Dear Readers,

I’m pleased to announce that I’m releasing a new album on all platforms May 28th, 2021! Over many months, I worked on creating this chill music combining city life with dreamy synth textures and I can’t wait for release day to hear your feedback! I truly hope this music brings you the same level of chill and inner peace it brings to me every day.

For this release, I wanted to dive in a bit on what makes this album different. So, a quick recap:

• “Inside the Red Room” was my first full length release which contains 17 songs mostly combining piano sounds with sound samples geared towards yoga and meditation music. The album was produced entirely in GarageBand as a labor of love and passion but with very little technical knowledge of the music making process.
  
• “Exodus” was an EP created in the month of February for the RPM Challenge. When I created this music, I was already a month or two into the process of creating “City Dreams” but I took a timeout for the challenge. I learned a lot leading up to this EP and from creating this EP – relying a little less on samples, moving to Logic Pro, starting this blog, and learning about all sorts of things along the way.

“City Dreams” is different in terms of applied knowledge – I just know a lot more about the process now than I did when I started making music. (For the record, I still have a lot to learn.) It’s also different because I had very specific targeted goals like wanting to target a lo-fi feel in the production. Some other things were done for consistency which I didn’t bother with before: using the same BPM across most of the songs, creating and using the same drum kit across all the songs, etc. The end result, I feel, is a more technically accurate sound.

The drum kit component was also very different this time. “Inside the Red Room” was done purely with samples – any percussion in those songs was chosen from purchased samples and used, pretty much, as-is. “Exodus”, given the speed at which I needed to complete the songs, was done using the Logic Pro drum sequencer and a stock drum kit. With “City Dreams”, all the drums were programmed via MIDI which was a painful process at times but I felt led to better outcomes.

You may also note that the raw piano sound is missing from this album. I really love the sound of a piano but I decided to switch that out for an Alchemy-based sound that I customized a bit. When I was chasing that lo-fi feel with my piano sounds, I kept backing myself into this corner where the piano either sounded far too distorted or was still too piercing. I just wasn’t getting to the sound that I wanted – so I tried a lot of different things and finally got there.

Why move away from the piano sound? The highs were just too jarring for the dreamy feel I wanted to get to.

Enjoy this preview from Track 1 of the album taken from the middle of the song!

As always, thanks for sticking with me and I hope you enjoy this album when it comes out!

Sincerely,

Achira

P.S. Don’t worry about marking your calendars, I’ll post a reminder on release day!