on the menu today... because what i want to try to do is write a song right here in front
of your eyes that by the end of this video will be a finished song so i've been a little sneaky
welcome. no dogs don't have tusks only elephants that's how they used to get the ivory oh hello
chip dippers welcome to (piano bongs) welcome to retro recipes don't do that Perifractic here
and Puppyfractic your friends in retro and as you probably know if you've watched the channel before
i usually make retro computing and retro gaming videos but i also feature my retro
music indeed as i say on my website i've been making retro music since before it was retro
and the theme song that you just heard and you're hearing in the background now
it's called the lost years and that's one of the many songs i've written over the past
30 years and when i've released music videos for those theme songs i've often got a lot of comments
from people saying how do people write a song and you know i can really understand that because
how do you go from nothing in silence to the finished result that you're listening to now
there's a quote by michelangelo that i really like i'm not in any way
in shape or form comparing myself to michelangelo but in the quote he said that the sculpture or the
statue was always there inside the marble his job was just to remove the superfluous material
around it and i think for any songwriter after the song is finished it certainly
feels like the song has always been there and our job was just to release it from the ether
so for example the lost years which is the theme tune has three parts the first chorus
and the middle eight and before i recorded it i would have got to a kind of piano version of it
but how does a songwriter or how do i get from nothing to even that
that's a really good question so there are two main ways that that happens
one is kind of weird um there are several songs that i've fully dreamt up in my sleep
that's why i always keep my phone by my bed because i have hundreds of voice memos or voice
notes even going back to dictaphone tapes where i would literally just wake up at all 6am usually in
the early hours in the morning for some reason and just record the song the second way that i
write songs is to just play around mess around on the keyboard and just wait till you hear something
that sounds like a song you would want to hear but the internet being the internet
i don't know how this is going to go but if i did come up with something incredible
i wouldn't want people to comment oh there's no way you just came up with that in five seconds
so i've been a little sneaky a couple of days ago i posted a message on my patreon
just asking people to comment with one letter of the alphabet between a and k now obviously there
are only eight notes in an octave and they go from a to g and why do i go to k i didn't want to give
the game away and have people realize oh hey we're writing a song in the comments so uh what i've
done is stripped out all the superfluous letters and that's given us basically some random letters
and random notes so if you're bear with me i'm going to start playing around with those notes and
see if we can develop it into a song that by the end of this video will be a finished production
here goes nothing
so
that's incredible
wow
i need a pen
not part of the song
i didn't think this would be quite as
catchy
this happens a lot i'll keep making mistakes and eventually
get it down but sometimes those mistakes lead to a new avenue for the song which
inspires something that you hadn't thought of so actually quite enjoy and embrace the mistakes
see now it's leading to something that i had never thought of
so now it's becoming a tune
and then of course you have to remember the stuff that you wrote before
do
so let's move on as i said that's where we're up to let's try the next bit it goes f b
doesn't sound good got any ideas how to fix that b doesn't sound in place does it
little inspiration please bye well i am back again from a little break so
messing around with those particular notes wasn't really working out sometimes that happens you
know things aren't going to work out the way you expect i think honestly we got really lucky with
those first sequence of notes pure fluke that they actually played a really nice song on their own
and then i was inspired what sounded like it would come next in my mind and just played that
i think now instead of trying to play the exact notes and hope that that's going to work into
work out into a song i'm actually just going to play through the notes and wait till i hear
something it sounds more inspirational so less pressure let's play around with those
see there's something there obviously the other part of it i'm putting in is the bass
and here i'm just working through the notes to see what goes with that upper melody on the treble
so
too high so we've now got two main sections one could be a verse one could be a chorus
or there could be a middle eight or a bridge just takes you away from the main song just to
give a bit of variety different melody and then kicks back into the chorus again at the end i
wasn't looking for something that's about three and a half minutes long so we've done pretty
well so let's see what i used here i elaborated around it a little bit so bgfd would have been
still nice and that's how it became that
so i really like it and sometimes i'll just keep playing it over and over
and then you know you can kind of turn it into chords and just make it into a backing sequence
and i like that sort of discordant sound basically in maintenance terms of playing the
notes closer to each other
i just think it sounds a little bit more ethereal, romantic i don't know how you describe it
you
get the general idea with that as well love it okay why don't we move on see
what other melodies are trapped inside this piece of marble which is paper
and this isn't marble or paper either these are pcbs and they're made from fiberglass
i mentioned that because if you need your own great quality pcbs i recommend PCBWayyy
because as we all know pcb stands for performance composition board something like that doesn't it?
anyway with that said back to playing around with notes so next we've got g g-a-b-b
why is this so good
i've left an h in there
ladyfractic? yeah. trimming your bush again? yep. so you're american how do you pronounce
hurt? hurt. okay how do you pronounce herb. 'erb. well here. it's the h you keep dropping hahaha
oh did you 'urt yourself?
i mean that's the exact notes so really i mean what this tells us is that the key part in the bun
is the baseline brings kind of the emotion to it and there are only certain base keys
that will go with a melody in the treble section you can again just mess around
and find the base chords that go along with it so so far out of more than half the notes
only this little section i couldn't really uh find anything with but the rest have almost
note for note being able to be turned into a melody and i hear a little something to join
so you can join the two
get the idea okay
there's my girl you'd like to give me a little break so about every 20 minutes she'll come over
and then basically telling me it's break time or in other words tummy tickles time
that's the dog version interesting
that's not
i'm hearing something better that could come next
not that that's something
so you can see here this is the purest the simplest chord you could play
c major and uh do something different on the bass but you could do the same so all it's
done is extrapolate it down to b so instead of it's a little difference but it's nicer in a way
and then you just play around the chord in the kind of arpeggio
isn't that nice
so of all the letters that i extrapolated from that mystical
comment thread that i posted on patreon we've used
well over half of them in almost the exact sequence that they were typed a few little
flourishes and changes here and there and we've now got four main melodic sections to a song
so
do
all right well let's smooth out the timing and put the rest of our musical sculpture
together
ah that's music to my ears pun definitely intended and i hope you've enjoyed seeing a little bit of
how it is possible to turn completely random notes into a complete song but as i mentioned
at the start i want us to turn this into an 80s styled musical chiptune so i invite you to
subscribe and join me next time where we try out insidious with our little song insidious is a new
reproduction of the commodore 64's wonderful sid sound chip in the form of a software instrument
that you can use with modern music software i just can't wait for us to find out if it'll strike
the right chord and hold the key sorry until then subscribe and support below and cheerio