Track breakdown: Turning a Classical Piece into a Lo-fi Beat
Getting Chopin's Funeral March ready for a Halloween lo-fi compilation
It’s Halloween, and Halloween’s a holiday, and I love holiday music! So, I’ve released two new songs for Halloween!
I made a short video for the socials about how I adapted the third movement from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 into a lo-fi beat, which became my new Halloween song, Funereal March:
…but, I wanted to go into more depth about the production process than short-form social media allows. So, here’s a more thorough rundown—with video clips!
I started the track by thinking as a composer/arranger. I learned to play the whole piece on piano, because I wanted to be true to the original. I stayed fairly true to the actual composition (because what am I going to do, improve on Chopin?), but I did make a few tweaks to make it fit into the lo-fi beat genre.
I added an intro of some chordal noodling in Bb minor. This establishes the timbre and vibe of the track and establishes the tonality pretty solidly:
I just love how, in Chopin’s original, the bassline goes up and down a third to take us from a root position Bb minor chord to a second inversion Gb major chord over and over again. It’s so clever!
I kept that voicing in the original entrance of the chords, played by a spooky vibraphone. (In my VST instrument library, this is named “TrinkleTink,” so…now you know the TrinkleTink is an instrument.)
The A theme reappears embellished by some barely audible guitar (or I should say “guitar” - the tone is processed to the point it sounds like a vintage synth). This part is almost imperceptible in the final product. But, when I experimented with muting this track, I definitely felt its absence! So, here’s to minute details that nobody notices and you just feel:
The C section is pretty true to the original, except I added some major 7ths in the voicing. The trilling melody is played by a theremin with vibrato, which I thought was pretty clever of me 😎
The outro is a slightly simplified version of the left hand piano voicing in the beginning of the piece, complemented by a busier bass-line and some theremin in the background.
In addition to thinking like an arranger, I also had to put on my producer hat and think in terms of instruments and sound design. I tried to give some big timbral changes to each section by utilizing filter sweeps, EQ cuts, and more studio trickery.
The organ sound is actually a Fairlight flute sample pitched way down (I love that sound!) I’d love to include a link to where I got it from, but…I can’t find it? It’s either from Puremagnetik or Samples from Mars…
And the piano warble comes from the usual tape effects you might find in a lo-fi track, but I also used YumAudio’s “Pitch Dropout” plug-in, which simulates tape imperfections in a way somewhat different from the plethora or other tape simulators:
Like what you hear? You can listen to Funereal March on your preferred music platform.
And, if you use Spotify, I made a mix of songs for dark chilly evenings, including Funereal March and also Flying Lotus, Boards of Canada, and more:
So, happy Halloween! This weekend I’ll be making one more Halloween song for the most recent Disquiet Junto prompt, and I’ll be using Synplant a lot (which is a fun weird new sound design that’s getting a lot of attention)
After that, I’m releasing some new winter-themed tracks to accompany our time through the dark, cold nights (I love this time of year!). See you next time!