For this track, I felt compelled to incorporate some Lo-Fi into the piece.  This added a bit of complexity to the creative process because it was changing the instrument line-up for the composition when part of the piece was already made.  After some trial and error and some volume automations I managed to get a blend between both halves that I was happy with, and actually excited once both parts came together.  This composition, when I was first creating the first half (which is actually the second half in the finished piece) several weeks ago had me struggling, and I even started to think that maybe I was very good at this, which was bringing my spirits down, so to speak.  At this point I decided to take some time for myself to go out and worship with my shofar in my garage for a bit.  This is when the phrase “be still” from a song I heard recently, and from a fragment of Psalm 46:10 which says, “Be still, and know that I am God”, came to me.  This has been a verse I have gone to many times in times I need comfort or peace, and because of this, I decided to incorporate some of my worship into this composition with both my voice and my Shofar. Incorporating the Shofar into my compositions, has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while, since making electronic Christian music or something along those lines is one of my main goals.

This composition was made in common time (4/4) at 60 bpm.  The drum rhythm started off as a somewhat simple backbeat-inspired beat, with a pretty busy kick drum, and then evolves into a more complex rhythm, where the snare and hi-hats gets some syncopation for some extra texture.  The whole drum rhythm is based on two 8-bar beats that repeat once each to make up the whole drum track of the composition.  The bassline follows the harmony throughout the track to give it more width, with a secondary bass element, which gives it additional movement.

The composition starts in the key of D major, and halfway through changes to its relative key of B minor.  I chose these keys because D major was a key I enjoyed playing on when playing the Viola many years ago.  The chord progression for this composition is  a bit extensive due to the slow tempo of the piece and is as follows: D, Em, D, Em to Em7, D, Em, F#m, Em, F#m, G to Gmaj7, D, Em, D, Em to Em7, F#m, G to Gmaj7 for the first half in the key of D major, and for the key change to B minor it continues Bm , D, C#dim, F#m, Bm, A, F#m, G, G, A, F#m, G, Bm, G, F#m, and finishes in Bm.  During the first half of the composition the harmony is played by a piano and is then joined halfway through by two separate layers of synthesizers, one coming in completely at bar 9 until the key change, and the second gradually.  This second synth layer takes over the main harmony for the second half of the piece and the piano disappears.  The harmony is then doubled halfway through the second half of the piece by an arpeggiated variant of the chord progression across several octaves, giving the harmony additional movement and dynamic range.  The melody starts off with a piano as well, which is then  gradually doubled with a synth that later takes over the main melody on the key change as the piano vanishes.

For the audio tracks I had a total of 4 recordings.  One of the recordings is “be still” in both a normal spoken voice and a whisper with the second recording being the same phrase sung with some vocalizing afterwards.  The third recording is of myself blowing one of my Shofars, and the final recording is of myself making the sound of blowing wind.  My sampling track took the whisper from my first recording and was used at different pitches to give the feeling of different people whispering, but mainly to add depth to the spoken voice.  For my two original synthesized tracks I used the ES P synth , which took the form of a bass pad and synth pad, for the secondary bass layer, and one of the secondary harmony layers utilized on the first half of the composition, respectively. 

For the processing I utilized compression, EQ and noise gates for my dynamic processors and reverb, chorus, and delay for my time-based effects. Compression was applied on the bass, harmony and audio tracks to keep levels consistent throughout the track, EQ for the drums and piano harmony and melody tracks, and the noise gate on the shofar’s audio track to keep the recording clean from any unwanted sounds. The reverb was applied to both vocal tracks and the shofar track to give them some additional color, while the chorus was applied to both vocals and wind tracks, as well as the sampler track for a wider sound. Lastly, the delay was applied to all five tracks that incorporated audio recordings to give them more movement, resulting in a fuller sound and texture.