My Music: The Edge of Frost

Last Sepember, the algorithm deity saw fit to recommend me a video in which someone was helpfully demonstrating an aspect of piano playing. All fine, but they used a particular chord progression that simply sounded lovely. The progression wasn't even the point of the video, but it only goes to show that inspiration can strike any time.

The progression was, simply, C, Bb, F. This is interesting because Bb is the flattened 7th of C Major and my ability to find nice chord progressions myself would certainly not have found it. It's the I - bVII - IV in C Major and is, according to Google's AI answer-slop generator, a common progression in pop. I guess that's why I liked it, because it felt very familiar, even though terms like "flattened seventh" are, perhaps, rather geeky. If you want to be even geekier, it's the C Mixolydian scale. (I did warn you.)

As I do very often, I fired up the DAW, made a new project and started noodling around this progression. As I don't do very often, I stuck with it long enough to build a proper track around it.

The progression reminded me rather of Teardrop by Massive Attack. Because, well, it's the same one. Almost: Teardrop is in A Mixolydian instead of C Mixolydian but the chord numbers are the same. And, if you hammer the cords in C out in the low notes of a piano, unsurprisingly you get the same sort of sound.

So, inspired by this, and struck with the inspiration to do something with some lyrics I had half written ages ago, The Edge of Frost came into being. A homage to Teardrop, if you will.

Lyrics needed a singer so I fired up Synthesiser V, actually it's the first excuse I found to take the newish v2.0 for a spin (conclusion: works like v1 for my very basic usage). I picked the ANRI Arcane voicebank for its intimacy. In early versions of the track I ended up making ANRI a bit too robotic, so I need to extend my sincere gratitude to some fellow students on Thinkspace Education's Discord, who were generous enough with their time to listen to my track and offer some suggestions as to how I could improve it.

To get the timing more natural I sang the song myself, then autotune'd the vocal to actually hit the right notes (which I cannot do), giving me a MIDI track with human timings I could then import into SynthV and make ANRI sing. I then triple tracked the vocals, all with copies of ANRI but two set to different vocal modes to emulate a human singing the same thing multiple times. In the mix I panned these hard L/R and sat them just low enough in the mix not to hear them, but they add a touch of humanity to ANRI.

I shot the video walking to the train station one cold, dark morning in November. I used a new toy for this, a DJI OSMO Mobile SE gimbal, which was fun. Like with so many things I need to practice with it some more, but nevertheless the results are pretty good and smoother than I'd have achieved simply by holding my phone. Everything was shot on my Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Finally, all that was left was to stitch the video together in Premiere Pro, which I just about managed to complete as a Christmas project during the holidays.

Vocals - ANRI Arcane RDX (Synthesiser V 2.0)

Piano - Native Instruments Alicia's Keys

Drums - Samples and loops from Native Instruments, Slate Digital and Venus Theory

Synth - Arturia Analog Lab, UVI Aurora, UVI Atmospherics, UVI String Machines 2, Venus Theory Epharus

Bass - Fracture Sounds Blueprint Bass

Sub Bass - David Hilowitz Earthquake Sounds

Music Production - Plugins from FabFilter, Universal Audio, Valhalla, Soundtheory, oeksound. Cubase Pro.

Video production - Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition.