Newfangled Hotel Ambience 4: The Drama In The Elevator
Notes On Newfangled Hotel Ambience 4: The Drama In The Elevator
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 65
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT,(All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Aug 11 2021 - Oct 13 2021
Concept / Composition
(TM writes:)
Quite unusually, I set the concept of an elevator (or lift) before composition. I once encountered a particular dramatic situation in it when I was staying in my favourite hotel. Something unforgettable. I would like you to imagine how that was through taking a listen. This track is relatively short in FMT like that was very quick.
The motif of the augmented intervals is exposed on the guitar at the beginning, repeating E/D, G#/F# and C/A# (with the interval of two whole tones). After C/A# it comes back to E/D like a spiral. I called it "the elevator motif", which I developed in various ways later in the track; that is like Ludwig van Beethoven in me. The motif gets more complex as it goes.
There are mainly two drums patterns and they exchange: one flat 6/8 groove and one swing beat. At first Section A sees the former and Section B the latter, but just later A uses the latter and B the former, and so on. Is there any hotel lounge music of some four-on-the-floor on 100 BPM? I haven't ever heard any at all while it is very attractive to me.
Besides, I found out that it's very easy to write a swing beat on the notation with the 6/8 time signature. In that you can treat a dotted eighth note as one beat. I have not seen a swing four-on-the-floor beat written in 6/8, either. Thanks to 6/8, rhythmic shifts that occur several times in this track can be easily made, which I haven't heard either.
There is no obvious melody or central motif in this track. If you name the elevator motif the melody, that is not wrong. But it's at the same time the chords. In the next section, on the contrary, similar monophonic phrases are overlaid with multiple parts. This is very FMT-esque, I think.
Late in this track, by the way, an organ joins the elevator motif, with which I hoped to imply this is connected to and developed from "Here I Am", a symbol of our 2021-esque music.
Even though NHA1, 2 and 3 are acoustically normal, meaning they simply sound like live performance, from this track, NHA4 up to NHA8, each track has unrealistic acoustics. As TI tells below, the track starts with a sound like an analogue player, which I like very much.
In addition, I love the melody that appears in the middle of this track, which is a copy from another track of ours, as TI writes below.
(TI writes:)
Like the other songs in the "Newfangled Hotel Ambience" series, this song was composed by my adding three parts (piano, saxophone and violin) to the foundation song created by TM, as if I was participating in the session.
The only difference is that I made it more like a live session. For example, in the second half of the track, I playfully reused a phrase from one of our tracks ("The Beginnings") and improvised on it.
Mixing
I mixed this track as if I were playing an analogue turntable player and rhythm box in real time, not just playing instruments.
And I'm very elaborate about the mix.
We started with an analogue player, and then gradually switched to live instruments, and then back to the analogue player.
This was done by exporting a master file, running it through an analogue turntable simulator (iZotope/Vinyl) and then creating a separate mix file for the mix.
For the drums, as with the other tracks in this series, I played the Musescore for each individual part and mixed them together, but some of them were processed through iZotope/Vinyl to sound like breakbeats or switched to a rhythm machine.
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