Here I Am
Notes On "Here I Am"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 36
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT,(All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jan 9 2021 - May 16 2021
The track called "Here I Am" is packed along with "The Beginnings" into the extended play "At The Break Of Dawn" in SoundCloud.
(TM writes:)
Take a Break, Start Over
The track “Here I Am” is a work when I was a bit bored (and even disappointed) with my composition like I wrote “2020-esque” in the Notes On “How I Like To Align My Things” and struggling to seek something new and interesting to me. I had a break for a week or two around March 2021, when I neither made nor listened to music at all, even while driving alone.
To start over I made a phrase of just two-bars length, with which the track “Here I Am” began. It’s expressionless and emotionless, so to say, so that I just wanted to get started with a point back to zero. An atonal wave organ and sine wave as well as zero-groove percussion. That well signifies that my musical vector was reset.
(While I am writing this text, I am listening to the motif by repeating these first two bars, by the way. But I feel I am going to be sick and mad if I continued to hear this because of its zeroness!)
Then I felt it could be developed to something stimulating and applied what I called “Extension Method”, which FMT had found for the track “Mad Disco”. The method is quite simple: to create the first motif of a particular length, copy it to the next position and change it to something that I want to hear next. It is also consistent with FMT’s frequently focused concept of “minimal but not repeated”. (See also the notes on “Particles Behaving Like Waves.”)
Thereby, the motif gradually shifted, as if an emotionless and expressionless girl with some traumatic experience opened her heart little by little. I am about to remember such a portrait photo but cannot. It could be a work by my favourite photographer, Robert Capa or Robert Frank. Or otherwise Helmut Newton.
Then the concept of “Here I Am” came to my mind. I wrote it down on the notation:
“Digital folk music of nowhere. It's NOT old at all, but NOT new at all either. Warm but cold. Slow but groovy. The tempos slightly shift. Not based on specific modes or tonalities. Developed in the Mad-Disco manner.”
It’s like I stood straight to say “Here I am… Nobody else but me… I’m here just to insist I’m here… I just want to say that” after I was unable to move and crouched down. It feels the start of a new period to me.
Quite rarely, the title "Here I Am" has been unchanged since the track was just two bars in length.
(TI writes:)
Composition
As with “The Beginnings“, the composition of this track was based on the Musescore score created by TM, with a few supplementary parts added.
(This is what I wrote again after reading the above description of TM).
Even when TM was inactive, I was still working on something every day. I was just trying to tell TM what I was doing and do what I could. I think I was just tinkering with the song that would later become "Goal For The Trio" (which resulted in three versions).
I just enjoy creating sounds, and even when I am stuck or troubled musically or otherwise, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't touch MuseScore and Studio One, except when I'm on vacation with my family and don't have my computer with me, or when I have to replace my computer or re-set it due to a problem.
I think I'm the type of person who tries to solve musical problems by touching MuseScore or Studio One.
In my case, once I'm in Zero, I don't feel like refreshing myself, I feel like I'm really in Zero and that's where I end up.
"If I don't touch it, won't it dull my senses? Wouldn't I forget the technique? (In fact, I do forget.)" I analyze myself to think that I am not confident in my abilities and skills.
Probably, I am the one who doesn't trust myself the most. The teachers and parents often say things like, "Trust yourself," but in my case, I'm the type of person who thinks, "I can't do such a horrible thing as trust myself:)
TM and I share many of the same preferences, but as human beings, we are very different types of people, I think.
Tone Creation and Mixing
The concept of sound creation for this song was "to make it sound as simple as possible. Therefore, we used only 36 tracks, which is a small number for our songs. However, if you just play it as it is, without any modifications, you will end up with various inconveniences such as unbalanced parts.
In Japanese gardens and tea ceremonies, there is a belief that it is good to "leave things as they are" and "not make any changes", but this is also to "make it look as if no changes were made". I made a lot of changes so that it wouldn't sound like it was created.
For tones, I used the same sound font I used when composing in MuseScore for almost all tracks, and if the sound font didn't sound as good (unnecessary noise, default volume too low, etc.), I played MuseScore and sampled it. Also, in one place, at TM's request, I used a sampled sound from his home vacuum cleaner.
As a side note, I noticed for the first time in this process that the filters in the sampler that comes with Studio One are self-oscillating. Self-oscillating filters are one of the unique characteristics of old analog synthesizers (originally an error caused by inaccurate components), and I was surprised and happy to see that this was reproduced in the sampler that came with the DAW.
Normally, with drum sound sources, for example, I would play a sine wave around 50Hz on the bass drum to add fullness to the sound, or play noise on the snare drum to emphasize the attack, or combine different types of tones to add impact. In this case, I didn't do that at all, and just used the sound as it is. So the bass drum is very thin, and the sine wave band for the bass line takes care of the low end.
On the other hand, the overall sound image, the sound field, and the balance of the sound field are very well designed. The midrange of a normal cassette tape is raised, and the frequencies below 100 Hz and above 1 kHz are gently cut to create a vague sound image.
In addition, the sound field was not expanded too much, and the entire sound was centered.
However, unlike so-called cassette tape simulators, it does not simulate things like hiss noise, tape comp, or motor wow-flutter, so I think the sound is cleaner than a cassette tape simulator.
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