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Hey There Lurker

Submitted to DistroKid | Hyperfollow here

This one is part of a weekly game on the Indie Music Feedback discord server. Anyone can play, its a random genera assignment game where each person rolls a dice of around 118 possible genres, and then has a week to make a track.

The “story” of the track is a lurker wandering down a dark alley on Soundcloudand stumbling upon the Somewhat Incognito Soundcloud page. Hearing voices reflecting off the walls, a bit scared, the listener continues forward. A strange figure peeks around the corner and whispers ‘hey there lurker, do you follow me?’ as the listener gets cast into a well of off-kilter bangors, the track slowly turns more and more into a SI sound and leaves the listener a little perplexed, but now following a new found indie artist.

I rolled Orchestral, the track uses nearly all ‘Orkester Soundson NNXT samplers in Reason. This is a default set of orchestral like sounds that comes with Reason.

Orkester sounds aren’t the greatest sounding things, but I found using Valhala VintageVerb on them, along with HIKU gave a pretty good overall sound. Each layer has slightly different configurations of these 2. I selected reverbs by browsing presets and then tuning them up a bit for the track.

Current Outlook in the DAW (Reason 11) . There are 31 layers, some are sparse however, like backing takes for vocal layers on just some words. The track runs for 3:20 which is close to what I targeted at the beginning (3:30 is what I wanted). The timing consideration is mostly NOT to go long as this will be featured in a single sitting with many other artists and I don’t want to make a 8 min track and keep everyone waiting all day, but I wanted enough time to explore a few ideas within the track.

The colors start starting at the top:

Green: String Section & Piano – All strings are Orkester NNXT presets with some light changes. The piano is a ‘Processed Pianos’ preset (new in reason 11, sounds great)

Light Blue: Wind section – mostly flutes and Flutola (whatever that is)

Yellow: Brass – trumpets, trombones, and french horns

Purple – An upright bass positioned forward

Red – Percussion section – lots of things in here like wood blocks, triangles, mallets, and a few ‘cheats’ like ‘just trash’ and ‘processing’ which are NOT orkester percussion but they fill up some space I wanted better and are fairly subtle in the mix.

Tan – Vocals

On keeping the SI Sound

Most of the games and activities I do, I try to keep a profile close to the ‘Somewhat Incognito’ sound, this one deviates probably the furthest from that of all the tracks I’ve done recently. It does however (I think) pass as a Somewhat-Somewhat Incognito track and a ‘Somewhat Orchestral’ track , which is hopefully passable for the game. I plan on keeping it on my Soundcloud and putting it on Spotify with the rest of them.

It does have vocals, and lyrically its about lurkers on my Soundcloud page.

No feedback this time

It is not going through the usual feedback process to keep the track a surprise for the reveal, which I think is more fun for everyone. I will post it to my Soundcloud on the listening party day.