The Vatican Concept
I tend to rotate my hobbies at different times of the year and for some reason, music production always happens in the winter. I think my creativity just peaks after the sun goes down, and since winter is mostly dark, it matches how my brain works. It is not a strict rule I follow, but looking back at the last few years, that is just how I seem to function.
But, where should I start? That’s a question I often ask myself whenever I start working on anything related to the topic I'm writing about today. This year was the same.
Around December, I got back into production after a two-year break where I focused mostly on my health - nothing serious, I just like giving my body time to learn new habits. I felt a sudden burst of energy likely triggered by a new group of friends I met recently. Seeing what they were working on and hearing how they talked about their craft gave me the motivation I needed to start again.
I decided to work with specific themes this time. For example, I take the Vatican as a concept and build melodies out of my associations with that city. My process involves using my MIDI keyboard to compose, while also bringing in external mp3 sounds, free samples and textures (like distant crowd hum or ambient room noise) as raw material. I like to tweak these sounds and layer them until they sit right in the mix. I don't feel like a "bad guy" for using these samples and recordings. That’s just how production of anything in general works - you take what exists, build something on top of it, and make it better (or worse), but once you've made it, it's unique and yours.
The real issue is that I can’t choose when inspiration hits. I usually end up recording a quick voice note on my phone, but the trouble starts when I actually sit down to work. I didn't have a reliable way to sync my mobile ideas with my computer and fighting with two different environments that didn't talk to each other was frustrating. I needed a way to keep my ideas in one place.
After testing bunch of programs, I found Soundtrap. At first, I was suspicious. It felt like a "dead" project and sounded like Spotify had only bought it to sunset it eventually. But then I saw it was actually re-acquired by the original owners, which gave me the confidence that the platform isn't going to vanish overnight. It does everything I need in the free version and it actually replaced GarageBand for me. The main thing holding me back with GarageBand was the lack of Android or web support and I needed something that could actually bridge the gap between my devices. By the way, the Soundtrap even has version control, so I can move back and forth through my changes and export the final track whenever I’m ready. It is a simple setup, but it is exactly what I need to play around and create things that sound good to me.
I needed one last piece for the puzzle: a clean way to grab audio from YouTube and split it into parts. I went with yt-dlp for the downloads, mostly to avoid those shady "converter" sites and their low-quality limits. For the actual splitting into stems (vocals, drums, instrumental etc.) I bypassed the old Spleeter tool I’d heard about and used Demucs instead.
I handled the whole process through Google Colab, which was a lucky discovery. It lets you run a script in the browser that processes the audio and dumps the results straight into Google Drive. Even though I’d used Colab before, it was always for dumb scripts. I never realized it could do so much, or that I could even use it this way. I chose Google Drive as the destination because most of my apps can import from there, which is a lifesaver, since I usually lose everything in my disaster of a downloads folder.
So, when you add it all up: I have the high-quality source sounds, I have a way to pull them apart and add effects and I can mix in free samples from the app itself. And when I’m feeling like enough of a hacker, since my EXPERTISE is web development, I even figured out how to use the paid features for free. But wait... if you call yourself an engineer and you still haven't figured out how to bridge this gap on your own... well, I’ll leave you to it for a bit. hehe
So now I don’t really think about “where to start” anymore. The Vatican concept is just one example of that. I took the idea of the Vatican as a theme and built a track around it. I did something similar when I solved the issue I mentioned in this blog, not being able to stay in sync across devices while producing. Remember that, this is just one part of a series where I’m building a Mobputer. Before, the idea would get stuck somewhere between the phone and the computer, but now it survives that gap and brings me closer to what I’m actually trying to build.
Here is the actual track. This is what came out of the whole process described above.
