Throughout this process, it’s been very difficult to gather up enough motivation to work during the quarantine. I’ve tried my best to put all of my frustration into my music. I have finished writing the song and I have recorded each piano section on logic pro as well as a quick vocal recording to use as a tester.
It took me hours to figure out what tempo each section should be and to actually record them in that tempo. Yesterday I discovered that it’s not possible to record each section in a different tempo. They all defaulted to their tempo and all my hard work was erased. I arranged them each by tempo and now I feel that each section sounds too similar and the emotions that are reflected are dependent on those tempos.
Besides that disaster, I’ve been adding sound effects to enhance each emotion and directly relate it to the situation at hand. I’ve added a flatline to the sad section to commemorate the people who were killed by the virus, a cough to symbolize the virus’ symptoms, and sad rainfall that sounds as if it is against the window to symbolize the sadness of being trapped inside during the quarantine. I’ve discovered that I am able to download these sounds and manipulate them for free.
In addition to working on the technical effects, I designed and created the album cover for my song. It helped to really reach deep and discover what I want my song to portray. I used my brother wearing a mask and rubber gloves making faces and hand symbols to portray the emotion that he is feeling; sadness, joy, anger, and hope. I used each of these pictures and tinted them with a color that I felt reflected the emotion. Hope was very difficult because all of the other colors were primary and there are only 3 primary colors. I intended to use gold but ended up using orange. The rest of the album cover besides those pictures are all in black and while or grey. This symbolizes how life and the world is simple, as if it were in black and white, until emotions, colors, are involved which makes everything difficult, complicated, and interesting.