New Music – Forest Firefly

This song has gone through a few variations.

When I was very new to Ableton, I was listening to a lot of Disasterpeace’s music and trying to create chiptune aesthetics using instrument plugins like Chipsounds and Massive.  Recreating chiptune aesthetics in DAWs like Ableton is often called ‘fakebit,’ because it doesn’t have the same restraints as trackers or the actual hardware chips in retro consoles.  While a composer might be using simple sounds and waveforms associated with chiptune music, they’re still accessing a toolset (MIDI capabilities, sampling, audio processing, effects, etc) that can take the sounds outside of the traditional chiptune aesthetic.

This is exactly what I was doing when I wrote the first version of Forest Firefly.  The tempo is faster because I wrote this away from the piano, pointing and clicking the notes into Ableton.  So, I wasn’t yet considering the physical realities of having to play this at the piano.

Year later, as I was digging into Pico-8, I started writing music for Counterpoint, a album of music where each track uses only 2-channels and 1 cart.  For many of these compositions, I used a preexisting song (like a short game loop), and expanded it into a full pledged song.  Forest Firefly fit nicely into the albums concept because the song is basically in 2-part counterpoint already.

More recently, as I’ve started moving back to piano music, I finally learned Forest Firefly at the piano (sheet music attached!). This first required a slower tempo to make it more playable, and a few subtle to make the arrangement less repetitive.  When I perform this live, I also improvise some of the left-hand accompaniment to keep things fresh.

And that brings us to the CURRNET version of Forest Firefly which is solo piano + electronic sound design.  The sound design elements are minimal, but just enough to add some colour around the piano.  I was VERY tempted to add more layers and effects, but didn't want to take away from the solo piano performance.  

As you can see, most of the channels are dedicated to another Frankenstein piano.  The Pads fill out some of the high end, the sub fills out the low end, and the “High Bass” is the fuzzy effect sporadically panning back and forth.

PRETTY sure this is the last version I’ll produce of this song, but who knows what other tools I’ll be using in 5 years :) Hope you enjoy, thanks for listening!