Henry was my best friend growing up. He’s the one who pushed me to come to DigiChip Academy to develop my craft. I remember our last roadtrip, cutting through the mountains cradling our town, magcycling out to Menna Coast.
Along the long road, we chatted. I wanted to run away from the family shop. It was feeling like an anchor. Suffocating. Henry helped me to understand the strength that comes from the generational labor before me. “Landmarks take decades.” I’ll remember those words.
Henry also revealed that he was arranged to be married in a distant city. How his family had given him no choice.
We stayed in touch for a little while, but it wasn’t the same. It was no one’s fault, really. I hope my friend is happy.
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As I was exploring FM synthesis around the time of this track, it was only natural that I give Dexed a proper try. After all, the DX7 is *the* FM synth that many of my influences would have used.
Interestingly, I found a lot of presets to be quite harsh, and less audibly enjoyable than the FM that I was doing with Vitalium. I did come across a couple of presets that hit emotionally, and so I used them.
But I also used a technique that I developed while working on Smol Penguin, which was to resample the whole track through AmiSampler, add some bitcrushing, play it at a different speed/pitch, and trigger some quick additional flourish notes around it.
—
_software-used: Dexed, AmiSampler, Cardinal, Ardour
_download: Roadtrip.wav
_project: Roadtrip-SOURCE.zip
_license: CC0 / Public Domain dedicated