Creation Process

Creation

This track was made in a week on my laptop in my room in Cologne, during the last week of my university’s winter semester. I had messed around with FL Studio for the first time in the summer of 2019 and made some songs by following along to tutorials, and also made some small ideas that never went anywhere. Soon after I started learning music theory, but it wasn’t until February of 2020 that I finally decided to make my first own song from scratch.

I ran into this Lo-Fi parody/lesson video and I just felt inspired. So, I decided to give myself a deadline of 1 week to make a lo-fi song.

I started by choosing a cool realistic drumkit preset in FL Studio using FPC, and making some laid back but groovy beats. I’d been listening to Delvon Lamar Organ Trio a lot, and I just had to use a Hammond B3 organ here. Luckily for me, I had just what I was looking in the Arturia V Collection. I felt inspired as soon as I heard what they sounded like, and quickly laid down some chords connected by nice little licks. I then wanted to get more creative and exciting, so I copied the organ and panned it to the right ear. I made it play the same melody on a higher register to emphasie it, and some times it alternates: having only the right organ play the ascending melody, then the main organ play the descending melody right after. I love that effect!

Other than that, I also added a background organ holding down the chords in the upper register. Its volume is fairly low in the mix so it’s a subtle but great addition that helps to ground the song. Finally, I copied the main organ and made it play a bassline. It mostly follows the chords, while also playing some quick licks every now and then.

So that’s that for the “verse” section of the song. Following this, I made a chorus section. The drums get faster and more intense, the bassline gets faster too and plays its own thing entirely, and I added an electric piano to play a full melody alongside the main organ.

Okay, at this point I already had all the basic building blocks, so what I wanted to do next was adding a spoken monologue, like the guy did in the LoFi video, and I knew exactly what I wanted: this hilarious but dramatic monologue improved by Jerma985. I did some compression and EQ on it to make it comfier to listen to, and added tons of tasteful delay and reverb for the vibe. To add to the vibe even more and glue everything together, I added a vinyl effect to the master track.

I used this entire monologue as the intro, and harmonised it with many spicy chords and short melodies connecting them together. I really wanted to highlight every word and feeling evoked by the narrator, so every chord was chosen by how closely it could portray and accentuate that feeling - be it wonder, mystery, coziness, or conflict - instead of a standard chord progression. I can’t express how much I love the way it turned out!

Later on, Jerma985 did a hysterical AI continuation of that monologue, and I used those clips as the lines spoken during the verse sections and the outro. I love the laugh clips with delay, so I sprinkled them here and there.

Before the final verse and the outro, I wanted to have a really awesome organ freak-out section. It kind of shifts into a minor key, and I wrote some cool banging riffs for the organ to play in the high register, while another organ is doing staccato chord stabs in the lower register. It’s also a different song interweaved within this song… this will become a recurring motif in my future songs :). It then connects back into a final verse followed by an outro inspired by the intro, where the monologue story comes to end and the song finishes very satisfyingly.

I’m noticing now how much I overwrote for this page. I can’t help. I love this song, and I’m amazed that I managed to come up with my little knowledge of music at the time by fooling around and having fun. It was so much fun!! I dedicated it to my dad because his birthday was very soon after I finished the song, and the story was about a father, so it was meant to be.

Link to a file or something