Toy Soldiers Track

This track was the product of some long, obsessive days. I had a lot of fun making it though! I've had the idea for this song's concept for a little while now, and it's been a blast putting it into motion and seeing what happened! I focused a lot on sound design with this one. I recorded/augmented a lot of audio to get a lot of the SFX you hear in the song. For example, I had made the toy wind-up sound effects with my mouth and some car keys. The toy's active 'motor' sound was also made with my mouth and a tin can. A similar amount of processing was needed to get it to sound the way it does, and I'm quite happy with how it ended up sounding! The goal was to make the song feel very tactile. A lot of this was achieved through both the texture of the percussion and instruments, as well as the mix. Many of the instruments were mixed to sound as if they were coming from a real object, and the track was mastered with a light room reverb. I kept it subtle though, because overdoing it sacrifices the details! Many of the instruments also have their own resonant frequencies, which I made to sound small, hollow, and metallic. I also pitched their resonance to the same key of the song as well, so even the percussive instruments do their own harmonic pulling too! In parts of the track that are meant to sound more 'real' (like the intro/outro), in addition to the room reverb/EQ, I also recorded some empty room tone to give it the effect of being recorded on a microphone.



On top of the sound design, I also got very nitty gritty with percussion and rhythm design as well. I'm not sure if it's everyone's cup of tea, but personally, I like my music short and dense. (Probably the ADHD!) What the song lacks in length, it absolutely makes up for in girth! By that I mean detail, of course. After laying out the general outline of the song, I went through and filled in each section with their respective progressions and melodies, ramping up the layering as the track progresses. Then it was a process of scrubbing back over each section probably hundreds of times and breaking things into pieces and putting them back together. You could think of it like a mosaic. The fragments of stained glass are the original outline, and the fun little percussive doodles and melodic sparkles are the glittery glue that holds it all together.