and i ready 2 move on :D


(album art is Fisherman's Castle, in the Irish Bayou of Louisiana!!! Very cool little landmark you see on the highway; it's kinda dreamy!)

iu_1096393_3856063.jpg

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This is a pretty sweet piece for beep box! It sounds like with your experimental works, you are taking it to the limit with pitch bends.

I can hear a little of what you mentioned to me in struggling to structure your piece. However, you deliver a pretty consistent melodic theme and a clear outro.

It sounds like what is the problem is not knowing where to stop stacking when it comes to complex rhythmic and melodic elements. For 1:20 seconds, you have a full minute of that with most or all of the instruments playing at the same time, and various quick pitch drifts occurring, taking up a lot of the attention of the listener. I am not immune to this myself, so I will listen through several times and explain what I mean.

In your intro, complexity develops quickly, with moving melody, bass bopping around quite a lot, and what sounds in between mallets and organs also entering and exiting.

The lead has several nice licks, but it can sound a bit disconnected perhaps due to a bit of muddiness in the chords below. If I am not paying direct attention to it, it sounds nice, but when I am paying direct attention, the mallets in particular are distracting from it by hanging out on a minor third and being quite busy.

You may have better luck by starting with fewer instruments at first, a bass, a lead, and a pad, and then further adding occasional accents.

Further, a study of song structure may help you organize these musical ideas and develop them into satisfying phrases – I actually think everything I heard would be catchier if parsed out like so: intro with mallets > verse with developing perc sounding instrument and mallet > chorus with your lead > verse with mallets and perc > chorus > bridge building into another > chorus > chorus into outro.

You have done some very nice transitions with your pitch bends and made with beep box what many don’t take the time to, so pride yourself on that!

Regarding your arrangement of chords, there is a phenomenon that happens with triads as you go down the keyboard – the lower a chord is, the more chunky and dissonant it starts to sound. Try to keep the low mid and low range of your tunes as clean and uncluttered as you can.

I’ll explain further. Notice the lead up top sounds very sonorant and clear, but if you were to drop that down an octave, it might lose that clarity. I think this is happening with the minor 1 and 3 in the bass in your outro, as well as with the mallet hanging out on the 3rd of the minor i chord a lot. If any of this is unclear, I’m more than willing to go deeper, but for learning applications, I recommend a channel called Signals Music Studio for songwriting in particular; Adam Neely is a step up from that into finer concepts of music composition, but both are great places to explore this terminology. And if you are an absolute nut who wants to make everything weird, Ben Levin is another great stop on your research journey.

For this piece as is, I can see it as a menu theme for a Genesis-like game or something similar, something involving building alien worlds or exploring new planets/prospecting. Perhaps even something like Minecraft. There is no kick/snare/hat, so it lends itself best to waiting, pondering, observing. Very chill stuff.

JimmyTheCaterpillar responds:

I really appreciate all of your words -- it's crazy! I'm not even sure where to begin with a response,, but the song structure bit has sincerely got me thinking critically about much of the music I hear lately. I listen very analytically to poetry, and i'm starting to do it with music too more consciously;; it's kind of exhausting lol but i'm trying! thank you so much!!

This sounds like a distorted dream where you try and make your way around a mysterious castle that never ends but with many rooms to explore like a maze!!!!!!!! Then you wake up!!!!

JimmyTheCaterpillar responds:

i love this interpretation -- very awesome, thank you!!!!!!!!

This reminds me of something, I need to find that something (Good song, il be at pretty wierd ((or ilbeat idk):)

Uhuh... yeah... yeah... dis is good in a trippy kind of way 👍

JimmyTheCaterpillar responds:

yr real for that, thank you!!

Credits & Info

Listens
219
Faves:
1
Downloads
0
Votes
6
Score
4.11 / 5.00

Uploaded
Oct 12, 2023
4:33 PM EDT
Genre
Experimental
File Info
Song
1.9 MB
1 min 21 sec
Software
  • BeepBox

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