Faltering Stair (song demo)

I've been going through another flurry of excitement around making music, to the point that it's been a huge distraction lately. I blame the latest Osmose firmware update, which has been very entertaining to dig through.

Each sound finds my fingers picking out what feel like the most appropriate chords for that colour palette, and suddenly I have a new song idea. You can understand why this might derail the rest of my life^[1].

Today, I want to talk about the following song demo:

This started as a really modest exploration of a patch I was testing over on Bluesky. The arpeggiated chords are different in this example, and of course there are vocals in the linked video. Needless to say, I find this kind of aggressive and feedbacky mallet sound really enticing. It provides something that I can immediately contrast against with softer sounds like the horn-esque lead in the B-section.

This tune is almost entirely Osmose^[2], save for a sine sub-bass, the drums, and some electic guitar. I don't typically find myself making such pop-structured or driven music with my Osmose, and this has totally swept me off my feet.

As you can imagine, this machine is really good for anything "cinematic" or wispy, where you have layers of gestural voices that aren't going to interfere with each other too much. I often use it for things like bell leads, or string instruments because of the control I have over things like vibrato or slides. This song is the first piece in a while where I've felt like I had a really solid handle on doing almost everything with this synth, and not having the production feel out of control or like it was going off the rails.

I'm once again excited about the possibilities this machine is giving me. My brain feels hooked on it right now, and I'm starting to think less "film score" and more "songy-song" with it.

My goal with this song in the next major version is to add vocals, because come on, it's begging for them.

Do I know what they're going to sound like yet? Nope! Is it going to be a struggle?

Yep!

Will I lose hours and hours having a blast?

Absolutely.

I'll leave you with a second (much smaller in scope) all-Osmose demo at the end of the post here, since you've made it this far. Thanks for following along :)