Wells Next-the-sea Music

Wells Next-the-sea is a lovely combination of Sandy beach, ridiculously expensive beach huts on stilts, pine forest, harbour and (compared to most of North Norfolk) a bustling small town.

The start of the writing for this piece of music began with some experiments with designing a synth sound on my Microfreak synth. Through a pretty random bunch of configuration i ended up with a pretty pleasing sound, and very quickly found a nice little bunch of notes that is the first synth part you hear on the record. The patch that i'd clumsily put together had its own sort of internal rhythm, which pretty much became the basis of the sort of loping rhythm that is present throughout the song. I then created a couple of other lines using the microfreak and Alchemy synth in Logic.

After recording the initial synth parts i found it really hard to take these small parts and work them into a complete piece of music. I ended up playing in some drums to add some drive to the music. I also spend a lot of time recording some distorted/fuzzed guitar playing melody lines. In the end i didnt end up using any of the melody lines i recorded on the guitar, instead i sampled these, manipulated them a bit in logic and they became the noise guitar parts at around 2:50 and 3:25-4:31.

Once i had a bit of an outline structure for the song i started working on the field recording samples. In my head i wanted the use of sounds in the song to reflect the location of the sounds in relation to the video, so at the start of the song they are more organic sounds of seagulls, bird song, dogs, and people, then toward the end of the song they are more mechanical sounds reflective of the field recordings near the harbour and the town. Girl and bird sound are recognisable during the song, but i also sampled these and pitched them down to create some of the drones that are audible through the song.

The video below is the original field recording video/audio, can you hear which sounds ended up in the song?

If you want to listen to all the music i've created so far as part of this project you can watch this playlist here: