Sunburn is a track started out as something else than a track. I originally needed a loop to fill out the background of a radiospot. For this I used about an hour but then the loop started to sound pretty damn good on it's own.
In the original loop I only had some atmospherics and the beat, which clearly were not enough for a ful fledged song. The biggest thing about the original loop was the lack of a melody since it was not meant to have one. And that was the first thing I started to work upon. For the melody I drew inspiration from the soundtrack of Bladerunner. I kept it fairly simple so I wouldn't loose the atmospheric nature of the song.
...The sun light reflects of the glass and steel around you. Foot steps on the gravel behind you. They're chasing you. The roof ends. You jump...
After I got the melody down I started to work on the structure. I wanted to have this track rolling and not change too much, but still wanted clearly different sections as I imagined this to be the soundtrack of a Mirror's Edge like video game level. I wanted to have some calming moments, some dramatic moments and some parts that rolled forward. And all the time I wanted to keep a good pace. So I imagined different kinds of situations you could get into and began to mold the section according to them.
...A railing. You grab it mid air. Fling yourself over it. A fire escape. Kick the ladder down. Slide...
After I had finished the structure and mixed the track I still wanted to mess with it a bit. I popped the beats and the melodies on different tracks in Sonar and started to mangle them with Illformed's Glitch plugin. I used it to create new drum fills and section changes. I used it to stop the beat, reverse it, retrigger it and just generally abuse the hell out of those drums. And then I did the same to the melodies. To top it of I intentionally forgot about making clean and smooth cuts between the effected parts and the clean ones.
...Head down the alley and back into the sunlight. A plaza, people there. Blend in.
Gear I used for this track:
DAWs and editors:
- Cakewalk Sonar 8.5
Samplers and instruments:
- u-he Tyrell Nexus 6
- Synapse Audio Junglist
- HG Fortune Serenity Free
- HG Fortune UltraSwamp Free
- HG Fortune Altair 4 Beta
- Cakewalk RXP
- NI KorePlayer
- Novakill Neokiller III
- Ummet Ozcan Genesis
Effects:
- Cakewalk z3ta+ FX
- Variety of Sound Ferric TDS
- Illformed Glitch 1.3
- MeldaProductions MEqualizer
- Kjaerhus Classic Master Limiter
