Spiral

Spiral is a song I wrote in term 2 of first year, for an assignment to make a piece of production music. We got given a list of prompts and bands to replicate the style of, and literally the only one I even slightly recognised was Green Day, so the song is a pretty transparent ripoff of Basketcase. I sketched out a demo in Ardour, got a mate to man the desk while I played drums, then a few days later got another mate in to play guitar. After recording the guitar, I bounced a demo from Pro Tools on the studio mac so I could record the vocals on my own laptop in Ardour. THEN I comped the vocals, shot those over to Pro Tools, mixed it and produced the required edits: full length, 59 seconds, 29 seconds, and a sting, all with and without vocals.

More recently, the song got a new lease of life as a hit single by the fictional band Biogenic OOZE, who hail from the planet Glorp in the far future. It was only at this point that it got the name Spiral - previously it was interchangeably called "APTVAR assessment 2" or "legally distinct Basketcase". This also came with a new edit, specifically a version of the 29 second edit that starts with the distorted guitar rather than the clean guitar. At some point I want to re-record the drums, because I'm not the best drummer in the world and my original performance wasn't great. Better vocals wouldn't go amiss either.

You can listen on Bandcamp here.

Credits

• Allison Edwards: composition, drums, synthesiser programming, vocals, recording, mixing
• Dylan Harrison-Moden: guitar
• Louis Hargreaves: recording