I wrote this song for the Weekly Note Composing Jam #7. The theme was "1000 pigeon army".

SoundCloud link

Have you ever had the experience where you just have too many ideas? And then you try to cram it all into one thing, even though it's impossible to fit all of those ideas? Well that's what I did this week. And I ended up with this... thing. I've decided to call this pigeoncore. It's kinda like crabcore, but cuter.

Making this was very fun and I learned a lot of things!

Everything was made in Logic Pro. Samples are from the Logic sound library.

Also goddamn mixing is hard!!!!!

Lyrics:

You can't stop the 1000 pigeon army
Hunt and peck
Until you're dead
We will kill and destroy all our enemies
Make sure that our beaks are fed

Yeah
Let's go
Ey

Pigeon squad, coming down
'Bout to put you underground
Sharpened beaks, claws sleek
Stylin' as we flyin' 'round
Above your head, eyes are red
In a ring, hear us sing
And cower as we take wing

You can't stop the 1000 pigeon army
Hunt and peck
Until you're dead
We will kill and destroy all our enemies
Make sure that our beaks are fed

You can't stop the 1000 pigeon army
Hunt and peck
Until you're dead
We will kill and destroy all our enemies
Make sure that our beaks are fed
Top of the animal kingdom
Bow to us
And feed us bread
We will kill and destroy all our enemies
Make sure that our beaks are fed

Rambly reflections

I've been listening to a lot of Attack Attack! lately, so this was partially inspired by their earlier work. It really gave me an appreciation for their production, since it can be really hard to keep the sound clean with so many different elements in it. The electronic bridge is an attempt to do something similar to what happens in "Stick Stickly" where the entire instrumentation changes very suddenly. It worked better than expected, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

I'm pretty happy with the overall arrangement. It's a lot more dynamic and fun than most things I've done before. This is especially clear when you listen to the instrumental version.  I think the reason why the instrumentation was so much more interesting is because I started by writing the drums and bass, and then added the other instruments. I should do that in the future, instead of starting from a guitar riff or whatever.

I freaking love truck driver gear shift key changes, so I felt like I had to include one in this song. I think it went okay, but it was a bit messy having to try to mix both of the versions in a way such that both the original and the key-shifted chorus sounded decent. It went okay, but I'm not really happy with how boxy the lead vocals sound. Kinda sounds like two different songs played together tbh, That's something I have to practice more I think.

I recently got a new bass, and it sounds soooo much better than my old one. Like, the signal is so clean and it is actually possible to record without having to EQ out a bunch of noise. Even though I didn't use it a lot in this song, since it's not as tight as the fake bass, it did work really well where it was used. Bass is a lot of fun. I should play more bass.

I originally planned to do the vocals without the voice changer, however it sounded terrible. My voice is waaay to soft for this kind of music (or maybe I just need to sing louder). Anyway, I'm glad I decided to use the voice changer. Even though the mixing is kinda bad, it does fit better, and it kinda maker the singing sound like a different creature (i.e a pigeon),  rather than just a dude pretending to be a pigeon.

The screams are definitely the worst part of the song. I thought they would be easier, both to record and to mix. But whatever, they're pretty funny and surprising and unique, so they can stay. I also think the palm muted, chuggy guitar in the beginning of the song was pretty weak. As you can tell from the screenshots, I cheated and recorded the palm mute and sustained notes separately, and the palm mutes sounded really uneven in the left and right channel. I should probably try to suck less at guitar for the next time I try something like this.