Day 40. This is mostly me playing the piano live. In a few places I adjusted the timing, and I added a couple notes that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to reach. I doubled the piano with two slightly different piano sounds, and they are panned hard left and hard right. This adds a bit of depth to it. I added the drum track at a relatively low volume to kind of keep things moving a bit more than it would without the drums. This one came out a lot more melancholy than I thought it was going to despite it being in a major key.

Day 39. I don't know if you can really call this one a "song". This is an attempt at making something that could be used in a trailer or as the end of an episode of a TV show. There is a base track of a few layers of string instruments, and then I layered a whole bunch of other sounds to build up to the big "boom" at the end. I reversed a couple of the sounds so that they build up instead of taper off. There's also a heart beat at the super low frequencies that doesn't actually follow the rhythm of the rest of the piece, which I think gives it a nice bit of dramatic effect. This time, I was mixing it while listening on both headphones and my desk speakers to make sure it comes across okay without headphones.

Day 38. I wanted this one to be mostly piano, with just a hint of some other sounds. You might want to listen to this one with headphones for the full effect. The atonal sounds you hear are sampled from a gong. I like how some of them sound like muffled speech.

Day 37. I liked the way the maj9 chord resolved in this synth patch, so I built up the rest of the song around that. The background piano is doubled at a 1/8 step out of tune. I used the same compressor trick to help add rhythm to the background tracks too. I'm starting to run out of new video filters to use for these, I wonder how I'm going to make it to 100.

Day 36. This one's short and sweet. When I replay this in my head I keep thinking about other embellishments I could add. I think if I later expand this I might try some of those ideas, but I didn't want to complicate this version of it. The video is from my flight from Oakland to Portland this morning.

Day 35. I'm not super happy with this one. I originally had something else in mind, but didn't have the energy tonight to properly get it out of my head. So instead, you get this, which is a strange combination of sounds. You may recognize the pulsing synth sound from yesterday's song as well.

Day 34. I started this one by listening to a Logic Pro loop that I liked. I tried to recreate parts of it as an experiment to see what it would take. I started with two synths playing the chord progression in two different octaves. I added a clip distortion filter to make them sound more dirty. I wanted them to sound like they were pulsing on the beat, except I wanted the volume to drop on the beat to punctuate the sound instead of having them get louder on the beat. To do that, I added a silent drum track that just hits a bass drum every beat, and used this as the input to a compressor so that the compressor would think there was sound on the beat and clamp down on the synth tracks. This results in the tracks getting quiet on the beat, and coming back up again on the off-beats.

Day 33. I didn't really know what to expect going into this today. I started with the piano, then added the first violins that you hear. At some point I realized this sounded familiar, and then found out that it's the same chord progression I used on Day 7. Not that it's particularly unique. I then decided to stick with only orchestral instruments, and that I wanted to try a large buildup and taper it off to a slow resolution without doing a fade-out. I think that aspect worked!

Day 32. I decided to go somewhat simple for this one. I used a delay effect to get the piano and snare drum to echo. I added the vocals last to fill out the sound some more. The vocals are a mix of a full choir singing "ah" and tenors singing "oo", and they fade in and out mixing between different intensities of singing. If this were used as background music in a TV show I probably wouldn't have used as strong of a hit at the end, and just left the cymbal build-up hanging and probably not resolved the chord either.

Day 31. This one is composed of seven tracks of the same piano sound, all with slightly different EQ and effects. One has a strong low-pass filter to make it sound percussive and not interfere with the rest, some have delay effects, etc. I wanted to see what I could do with only piano and no other instruments this time!