This is a page explaining how I wrote Seventeen. If you just want to give it a listen, please click here
Seventeen released on April 19, 2026. I had been writing it since September of 2025, and finalized mastering by April 15.
All of Seventeen was produced in Ableton Live Suite 12. I use Ableton for all of my music production needs, both live and recorded.
Speaking of recorded - except for vocals and resampling, the Seventeen instrumentation was entirely MIDI clip-based. This made it really easy for me to change notes, parameters, and envelopes. It is a synth-heavy song, with the main ostinato being a basic square-wave oscillator synth, playing scale degree numbers 6 6 5, 1 1 7. More on solfege/chords later.
One thing I struggled with was repetition. There is a chord change almost exactly every second. This contrasts with many pop songs, which stay on a chord for entire bars or lines. I tackled this by alternating synthesizers and automating parameters to make each bar sound slightly different from the rest. This is better heard in the instrumental version, which will be out shortly on YouTube.
The chord progression is borrowed from Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. This is not something I had noticed before a friend of mine pointed it out.