Development of an UNDERSONG number - "Fabulous" - Part I

In today's little behind-the-scenes featurette, I'll be showing the complexity of composing UNDERSONG through the development of its tracks - and what better place is there to start than the track with the longest devtime of all? One of Mettaton's two major numbers, "Fabulous", took over 3 months to go from idea to scratch track, and today we'll begin discussing how it happened, one piece at a time.

"Fabulous" began as literally nothing more than the chorus hook popping into my mind during a shower. This is, in fact, how roughly 90% of UNDERSONG tracks begin. From there, I began playing around with the hook and building a chorus around it. From the chorus comes the verse, and, before you know it, we have a first draft. The only inspiration I could directly pull at the beginning was that I wanted something with a similar upbeat, story-progressing feel to "Popular" from Wicked, with a bit more of a showy attitude.

Unless the instrumentation is so unforgivingly complex that it wouldn't be comprehensible in such a form (as is the case mostly for heavy metal/sample-heavy numbers), UNDERSONG numbers always start as a simple recording with nothing but piano and my voice. I mostly refer to this as a "remember scratch", as I'm trying to get the general flow, melody and chord structure of the song down before I forget it. Sometimes it's only the first verse. Sometimes it's the full track. Sometimes the first draft sounds mostly like the final and other times it sounds nothing like it at all. Fabulous was certainly quite different in its rough form than it eventually became. Chord structures, harmonic arrangements and even lyrics all had changes in the final scratch.

While the final "Fabulous" has four verses, this was only written with one in mind because it's all that was required to capture the melody written at the time. Please enjoy looking back at the initial spark, and look forward to more development logs like this in the future, EXCLUSIVELY for $10+ patrons.

<Original date of creation, Oct 29th, 2015>

-RecD