I wanted to make something a little more uptempo in the “Spooky Scary Skeletons” vibe, so I pulled up a xylophone sample and started experimenting. The chord progression I came up was in 6/4, which was pretty cool, so I went with that! (The middle section is 4/4 and then the chord progression arpeggios show up again, but in 5/4 this time for some reason).

In terms of timbre and sound design, Synplant 2 is all over this track - I figured this was a good chance to run it through its paces. Whenever I got a sound I liked, I would evolve it in Synplant to get a slightly weirder version. A lot of the sounds are two weird evolutions paired together. For things like crashes and fills, I drew an envelope to slowly increase the mod wheel (which changes the sound) over the course of the whole track, so the sound would be a little different every time time it appeared (not sure it’s audible in a busy track like this, but it’s there!)

The intro and outro emerged from experimenting with a synth sound, and I thought it might make a nice contrast to the intensity of the beat-driven sections of the track.

I also took this as opportunity to create a very short track.

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