When The Crow Hill Company, a new samples company I follow, popped up on YouTube Shorts with an invitation to "write us a track in 24 hours, if we like it, we'll feature it in our next video", at first I disregarded it. Usually the deadlines for these fun little challenges are incompatible with all the "other stuff" I have going on. But, surprisingly, I then realised I had an evening free enough to stoke up the DAW and have a bash! Fun times.
The brief was "uplifting, like a summer's day", and they asked to feature one of their new freebie Vaults instruments (the Attic Grand piano) prominently.
Here's the results of an evening of composition.
Underneath it's a little I-IV-iii-V progression in D Major with a I-IV-iii-ii variation. The melody line hangs around the 5th and, well, it kind of goes around in circles. To make it halfway interesting and give it a bit of a build I slung in some Appassionata Strings and had a bit of a go at 4-part-harmonising the chord progression.
There's a bit of compression on the piano instrument and the strings bus using the UAD LA-2A compressor. Then the Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor sits across the mix bus for some glue. Finally, Ozone 10 does the mastering.
Above all, having the 24-hour deadline actually encouraged me to get the track finished and uploaded! I'm utterly terrible for deciding when tracks are 'finished' so the hard deadline provided a nice end point to focus on.
For the video I had Dall-E draw me some pictures of "crows in sunny countryside", some are rather better than others!
Oh, and was my track featured in The Crow Hill Company's video? No, it wasn't. But the one that was is really nice, so do have a listen.
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