Indifference

Hello everyone! Its been a while but I hope you are all well! So, I posted on my Snapchat for people to send me suggestions on what I should write to collect ideas. The criteria was that it had to be a concept, idea, or emotion and my goal was to personify that with music. I got a couple of suggestions and indifference was one of them. Now, it took me a while to do this mainly because I had to scratch my original draft and idea.

The original idea was to take the definition on google and create a theme for each of the components of the definition with also doing this for a counter definition. By the end of it I had 6 themes written in Muscore to work with and I was going to structure the piece in Audacity. Lets just say Audacity isn’t the best for this, so I threw that idea out and started from square one.

After some more thought I came up with the idea to make a lofi hip hop beat. I was inspired by Chillcow’s livestream on youtube. By the way, if you haven’t heard of Chillcow go check out his stuff! It’s pretty great! But back on the topic of Indifference. This music genre seemed to fit the vibe I was going for. This music is commonly listened to in the background while you study or just chill, and incites a feeling of nostalgia and comfort. So, I went on to listen to a lot more of this music to get a good feel for it.

From here I picked up some wav. samples and started constructing the piece in Studio One. By the way, this process was far smoother in Studio One. So, often in this genre people will insert a clip of someone speaking and it usually constructs the idea of the piece and sometimes they even cut up this speech and use it throughout the piece. My equivalent was simply the screams that you will hear at the beginning with rain in the background. This symbolizes panic and disorganization at a critical event which I am sure that many can relate to at this current time.

From there, My idea was to have the music figuratively pan into a quiet living space. A space not directly affected by the outside. From here I simply built up a Lofi beat with chords, a base line, and a melody. All of this simply just stacks throughout the majority of the piece with the exception of the repeat of the melody in which the drums stop.

The beat, chords, base line, and melody were all created using midi. I also applied distorted effects, filtered out highs for a muffled-type sound, and added irregular pitch bends. Then, I applied a crackling fireplace under the music to simulate a record and Wha-la! The piece was complete!

I hope you enjoy listening to my first attempt of Lofi Hip Hop!