A look into how a Skitter song actually comes together, from the first spark to the finished track.
Every song starts with an idea. Inspiration generally comes from experimentation with tools, ideas, or concepts from art and other music. Songs such as Submerged came to me while waking up in the morning; a frequent milieu for ideas. As ideas arrive throughout the day, I either drop everything and start writing, take notes on the concept, or make a voice recording on my phone sketching out the idea. I tend to get around to working on most of those concepts! As far as voice recordings go, I'm sitting on a few hundred I haven't translated yet.
Everything lands in my composition journals, 13-30 minute playgrounds packed with song sketches, sound design, and wild experiments. All nascent writing starts here, and if an idea becomes defined or infectious enough for me to want to turn it into a full song, it earns its own project file. From there, the iterative writing process starts and the project gets added to a list tracking all my projects and their state.
Some of the common synths used throughout my writing process are XFer Serum 2, Synplant 2, Quanta 2, Stage-73 V2, and UVI Grand Piano Model D. Workflow enhancers that save me time are XO, CableGuys Shaperbox, Snapback, and Kickstart. Other plugins I couldn't go without are Delay TAPE-201, MTurboReverb, and Newfangled Saturate. All the rest gets pretty song-dependent, but everything listed here is usually found in my tracks! You'll hear their fingerprints all over Skitter: Sunken Signals.