"There's something to be said about challenging your thinking when it comes to art. Until I met redbeard_prime I had a pretty standard sound. It's not that all my songs were the same. They were all of very disparate subgenres, but the over reaching theme was electronic. Period. When we started Toobix I was faced with several wrtiting challenges that were well outside the realm of what I had done previously. This was totally fun, of course, and so far everyone has been pleased with the results; however, the best thing about leaving home is that you get to come back. For my third monthly free track I decided to do just that. It was time to write a big progressive dance anthem. So here comes the 'current.'

As my usual writing / composing process goes, I pulled out all of the stops on the musical part of my brain and let myself slip into dance land. Before I touched the keyboard, though, I let melodies, beats and rhythms just pop in and out of my head. Once I do that, this stuff comes at all times of the day. The head doctors call this auditory hallucinations. I call it pure bliss. While these musical ideas may come at any time, it seems that the best ones come in my dreams or come to me in the shower. The main progressive riff that fades into the introduction on top of all of the percussion and bassline was borne out of the latter environment, and I could barely get to the keyboard fast enough to record it. As is common, though, once I maded it to the keyboard the original thought got changed just a bit. This initial melody ended up in a different key and also had a few adjustments made to the selection of the middle notes. The synthesizer patch went through a few morphologies before I settled on the final, phat supersaw sound that you hear as well. Then, in the latter parts of production I ended up tightening the on-beat timing of the notes that I originally hammered out on the keys to give it that computerized, processed sound that feels so right in dance music.

As opposed to the spontaneousness of the anthem line, the baseline and percussion of the song were definitely generated more with guidance from the left brain. I knew I wanted to have a serious driving beat with a certain amount of fierceness, so I thought that a 16th note baseline would work well. Below that I put a huge thudding 909 kick with some special processing around 30 Hz or so to give just a little more visceral grit. To keep the drive going I added 16th note mid range beat boxing on top of all this base stuff. Yes, that's me beat boxing, but, again, I added some special electronic flavoring to give it the sound that it has. You know, add a dash of distortion and a pinch of eq to make the ear drums go yum.

With this monophonic introduction line written and the instrumentation filled, it was time to take off into the rest of the arrangement, and after hearing the anthem to this track I knew exactly where I wanted to go. There are several different ways to approach a trance song, but one thing that I love to do is have plenty of builds. My favorite way to introduce the build is to transform the monophonic introduction line directly into the progressive form of the anthem without any break down/buid up interlude. The 4-2-the-floor beat just makes your energy soar when you hear the chord change so abruptly. If you're a fan of my work then you this is no surprise that it's one of my favorite arrangement methods! You can hear more of this style in Synthergy and Beyond. In this track, though, once I decide on this particular arrangement I knew I wanted to take the tune to a nice pad breakdown. Tweaking a preset off the Superwave Performer gave me my sound for this bill and also remitted some of the dead space in the mix between the baseeline and supersaw. So it was onto the break down interlude.

Or was it? I dunno. Something hit me at this point as I listened to the big anthem progressive line again. I thought to myself, 'With a big trance anthem like this, why not explore it even further and add an additional break down/build up segment after the one I was currently writing?' Why not, indeed. Unlike many of my other tracks, though, I decided to steer away from a break beat transition and went with the more boucny break down that starts around 4:12 or so. I thought this kept the dance vibe going a little better even though it was much less of an agressive approach. Then, I decided to follow that with another high-frequency anthem on top of the first broken-chord progressive melody. What better way to make your emotions soar then to again interupt the build by pitch bending your supersaw up about 3 octaves or so behind that bouncy kick and clap rhythm that I used for the 2nd break down?

If you're reading that last paragraph and just felt like you've been pummeled systematically again and again with tekno speak rhetoric, then I've done my job as a writer! The reason being is that this song took on this wave-like quality with the arrangement structure I gave it. I think it was also well mirrorred in the broken-chord anthem that the supersaw plays. Take into account the electric/computerized dance quality to the track and the genre that we're dancing in and you can't help but arrive on 'current.' I hope it moves you, too!"

e-effect, 05/28/08