Teft’s Blog

Okay .. First one hour song of the year … well, not quite an hour. More like hour and thirty minutes (it’s always the lyricists fault!). My best bud Jesse Janzen was up from LA and sat in on this session. Anddddd .. We had Kate Janzen as the “Director of Photography” for the video. Very cool stuff.

The song’s called Badlands and we’ve got two video versions: A 4:20 length quicky overview, and the full length version (1:27:35) for those that want to see how the hour/half shook down.

Listen to the mp3: (download mp3)

And check out the Video:

Want to see the full 1 hour and 27 minutes? Click Here.

I used Stylus RMX as the backbone of the beat. It’s a great tool. Fast beats. Lots of control. In the chorus I used another instance of Stylus RMX in “kit” mode to lay in a thicker and kick and snare .. just for audio BEEF.

The bassline is from “Predator!!!” (not the movie), which is one of my newest favorites of soft-synths. I like Papen’s “Blue“, too, but Predator captures that analog synthy stuff.

I also doubled the bassline in the chorus with a patch from reFX’s Vanguard. Past readers of my blog will know of my “undying love” for the Vanguard synth.

The chorus also got a leadish patch from Vanguard that helped the high transients move in the chorus. It helps give it that big “gush” that you generally want in pop choruses.

Towards the end of the hour we had lyric drama as Jesse was still putting together the second verse … We already had the first verse cut. But, that’s the fun of doing a song in an hour. It’s also interesting looking at the video afterwards .. you get to hear the ideas that you forgot in the middle of the writing process!

Until next time …

Video is copyright Teft Inc.

Badlands mp3 is licensed under: