The song ‘Shadows‘ is very personal to me.

It depicts my struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. 

I don’t know if the final outcome grasps the depth of the matter well enough.

But I started the song with intentions of expressing myself and the the depths of my despair and in hopes that the listener will be able to relate to it if it applies to them and feel less alone.

It’s after the time I moved to England leaving my loved ones behind. And I had nothing exciting in my life to divert my mind off of that void. I felt defeated and had no motivation to live life. Any one who suffers depression or knows about it knows how people use over sleeping as a coping mechanism like I did. 

It’s about a sinking feeling of never ending hopelessness. And when you’re that down in the dumps and taking any sort of action is impossible you just hope and pray for a miracle. It’s about a lot of heartache and frustration. But sadly my limited production skills and rushed vocals did not let me do justice to the idea I originally had in mind. Maybe once I have achieved a higher level in my skill set, I could try reviving the song.

 

• Now I’ll talk about the execution of the idea and the production process. After brainstorming , writing the lyrics and rhyming I came up with a initial melody for the first few lines. Then improvised it through the rest of the song. Then I roughly tried to learn it. 

• Then I created a drumbeat for it. 

• As I can’t play the keys I got someone else to play the melody I made by using piano chords and then added synth pad and choir effect. 

• Then I recorded the vocals section by section. And had to re record some bits.

• Then I edited the tracks . Like fading out, deleting unnecessary bits, cutting out breaths.

• Then did some basic mixing. High pass low pass. Used bright vocal preset with raised ambiance and mid range. 

• I also used equalizer, compressor, exciter and de esser. 

• Added 10% echo

• I did not use auto tune 

 

The musical components I used were

 

• Chorus : major to parallel minor (C major to C minor)

• Common time 4/4

• Occasional use of triplet

• Syncopated chords

• Melodic contour : vocals starting mid range then goes to the higher notes. Chorus explores the lower range as well

• The song has a basic structure of intro, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.