Act Casual

 I put this together in a rush because I wanted to see if I could still do a decent split-screen edit. The answer was no, I needed to do a little better job of preparing if I wanted to get good results, but the song was really good so I posted it anyways.

This isn't a very complicated song, because I knew I only had a couple of hours to finish it. It's a modal groove in F Mixolydian, and I put some synths on a melody. This one ain't rocket science as far as composition goes. 

The most interesting part of this little jam is the production. I recorded both the bass and the guitar DI, which gave me flexibility to mess with tones afterwards. For both of them, I threw on some compression, an amp sim, reverb, and some simple EQ. On the guitar solo, however, I got a little bit more involved. I tried out the Guitarix distortion plugin, which fit the vibe of the tune pretty well after some extreme EQing to tone down the fizziness. A bit of delay for atmosphere rounded out the solo tone.

Everything you're hearing that isn't on screen was done in LMMS and Reaper. To start, I put together the basic drum patterns in LMMS. On top of that, I layered the chord progression and wrote the melody. All of the synths are stock TripleOscilator patches except for one of the melody doubles, which is ZynAddSubFX. After I had the form laid out, I exported the tracks and brought them into Reaper, where I edited the drum parts to add fills and spice up the pattern from time to time. That's really all there is to it.