Montcalm

The second song from the Québec EP is finally here!

Home base for me during my time in Quebec City was the Montcalm neighborhood. It's a beautiful area with tree lined streets, close proximity to parks, and some great food spots. The idea behind this song was to spend some time writing in different coffee shops around the neighborhood over the course of my stay.

In reality, the writing process was pretty much finished after the first session. I grabbed a coffee and the corner table at Café Les Cousins late one morning during my first week and ended up staying for a few hours.

The main melody throughout the song is built from a generative patch. It's a bit time consuming, but letting something like that just do it's thing while you record the output can be an interesting way to get melodies you wouldn't normally come up with. To get some additional movement, I added an LFO to the synth's attack resulting in each note played feeling slightly different.

After I had some good recordings to work with, the rest of the song came about really naturally. One of those times where it's sort of a blur, then all of a sudden it's a few hours later and you have a song. I mainly used Diva for the synth sounds, with some additional elements coming from Cycles. There are a couple field recordings low in the mix as well; one from the coffee shop that day, the other from a school playground I walked past when leaving my Airbnb.

After finishing up, I went next door to Cinéma Cartier to see 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (very relieved when they started speaking English and not French). It was dark out with a light rain falling after the movie. I listened back to the song walking home under the street lights and it really just fit the moment. That's where my mind goes when I hear this one. Hopefully now you can make some new memories with it as well!

Montcalm will be out tomorrow, but as with Montmorency Falls, if you've joined the community here you can enjoy a first listen below :)