hello.
i enjoyed working on this project; i have always been interested by the subject of sleep and dreams and often try to reflect some element of that in my music.
by coincidence, i’d had the melody of a lullaby stuck in my head for a week or so before the project went out, and so my initial thought was to try and recreate that. it turns out (once i did a search for ‘lullaby midi’, hoping to find something to easily incorporate into a track) that the lullaby in my head was brahms’ wiegenlied. while it was stuck in my head i made up some lyrics for it and was originally going to use these in the piece, but eventually decided against it.
my concept was quite simple: i thought what if i played the lullaby, but extremely slowed down, to make a very ambient piece, maybe adding in some other subtle elements as well. i brought the midi into bitwig studio, and my first thought was to use karanyi’s lofi keys instrument (which i had recently bought) to make a nice gentle keyboard sound. i made a duplicate of the midi track and set this one up with arturia’s analog lab v, i wanted to use a synth pad this time but it took me a while to find one i really liked.
however when i played it back it seemed too quick and still sounded too coherently like the original composition, even though i had slowed the tempo from 110 bpm to a mere 30. bitwig studio has a feature where you can scale timeline events to preset values or arbitrarily; i’d previously used this to speed up/slow down samples, but i did not realise that it could also be applied to midi events. i scaled the midis to 200% and this was satisfyingly slow without completely losing the sense of the original composition. i also added in two identical tracks (panned opposite each other) of some free ambient beds samples i’d got from ghosthack, to give the piece a fuller sound.
i started adding effects (grain effects and reverbs on the ambient beds, mostly reverbs on the midi tracks) but even then it felt like there was something just slightly missing. i realised that bitwig had some built-in note effects that could be applied to tracks with midi events, and i decided to try those out. i used the ‘humanize’ device on the track with the lofi keys, and used ‘bend’ and ‘note delay’ on the one with the synth pad. this made it sound better, as did adding in a variation on the mastering chain i’d used for an ambient/drone project i’d been working on.
during the course of making this, i realised that it was essentially a companion piece/follow-up to something i’d made about 10 years ago, for junto project 20: narcoleptic’s lullaby. this had been very well received and i felt a sense of hope that this new piece might be well liked as well.
i went to the thesaurus to come up with a title, and i wanted to call it something similar to the older piece, but not just call it part 2. i came up with ‘broken-down berceuse’, which is to some extent synonymous with the older title, and the alliteration pleased me.
for the art again i went to nightcafe; i see many others have used ai art to accompany their pieces this week, and i feel like the results of that art often have something of the quality of dreams, especially in that they often seem to show something vaguely familiar.
overall i’m happy with my piece. it’s a very gentle and soft track, and i’ve been enjoying those kinds of styles recently. i feel like it also has a personal element: like narcoleptic’s lullaby, there’s a bit of a hazy, medicated feel to it, and for many years now i’ve had to take prescription tablets to help me sleep; if i’m not able to fall asleep fairly quickly, i can often become pretty zoned out. talking of, i need to get to bed. goodnight friends.
eta: for a while i got hung up on that one word in the prompt, ‘record’. to me that suggested some kind of performance, but i didn’t perform anything here, unless you stretch the definition to count the operation of a daw. it bothered me for quite some time. but i looked up a dictionary definition for the word, and got ‘to set down in some permanent form so as to preserve the true facts of’, which i suppose i have done, in as far as anything on the internet is permanent or true.
Used this as inspiration, added gongs, slow pads, changing reverb, but also a step down in tempo 2/3 of the way in. Bit short to really fall asleep; for that I shoud make it more like 10 minutes (maybe hours for some people actually), but hey.