I am now at the 'main' destination of my vacation, somewhere at the west coast of Italy, close to Rome. This is where my family has a kind of beach house to escape the heat in Rome. During summer, the place is full of Romans. Outside of the summer, it is more or less abandoned (it is my favorite place to spend Christmas and New Year's, but flying here for that has unfortunately become too expensive).
I created two tracks this week: One track I made with Sunvox, primarily using my phone. The other I made with the M8. The M8 track I made has no particular meaning to me, as I just made it as a potential Weekly Beats submission. The latter, however, does have a meaning to me:
My oldest daughter is the sweetest girl ever, and quite sensitive. My father-in-law - her Italian grandfather - passed away some years ago, as a result of cancer. My daughter is just old enough to be able to remember the whole experience. After my father-in-law passed away, my daughter has had some experiences, and this track is dedicated to one of them. One thing she told me is that she was once laying in her bed and she felt someone embracing her in a loving way. She said that she doesn't know how, but that she just knew in that moment that it was her grandfather (actually, my partner has told me similar stories). I asked her if it was scary or good, but this was definitely a good and happy experience.
I created something imagining the moment, taking some liberty to add some of my own interpretations of the story. I tried to capture how something you don't really understand befalls you. Maybe you feel uneasy at first but ultimately you feel that it is a good, loving experience. And then it vanishes and you lose hold of the moment.
I had some doubts about going for this track and about writing this. I wanted to do this special moment justice and wasn't sure that I could. So, I almost submitted my M8 track instead, which is just a (hopefully) fun, unassuming track. Yet, I thought it would be nicer to go for the one that means more to me than that. If it doesn't do the story justice, I'll make a better version some other time.
So about 99% of the composition was done on the phone. At some point I got a lot of crackles and hiccups as I was hitting the limits of what my Fairphone 4 could handle. I imported the track to my laptop to finish it there (did you know Sunvox has a great interface for this? It is such an awesome piece of software). However, at this point it was mostly making some final touches. I tried to also do some mastering in Ableton.
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