 Hey, it's Anfa. You're watching Anfa rambling indefinitely, and I've got a few minutes to tell you something And I wanted to tell you something. Well, this one is gonna be short Because I don't have much time and I wanted to tell you something about iterative refinement And I wanted to tell you something about iterative refinement that is Working on something then dropping it Picking it up again after some time passes and working on it again to improve it and this cycle repeats My process of creating an album is roughly like this I take any time that I can to sit down and start a track or Pick up a track that I already have started and Try to improve it once I have enough material I choose a bunch of tracks that will be making up the album and then I focus entirely on Finishing these and making them the best I can Without creating any new tracks to not distract me recently I started a track by creating a chord progression and It's already refinement goes from there like I had that corporation. Okay, cool What can I do with that to improve it? It was pretty the chords themselves were interesting But it was pretty boring on its own. So then I tried gating it I added another track that would play notes that would be Driving a side chain gate that would then cut the chords on and off to play only when the gate instrument was playing So that way I added a rhythm to the chords without Cutting all my chord notes and messing it up. I just added another track that would drive the rhythm into my chords So that was a refining that idea Then I I worked on the tone. I added some subtle reverb and such and some sidechain compression with the kick to reinforce the Pumping the make it all like sit together You know, it's like When I make videos for on for vlog and in one sitting I make a track This is very difficult and it rarely happens this way I also never as you can see I never managed to make a full track out of this It's always a more or less developed idea That has to be refined multiple times When I was working on the tracks For album suppressed. It was like one track was three years old like the track Sincerely I created this initially as a Classical-esque composition and the composition was pretty much done in 2016 nope it was September 2015 and the album was released in November 2017 but the sound design was never on par with that and I didn't want to release it because it wasn't ready I had to go from multiple iterations of trying to make the drums sound good because they I then added drums and Electronic bass sound to that once I had the classical Polyphonic composition going on I wanted to then reinforce that with elements of electronic dance music to make it like contemporary and Old-school at the same time by taking the things that I love about These different types of music and bringing them together I wanted to match together classical and idiom to with this track and it really took me a lot of effort and many times I sat down I spent two hours with this track and I still wasn't happy with the drums I still wasn't happy with how it all flows it felt a bit cut off hard at different places And I needed to work on the transitions to sometimes maybe use some automation to slowly fade something out with a filter or a reverb Taking over Different things like it's all iterations. You can't do this all in one sitting Okay, okay. I hear you. Yes, you can do it in one sitting But it's not going to be good enough to be released and really be admired You know you need to put some more work into that For instance, let's listen to the first version of that piece Now the second one you see in the second version We already have the whole classical composition from start to finish done This is the same composition that went into the final piece and all the 20 other Iterations were about sound design drums bass additional instruments and arranging this into the EDM track Now let's listen to the fifth version with drums and an intro These drums don't sound super good like they are pretty okay but not good enough and I've been searching further and further trying to make them sound different and I came up with this pretty cool thing that happened with these drums is that I Made the snare sound so that you can actually model the rim shot, you know basically Listen to the snare on normal pitch Okay, and then when it's played high You see at this pitch and octave lower Actually two octaves lower than something Yeah, it like we don't have the low frequency body of the drum Apparent at this pitch and it really sounds like a rim shot. It's amazing And in the final version it sounds like this So as you can see in the end, there's a lot of stuff happening You can notice how much other elements there are supporting the core composition It's not just the first main line and drums and bass. It's it's many different sounds and I split different parts into different instruments, which is often called malting which is like Multiplying the amount of tracks you have just shifting the parts to different track to have different effects in this context It's using a different instrument to synthesize the same MIDI data and as you return to your Projects over and over you discover. Hey, I could have a small sound here And that would feel amazing and you come up with these things when you have fresh mind and you come back to your projects This is why I find it so good to Get back to projects after some time because I get a new perspective and new ideas come in and the final piece is richer as a result It's it's not only my creation when I was on one day sitting for the whole evening and making it It's is me throughout some time frame. This piece is me throughout a few years Developing in composition learning about classical music and getting inspired to make this baroque like composition And then developing skills to create to synthesize the drums the basses to develop the mix to make it Really sound cool and makes you want to just get down and this is what I wanted to tell you in this video That to make things that are really polished you have to spend a lot of time on that But break that time into sessions Don't do it in one go because you're gonna just get very tired and Frustrated with making no progress give yourself a rest and come back later You might have new ideas that you hadn't had before and it might make the music better I think that many people who are starting out. They think that the pros Or the people who have decades of experience. They just sit down and make dope tracks Just like that and they make no mistakes. They don't have to take any steps back. I Don't think that's true. I'm making electric music for like 12 years right now And it's like I'm sitting down. I'm drawing some ideas chords rhythms drums sound design and Sometimes for like three hours It feels like it's not going anywhere. It feels like it's not connecting at all I've made a few different parts that are kind of floating apart I they just are happening after each other, but they are not like working together and And then, you know, I I let it rest for a few days Or I sit down to do it next week. I Pick it up after I've you know listened to some different music. I maybe worked on some other tracks I did some other things. I forgot how I was invested in this track. I'm reset I am have a fresh perspective and now I can refine if I were sitting on one track For like 12 hours straight. It could be good, but it could be as well very much forced and Not very smoothly fitting together because I wouldn't have any time to rest my my mind about this track I wouldn't have any time to gather some more inspiration from other people's music from Life from other people's lessons or what they think about music. They are ideas I wouldn't have time for any of that and you need this. I think that's enough. Okay I Yeah, I gotta go. Well, I hope that video was inspiring if you have any questions about this stuff or maybe Some suggestions for future videos or maybe questions general about open source music software Please leave that in the comment section below I also want to give big thanks to all my patreon supporters at patreon.com Who are giving me money so I can dedicate more time to making videos like this one And less to doing other work So thank you very much. And if you dear viewer Think that videos I make are valuable and you would like to have more of that and of higher quality Consider supporting me on patreon yourself. Anyway, thanks for watching. I hope you learned something And now just go and make some music Bye