Dissonance is my self-released debut EP! Released on February 16, 2020, it was in development from mid-2019 to early 2020 and got its name from the first song I made for it. You can listen to the album through Bandcamp below and if you scroll further you will find a little description for each track.
I decided for this to be the first track because it starts out punchy and gets your attention. The original project file name for this song was "idk" because I didn't have a name for it while I was making it. At the end I decided to call it "Fluctuations" because the song goes through 3 phases, fluctuating greatly between them. I'm not proud of how this track was made, I just took a crapload of samples and slapped them together. There's only about 5-10% of that song that I wrote originally. It's still a good song, though.
This song is the title track for the EP solely because it's the first one I wrote. In August of 2019 I downloaded my first DAW (digital audio workstation) software, LMMS. I had never had this much power when making music before, and I was so excited and inspired by my newfound capabilities that I wrote an entire song in under 24 hours. That song was Dissonance. I snatched a part of Megalovania for the middle section because I couldn't think of what to put there, but everything else is all my own work. I didn't know chord structure when I made this, so I used LMMS' built in chord maker. I named the track 'Dissonance' because the lead synthesizer has two oscillators and the second one is detuned to be a little flat, which gave a dissonant feel to the song. Over the next few weeks I learned more about music and polished up Dissonance to the version you hear today.
This song was first written on my old laptop in LMMS. After I got my new laptop and Mixcraft 8, I manually copied the song over by using the same VSTs and MIDI sequence. Fun fact: my old laptop took like 5 minutes to load this song when at the time all there was to it was 2 instances of Spitfire's LABS. The project file for the LMMS version was called "Minecraft" because I thought it sounded like the song "Biome Fest" from the Minecraft soundtrack. You can listen to the demo version of this song by clicking this link. I probably can't legally call this song "Minecraft" though, so I renamed it to "Better or Worse". I feel like I could've given this song a better name. If I recall correctly, the full name during development was "Was It Better or Worse", but I shortened it for whatever reason. I wrote the song while thinking about my really young childhood, and while I recall being a well behaved kid and all my family members say I was well behaved, I still question how much of an asshole I might've been, and chose to forget. So far as I know, these memories didn't exist in the first place and it was just my whacky social paranoia making it up. So now here I am, questioning if everything I remember is a lie and whether or not childhood was actually better than today. When I was younger, I was scared of a TON of stuff, like eels, germs, bugs, needles, anything that lives underwater, being underwater in general, talking to people, being left behind, and much, MUCH more. I know a lot of these sound common, but I was like too scared of these things. Nowadays, I have matured and I have conditioned myself to not be afraid of most of these things anymore, which is definitely better than how I was before. In my middle school years, I was also kind of a smartass. I hated that part of me because it made social interactions with other people seem like I was trying to compete with them over meaningless things like random knowledge. I've also matured and grown out of that, thank goodness. So now we ask: was everything I remember from the past better or worse than everything today? I still don't know the answer to this question, and I don't know if my life will have greater meaning if I find it.
Okay, so do you remember how I said I felt like I could've given "Better or Worse" a better name? Well, I DEFINITELY feel like I could've given "Good Friend" a way better name. Like, what is "Good Friend" supposed to mean? Is the song about a good friend of mine? No. Did I write it with a good friend? No. Maybe the song is about the concept of friendliness and hospitality? No. Well then, where the heck did "Good Friend" get its name?! The answer is simple. I finished the majority of this song mere minutes before I had to leave and meet somebody who I considered a good friend of mine. What a stupid way to name a song. Not only that, but I technically didn't write any of this! Much like my song "Fluctuations", this is made up of samples. But while "Fluctuations" has some original parts that I wrote along with the samples, "Good Friend" is 100% samples. All I did was arrange them. In fact, this was made with the looper function of the DAW Bandlab for browsers and mobile devices. If you find the looping pack I used, I bet you could recreate this entire song perfectly on your own. I also used a single arpeggio sample from Cymatics in the breakdown. No wonder this song slaps, it's because I didn't write it!
Now this is my magnum opus in this EP. I feel like I mixed this one the best, and I think the instruments sound great. Except for the fake soprano sax. I don't like that. The reason I used a synthesized saxophone rather than a real one (remember that I play the tenor sax) is because I didn't have a good way of recording my saxophone, and besides, I didn't like the tone of my sound anyway. I've gotten better with the tenor, don't worry. While writing this song I imagined a streetlamp in a setting like what you might see in the games Night in the Woods and Among the Sleep. The original title for this song was "I'm a Little Crazy, But That's Okay", and I'm glad I chopped off the first half of that name because the full name doesn't convey the feeling I had created at the end. I don't want this song to be associated with something like "hAhA i'Ve GoT cRaCkHeAd EnErGy LmAo", I want it to feel like an empathetic apathy towards all the things crashing down around you in your life. Everything hurts and I've ruined everything, but that's okay, we're still alive and we have each other. Overall, I'm super happy with how this turned out, and I think many of you would agree that this is by far the best song in the EP.