The Making of Arrival: My Foray into Music

Learning how to produce music has been on my mind for close to a year and I finally set aside the time and space to make it happen. My first song has finally been released and I put probably 150+ hours into composing this piece and learning all the technicalities in making it happen. 

This really was an insane labour of love and probably one of the most hardcore projects I have ever taken on, which is why I decided to document it in detail here!

Here's the link to the track - you can also download the song from this link: https://soundcloud.com/henrychim/arrival

Best looking album art. Ever. 

Henry the.... Musician?
I was first inspired to make music during my time in India. It was probably the spiritual pinnacle of my life and amazing music just started entering my head out of nowhere. The music in my head got so much more beautiful and real during my 10 day silent vipassana meditation in Nepal. I would hear music in my head and be able to direct it, almost as though there was a musical conductor inside my head who actually knew what he was doing. Solely by picking an emotion I wanted to transmit, I would hear the music change direction and begin channeling that emotion. It was incredible.

I knew I had to learn the tools and tricks of the trade so that the world could enjoy what I was hearing inside my head. It took almost a year to finally set aside the time to do justice to this hobby. At the same time I was thinking about making music, I met a German DJ named Ulf who taught me my first few tricks in Ableton Live in Kochi, Kerala. 

To this day, I still hear beautiful tunes in my head but they sound nowhere near as good as when I was at my spiritual pinnacle in South Asia. 

Inspiration for Arrival
During the Partner Gathering, which was a send-off of sorts for the Global Fellows in NYC, I was quite sad to leave the city and the wonderful community I had around me. My friend and Vancouver+Acumen chapter leader Marica reminded me that rather than thinking I am departing from somewhere, I should think of myself as arriving. With arriving comes new possibilities, adventures and friendships. So I thought about that distinction during the entire flight and my first few weeks of my field placement. I aspired to capture my emotions of arriving to a new place, combined with the cosmic-level craziness that is within the confines my brain, into a song... and the song is called Arrival.

Then I had a dream about 6 weeks about Transformers. Autobots and Decepticons were battling in a giant space crystal and Optimus Prime lost his arm in the fight. He transformed into a fighter jet and started spinning out of control because well, he lost his arm. As he spiraled out of control and started scraping the walls of the space crystal, the scene in my head ended and the closing credits started. I woke up at 4am and hummed the closing music into my iPhone and composed it into the piano solo of Arrival starting at 4:10. 

So... I literally turned my dream into reality! #mindblown.

Fun Facts About Arrival

• I started producing the song in December and made a daily ritual out of working on it all the way to release in mid-February. I would listen to it at work and took notes on what needed to be changed, then would spend an hour at night making the adjustments. I would then listen to it again before bedtime, take some more notes, and spend an hour in the morning making more tweaks. So making this song was an iterative 2 hour daily process for over 2 months.
• It's almost 10 minutes long with over 40 layers of instruments and sounds. Every single note, melody and sound was meticulously selected, placed and perfected from scratch
• The voices in the song are from the real Apollo 11 landing recordings. So the song is featuring my boy Buzz Aldrin. Also grabbed a few sounds off those recordings like the space beeps.
• My room mate in NYC, John, had to put up with a couple months of my epic snoring. One night he decided to record my snoring just to show how ridiculous I was. I used a vocoder to turn my own snoring into a musical instrument which I proudly call the "Snorecoder 3k". You can hear it coming in and out every second or so starting at 2:30. There are 6 snore variants used for the instrument. 
• I made this song on a used 13” laptop that I bought 5 years ago from Ernst & Young for $50
• The Ableton file takes 10 minutes to open and also crashes every 20 minutes or so, and this is after I took my computer to Lahore's Hafiz Tech City to pick up some upgrades from this fascinating laptop graveyard full of parts that I could adopt as my own. 
• The music file uses 2.5GB of RAM. Each layer needed to be "frozen" as I went along to save CPU so each edit I made also took about 5 minutes of rendering time. Needless to say, the final mile of finishing this song was the most painful experience ever
• In case I didn't hit the point home.... Arrival has completely pushed the technical limits of my laptop. It only exports properly from Ableton like 1 in 2 attempts and otherwise crashes! I'm never doing a 10 minute song on this computer again.
• In contrast... the album art took me only an hour of screwing around in Photoshop and actually turned out better than I had hoped. Goes to show that creative processes are a complete crapshoot.

Nerdy Facts About Producing Music

• Figuring out chords and melodic progressions is actually coming to me quite naturally. Usually stuff comes into my head during my meditations and I'll just plug it in to see how it sounds. The harder part though is understanding the physics and technology behind music.
• I downloaded 1,000 music tutorials from YouTube totaling 110 GB. It was a good call because YouTube is banned in Pakistan. These videos were invaluable for learning the technicalities of music production.
• Layering melodies together is really really hard. You have to balance so many things like octaves, frequencies and stereo width to make sure each sound punches through clearly. Otherwise things just get cluttered and sound muddy. The best description I heard is that producing music is like sculpting a sculpture. You really have to carve off what isn't needed using equalizers for everything to balance and be aesthetically pleasing. 
• There's this tool called compression which was tough for me to learn but incredibly powerful. Basically, when a piano key is struck, there's the mechanical sound of the key and initial hit followed by a beautiful resonance. Well if I want more of that resonance and I turn up the sound, the initial sound gets way too loud. What compression does is use math/physics to bring down the initial hit so I can bring up the resonance without screwing things up. It's way awesome and brings life to so many different sounds.
• Mastering music is also really hard. Usually producers send their mixes to a mastering engineer who does engineer the track to make sure it sounds clean in many environments. I learned to do this on my own and that took about a couple weeks. Even getting the song to be the same volume as other stuff in my iTunes library is an effort in itself. I spent some time pulling my favorite songs into a spectrum analyzer to understand how professionals master music. I learned about what different frequency curves look like for different genres and how the pros handle decibel levels throughout their tunes.
• AMC's Director of Development, Amjad, is an audiophile and has like a collection of the best headphones ever. He's been lending my different headphones over the past couple months and I've now listened to Arrival on like 8 different headphones, each run highlighting something different that I needed to tweak in the music.

What's Next?
Phew even documenting the journey to date took a lot of work. I don't know what drove me to put in that much energy into this project. Maybe you can call it passion.

Now that I have learned the basic tools of music production, the sky is the limit. There's so much more to learn, especially as I branch into more genres, but I feel good about my foundation. I want to make at least one electronic dance music and one hip hop song over the next year, and maybe even try producing unplugged acoustic music on my guitar. 

I can't wait to see what else I find and create as I continue down this road. For now, I need to turn off my brain and take a break from anything to do with making music. Time to watch a Michael Bay movie...