the sixth and final (in its original form) compost happened over on cohost this weekend, with a total of nearly 80 tracks made by the community. my track is something that i am very proud of, even if i were to ignore that i made it in under 90 minutes, so i'm going to use this post to talk about my process.
for the first half of the prompt, "eggbug is going to heaven," i wanted to go with a slow, gentle choir part. the two lines are separated by thirds, but use different scales; the first to enter is in D minor, while the second is in a nonspecific whole tone scale. adding the whole tone scale is meant to take some of the sadness off of the minor key and give a feeling of floating. i originally planned to have a low pipe organ arpeggio pattern under for the third time through but i decided it would probably just get in the way.
and then the celebration part. the choice of genre came very easily to me: i first heard of hit em on cohost, and it is a kind of music i have come to associate very strongly with the platform, so it was a natural fit. i had wanted to make a hit em track for a while now, but was hesitant because i didn't want to seem like i was jumping on a trend or doing it for meme factor when it was in reality a type of music i honestly find very interesting. the combination of 5/4 time and crunchy textures is additionally an area i have quite a lot of comfort working with.
from there i decided to tie together with the choir intro by splintering off into a new(?) subgenre name of "symphonic hit em." distorted piano goes very well with crunchy electronic textures in my opinion, and the filters i ran the violin through ended up giving it a wavering, pulsing sound that let it blend into the rest of the mix. for drums, i used the same general set of samples i use for industrial tracks, with the kick run through a distortion effect and the hat and clap both glitched using notepad++. this was not my first time using databending for music purposes, but it was the first that i have posted anywhere.
in the verse, i wanted to focus on the violin, so i had the piano mostly play a straightforward octave-based line while the violin had the melodic and rhythmic focus. with the chorus i brought the violin and piano closer together in what they play to give more of a feeling of unison.
the drums dropping out in the first half of the second verse allows more focus on the melody, while also breaking up the otherwise near-constant deluge of noisy, chaotic beats. the violin and piano changing octaves also gives a feeling of something new happening while keeping a sense of familiarity because of the melodies themselves being the same.
to tie the main part of the track with the choir part, the ending is a reprise of the intro, played at double speed. the violin plays the minor line and the piano plays the whole tone line. once the choir comes back in, the key is increased by a whole step to give a rising, intensifying sound.