Tidal Sound
The two biggest things I want to have in the pieces that I make are to contain samples and have some sort of cultural tie to me (or just something I am interested in). For this piece I really wanted to find an old Korean song to sample. This would end up proving difficult since I cannot speak Korean whatsoever. After much digging and asking some family members for some old songs they knew, I finally found a song that I liked: 님은 먼 곳에 (Ni-meun Meon Go-se, You are far away I think is the translation?) by Kim Chu-Ja.
After listening to the song a bunch, I eventually tried to take parts of the song I thought sounded nice and tried to put them together. This would prove to be such a pain in Tidal, because I have to find specific timestamps for the entire song and try to make sure they are about one measure. To make this easier, I was able to find the bpm to the song and then multiply that by the speed I set the song to (1.2). After this, it was mostly experimenting to find what sounded good together. Eventually, I found vocals I liked and had them in a pattern I thought sounded good. After this, I put some percussion in just to make the song sound a bit more like a hip-hop/lofi song.
Most of the inspiration for my percussion came from listening to J Dilla’s Donuts and MF DOOM and Madlib’s Madvillainy, trying to emulate percussion patterns they had in a way that would also fit my song. I was deadass listening to Donuts on repeat for like a week straight, just trying to break down in my head how Dilla samples. I also attempted to make my percussion in “Dilla time,” by nudging the snare and the cymbals a bit so they don’t all play at the same time. I especially like the rushed snare that Dilla likes to do, where it comes in just a fraction before the other instruments on the same beat. Since a lot of hip-hop songs are pretty repetitive, I wanted to do the same by just having a long beat that would keep playing with little to no change between measures.
To make my song an actual composition, I wanted to have a beat switch that would be transitioned by some sort of speech. I had a hard time finding inspiration for a speech, so kinda just ripped a speech of some TTS meme that ironically talked about certain negative things that plague today’s society, like microplastics or the conspiracy about 5G radio waves. As for the beat switch, I wanted to have a slowed down tempo that would use the amen break to have a kind of weird breakcore-esque beat. I swapped around the order of some of the samples I had and added some new ones as well to make the second part of the beat. I wanted to add extra sounds to it but I had trouble finding sounds that kinda fit with the overall sound to me. The other difficult part with the break beat is that the beat didn’t totally line up when it repeated, and that I had to manually make the midi beat for it, since it was one long sample. I think I got it close enough, but I know it isn’t perfect either. My ending is kinda bad because it just kinda abruptly cuts out, I wanted to have an xfade but I couldn’t get it to work for whatever reason.
Hydra Visuals
As for my visuals, it took me a long time to find some inspiration for something I thought would sort of fit with the sound that I had created. All I knew is I thought it would be cool to have something really hectic visuals-wise. For both visuals, I ended up taking gameplay of two games I liked: one being a speedrun from the FPS Ultrakill, and the other being a pro match from the card game Magic: the Gathering. While I wanted to have hectic visuals, I also wanted it to have some clarity so you could actually tell what the games were being played. The reason I chose games were because I felt like this, combined with the hectic visuals and the Korean song sample, sort of represented who I am. After tinkering with the visuals for some time, I got the calm and chaotic visuals I wanted and managed to sync up certain visuals to the midi, I was essentially finished with my full composition.