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Speed Composing: Leef Lang (Saturday 8 March, 2025)
A colleague was recently promoted, and to celebrate the occasion, I decided to composed a song and to submit it to Spotify—all within a single day; a real speed composing challenge (at least for me). I titled it Leef Lang (which means Live Long in English).
I started out with a melody and chord progression in Dorico (Steinberg) from which I also composed a very simple string accompaniment.
Image: part of the initial composition in Dorico (Steinberg).
Next, I imported the composition into Cubase Pro 14 (Steinberg), where I enriched the arrangement by adding drums, bass, piano, synthesizer, guitar, trumpet, trombone, horn, and tuba to complement the existing string section (violin 1, violin 2, viola, and cello). The original melody is played by a solo violin, but I also copied and simplified the melody line to be ‘sung’ using the Voices of the Empire (East West) sample library, adding an ethereal vocal touch to the piece.
Finally, I mixed the song in Cubase and mastered it in WaveLab Pro 12 (Steinberg).
Image: Part of the Cubase (Steinberg) project during mixing
Image: WaveLab (Steinberg) project during mastering
The resulting master was submitted to Spotify via the DistroKid distributor after generating the artwork with an AI tool.
Verdict
This is what I could do in a single day. It is far from perfect. In particular the timing of the ‘voice’ needs further work and the solo violin melody line is not sufficiently audible. The outro is also open for improvement. Perhaps, in the future, I will spend some more time on it. For now, it was fun to work on. But drop a comment to let me know what you think.
Listen to to the song
Documents
