I've been working on four songs to figure out which one would be best to make a music video for. In the context of the project, all four songs would be included on the same EP which will be what I'm marketing and designing the digipak for later on.
The first of these four is a witch house song, this being the genre I have the most comfort and experience producing in. For music production I use the digital audio workspace (DAW) FL Studio 12 and have for some time, and the main synthesizer I use within FL is called Serum. Serum has some pretty sick presets for witch house including hoover synths and hypersaws as well as one called 'Rave' that works pretty well for lead melodies.
In this song I used a basic hypersaw at a lower octave for the main backing chords, layering the 'Rave' preset at some points (especially the chorus) an octave up to fill up space and create cool little harmonies that happen with these kinds of synths due to the different waves being played simultaneously. I also put flangers on both these synths (only slightly) because that adds to the witch-housey sound a lot, especially the harder, almost wave-inspired sound I went for on this song. For the lead that comes in during the chorus I used a hoover synth and made some tweaks to the envelope (basically note speed or how it fades in / out, hard to explain LOL) and the oscillators / sub-bass.
In terms of how I built up / wrote the song, I started out by laying down the main chords with the hypersaw and rave hoover. Once I came up with a chord progression I liked, I did the drums. Drums have always been my favorite part of producing because witch house is so snare-heavy and you can create some really fun textures and rhythms by messing around with different one-shot samples.
In this screencap the top pattern is the main drums; I start out with laying down kicks and then add in snare rolls and space out other rhythmic stuff. The bottom pattern is the hi-hats; I made these separate from the rest of the drumloop because being able to add and take out stems like that makes for a more dynamic and sonically interesting track. For example, no hi-hats during the first verse, hats come in during the chorus, sporadic hats during the second verse, hats full-force second chorus and then a sparse ending with only drums and the basic synth line at an even lower octave.
After all the stems are laid out and structured I go in with dynamic effect stuff like little love philter riffs that make the melody more interesting, as well as cutting out the volume when the synths cut out because hoovers have a tendency to make a very audible 'winding down' noise when they stop playing a note. Then comes the mixing process: I'm not super proficient in mixing, I usually just do what sounds good to me lol. I like making my kick drums really strong which results in this sick effect where it sounds like the synths are side-chained with the kicks, cutting out a bit with each hit. Like I said, I also add flangers and stuff to the synths but most of my mixing is just making sure nothing is clipping or too loud / quiet.
Then comes artwork. This song was heavily inspired by stuff like CRIM3S and Sidewalks & Skeletons, even Crystal Castles to an extent that make up the noisy, heavy, EDM-ish side of witch house, but for the art I took some creative liberties and went for something that spanned the whole genre as opposed to that harder second wave. Some traits include vertical symmetry, lots of dark cool colors like purple and blue, crude image cutouts and editing, basic fonts, lots of triangles and other weird symbols, and a general thrown-together vibe that I tried emulating with the art for this song.
(Left to right: RITUALZ - Ghetto Ass Witch, CRIM3S - CRIM3S,
Crystal Castles - Plague, Black Kray & Jayyeah - Back to the Witchhouse)
And yeah! That's pretty much it. I have a bunch of witch house videos in my
music video inspiration playlist, and I think this might be the song I'm going with for the video because I have so much experience with WH visuals. But it's always good to experiment I guess :P
