Undertones
Notes On "UNDERTONES"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 26
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jun 28 2022 - 27 Nov 2022
Concept & Composition:
More relaxing in more weird structure
(TM writes:)
This piece was created late within the "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" Series. I loved to listen to this album (without this and some tracks that hadn't been completed yet) and when I was listening to it repeatedly I found it had almost no relaxing, chill-out music at all. There should be one at least, I thought, and thus I began composing it. In me, it's like a piece that follows our past track called "Newfangled Hotel Ambience 8: 3:20 am."
In "Undertones", pretty much like "3:20 am" and many other, I wrote the notation for one strong piano and another weak, which is a method I love so much. That's very different from just one piano being played strongly sometimes and weakly for the other. The weak piano is used as though it's shadows of the strong.
Another thing I'd like to notice here is that the sections in it are structured in a little bit strange way, something like A, B, C, B, A. But because the same sections are not merely repeated but are much developed, the later sections of B and A might not sound very similarly to the previous time. It's like you travel somewhere quite far you don't know, and you get home, then you find your home and hometown completely different.
During composition, I loved those piano phrases and developed them so quickly, but then I found something important, "oh, that should be in the "Auditory Art..." series... I forgot putting "minimal on basso continuo" components into it!! For that concept I always created some minimal pattern first but this time I added it later, which eventually generated some particular feels quite different from the other works in the Series, I think.
Unintentionally, my focus on the relaxing concept led to the next series called "Placid Wanderings."
Tone Creation & Mixing
(TI writes:)
The track was started around June 2022 and once completed in July, but for this release, it was re-examined and re-mixed. Specifically, the piano tone, which makes up a large part of the track, has been completely replaced, and the mix has been significantly changed (simplified) to match. Initially, I had exported the parts to be Lofi (strings and Shadowed Piano) and the other parts to be Lofi into separate files and mixed them in separate files, but I stopped doing that and mixed them down directly from the file where I was making the sound.
For the Piano part, I initially set up a different type of piano for each part and used a harder sound for all the parts compared to the final mix, but the different and harder tones made it difficult to balance, and there were inevitably parts that were grating. In the end, all the piano tones were replaced with soft-touch tones, which are not normally used, and separate equalisation and compression were applied to each to create the differences between the different parts.
In addition, the sampled piano tones vary in volume and emphasised bandwidth from pitch to pitch, so we adjusted the way each note sounds. I think we spent the most time on this process.
For the mix, we spent a lot of time adjusting the overlapping bands with EQ. The tones themselves are relatively simple, just piano, synth strings, bass and rhythm section, but because of this the bands tend to overlap, so I adjusted them so that they don't overlap and sound clear.
For the piano, the Shadowed Piano part is treated with a thin reverb and delay (mixed at different levels depending on the location) and divided into left and right to contrast it with the main piano part.
The bass part is split and each output is processed with delay and reverb, mixed with the original sound, and these are spread to the left and right. This sound and the way it is played is inspired by the 'Sons Of Pioneers' sound from 'Japan'.
For Strings, two types of synth strings are layered and reverb processed, then phased, expanded, compressed and played backwards.
For the reverb processing, distortion is applied to each part's reverb sound, and the pitch of the reverb is lowered and shaken in unnatural ways.
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