Final Project and Blog Post #6

Before you listen to my magnum opus, let me give you a bit of background on how the piece was conceived and created.

After an entirely unsuccessful first day working on my final project, I realized I lacked a certain direction. Though I knew (roughly) the genre and desired sound of my final project, I had no vision or inspiration - which was troubling, and made it nearly impossible to create a four-minute-long track. I would lay down a drum beat, delete it, lay down a synth lead, delete it; this process was repeated over and over, with no success. When I left the lab that evening, I felt dejected. But on the way home, I heard in the air the catalyst for my project: a church's belltower ringing hymns into the night.

At this point, you might be ask the (logical) question, "how did hymns inspire your final project?" In return, I would be obliged to reply, "hymns, are my final project."

Before I describe the creative process, listen first to "electrichymnal."




With this (divine?) inspiration in hand, I sat again to craft my final project. I searched the internet for .midi representations of hymns, and played myself the ones I couldn't find, or whose recordings I was unhappy with (often, the way the chords were played into the midi files made it difficult to isolate the melody - in this case, it was easier to simply play it myself from a 1982 hymnal).

(*A Brief Aside: I picked only hymns I with a) a relatively simple melody and b) which I considered "staple" hymns, which would be readily identifiable in an unaltered state. I began with 6 or 7 I considered eligible, and after working with them within my piece, I narrowed it down to 3 that "worked." (The key of each piece had to be doctored, but otherwise these three had the simplest, easiest melodies.) You may recognize them as 711: Seek Ye First, 586: The Doxology (Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, and 154: All Glory, Laud, and Honor).

With these basic melodic lines in hand, I then began to build my song. I opted for my first hymn (711) to be played on a Moog Synth, and layered on effects (reverb, directional mixing) until it had a spacey sort of sound. I then added a drumbeat and subsynth bass line to fill out the soundscape for the intro portion. I automated a gradual build in volume, and then introduced a track I built in Reason, which was to serve as layer of harmony. I had a significant amount of difficulty "slaving" Reason to Logic, and so (though it finally worked on a Thor track at the end), I chose at this stage to "Export as Audio File," and then work with it in Logic as audio. Because I already had the track as I wanted it, this wasn't a terrible compromise. In fact, it allowed me to edit it in SPEAR, which I wouldn't have otherwise been able to do as a .midi track. Editing it in SPEAR, i deleted some of the upper frequencies, where it would have otherwise collided with the melody.

Moving onward, I built this portion in volume and layers, adding various instruments echoing the melody line at various intervals, until I felt it had climaxed. At this point, I boosted the chorus effect on the Strobe Pad and raised its volume, so that after cutting out it would continue to sound. I added a building drumroll (to make that, I slowed the tempo way down - 30bpm - and played it on a pad), and then built the volume until it cut.

When the sound cuts, the dancing sound of the Strobe Pad, where I added that effect, lingers - tying the piece into the next section.

Throughout the rest of the song, I modulate bass lines, melodies (using the other two hymns) and drum beats. The song gradually builds again, but never cuts completely as it did at 0:43. It stays relatively etheric, which I felt was in keeping with the nature of the melodies (hymns). As the piece finishes, you are left with the initial melody (in actuality, it is often performed as a round - which was perfect for this piece, and one of the reasons I chose that hymn specifically), as the rest of the instruments fade out or drop off.

As a whole, I attempted to construct the piece roughly within the confines of the "trance" genre. It has the usual characteristics: 140bpm, fairly simple basslines, four-on-the-floor type drumbeats. Yet, purposely, it lacks the sort of soaring melodic lines/vocals typical to trance - the melodies are hymns, after all, and that's not how they're meant to sound. Though I experimented with their placement an octave or two higher, eventually I decided that C2/C3 was about the right place for them - and I double at octaves on different instruments occasionally (fading one in and out to change the color of the sound). Of the tempo, I wanted to ensure it was quicky enough that the hymns' melodies achieved a new life - this trance tempo is significantly faster than, (at least in my experience), these lines are typically played, and they have a very different character at this tempo.

Overall, I was happy with how this piece turned out. It was very fun to work on a sort of "themed" composition, and working the various hymns together was fun, though getting them to sound "electronic" was relatively difficult, and required a lot of effects work - there's something very "hymn-y about hymns, and I didn't want that to overwhelm the piece." The final mixing/mastering process was very new, but after working with compression on the melodies as well as the overall piece, I felt as though I could better position the sound of the melody within the overall body of sound, almost as to give it a distinct position or direction.

This class has been hugely rewarding, and I will miss it horribly next year. Many thanks for a great semester, and hope you enjoy this project as much as I have!

Blog #5 - Review

I mentioned several blogs ago that I liked trace. When I went through my iTunes playcount of possible song choices (for this review), one stood out. Though, as expected, the works of Ratatat and MGMT along with pump-up tunes by Darude and DJ Mangoo dominated my most-played, among this list was another song I have found myself coming back to again-and-again.

Here it is (my version is a little different, but this is as close as I could find on Youtube):



When the song began, the first time I listened to it, I though that it felt very thin. It builds slowly, and much of the first minute is simply a repeated melodic riff (with the occasional intrusion of three beats from the bass drum. Indeed, as I looked at the total length of the song (a short three minutes), and the time elapsed, I wondered how Tiesto was going to bring the song to a satisfying climax in such short time.

Then I realized that was not what this song is about. Though the second minute gradually adds layers beneath the melodic line, and introduces a stable beat from the drums (at about :48), it never really comes to the heightened climax that I had come to expect. Tiesto builds, and builds, finally arriving what is undeniably the song's focal point, and climax, at about 1:50. He adds the drum rolls and amplitude escalation, but, unlike many other songs, this climax doesn't rock you.

That's what I like. In many songs I have listened to recently, when they reach the climax, you're literally blown away. They are overpowering. This is not. From the vocals at the very beginning, moaning and whispering "ayla," you know immediately the song is not supposed to rock-your-socks-off. Which is why I have gone back to it again and again.

After the climax, the melody shifts. We lose, for a little while, the opening riff that carried us through the first two minutes. But he introduces a new melody. The song is "thicker," with numerous tracks and layers, various synths and instruments. But unlike other songs, which often grow dynamically as well as in layers, Ayla doesn't get loud.

So, if you want a great piece, which builds you up and puts you down without knocking you over, have a listen.

Assignment #4

First off, take a listen. Then I'll tell you how it went:






This project was much more rewarding than the previous project (#3, using Reason), but also much more difficult. As we transitioned into Logic Pro for the first time, the number of things we could do for our piece exploded - literally anything I could imagine musically was possible. I thought, in the first five minutes, that this would make the project much easier. Wrong. The more things I was able to do, and the more features, instruments, and variables I discovered, the more overwhelmed I felt.

So, in the end, I took it back. I thought of the approach I used with my last project. Develop a beat. Lay that down. Map out the song in your mind. Literally, draw it out (as in, on paper. Weird, I know - that thin white stuff is worth something). And then go from there.

I started then with a very simple bass-drum line, for the four-on-the four feel, that I developed as I moved through the piece, gradually adding instruments (hats, and club bass, etc), to help the "build."

Then I got stuck. My paper-outline had a big BUILD, layering in various sounds. This is harder than it would seem.

I eventually added some layers of bass (this is the first :30 of the piece, approx.), to "fill out" the sound. Then, I introduced some harmonies until (after a brief roll), I introduce the piece's melody - it's harsh, it's loud, and (I hope) it's catchy.

Then it cuts. This was the most fun part of the piece. Dropping everything out except for a simple bass line, and then building up again. With 2 minutes to work with this time (and 3 would have been easier, honestly), I felt like I could try something new.

I hope it worked.

Compression and Loudness

After our conversation about compression (and what it is?) in section, I stumbled upon a couple relevant articles in the past day or so.

This one is on why Vinyl can be preferable to CD's primarily because of reduced compression:
wired.com

And this wikipedia article explains the "loudness war" and how compression use has become rampant and detrimental to the sound of many artists today:
wikipedia.org

I thought they were interesting...

- J

Assignment: Reason

I'll preface this post with a discovery I made when doing my project: the longer I spent making my song, the longer I felt I needed to work on it to make it good. In tinkering with Reason, using various effects and synths, pads and samples, it became clear that you could spend either one hour or a hundred making a song. Mine fell somewhere in between. Though I'm sure I overlooked some cool Reason features, by the end I felt as though I was able to work into the song most of the effects/sounds I was aiming for. I hope you like it.





Creation: where to begin?

I don't know if this is backwards, but I started with a sample and built a piece around it. Over break, I spent a lot of time thinking of what sample I wanted to use. Then I was watching Family Guy (which is worse than South Park, but better than the recent Simpsons), and came across the episode involving the Kool-Aid man. Ohhh Yeahhhhhh. And there it was.

It took me a while to find this sample in high quality, I guess it hasn't been used in any of their more recent advertising campaigns, but it was used by comedian Dane Cook in a track entitled "Not So Kool-Aid." The track was only moderately funny, but the sample was perfect.

To make it more manageable in Recycle, I copied the .mp3 into Logic Pro first, and isolated the several second clip (which I aptly titled "Oh Yeah.aiff"). I bounced it, and brought it into Recycle. By cutting it down in Logic first, it made my job in Recycle much easier.

Having made the sample, I brought it into Reason. I didn't especially like Dr. Rex, so I messed about until I was able to set up my sample in the NN-XT Advanced Sampler. I set it up for the keyboard, and after assigning the sample to all keys, I got a pretty cool effect - by moving up and down the keyboard, the sample was lowered in pitch/slowed down or elevated in pitch/sped up. Moving up or down by simple octaves kept the sample durations in usable durations, and let me imcorporate the sample into different stages of the song easily. A pretty sweet feature.

Then I set about creating the bassline. I'm not sure how real DJ's/composers do this, but it seemed the most logical place to start. First, I identified the elements of House that I wanted to bring into the bassline - basically four-to-the-floor plus a hi-hat effect - and so I primarily used these sounds. Then, I identified the effect I wanted the bassline to have - I wanted the song to gradually ramp-up, until about 45 seconds, where it would then prominently feature the "oh-Yeah" sample that had been more subtly deployed earlier in the piece. So I made five or six different patterns in 2 instances of ReDrum, and went to work.

Then I got really stuck. How did I make it actually sound good? It took me a while to decide what sound I wanted (I chose c-minor as the key, because it's easy to play, minor, and I had already centered my sample around middle C). So I set up several instances of Thor (one specifically to use a pad to bring additional depth to the piece), and also a subtractor and arpegiator. The arpegiator became the focus of the first several bars of the piece, as the other instruments/sounds came in around it, adding layers and depth of sound. This augmented the building of the bassline, and I liked the effect.

After adding and recording all my tracks, I needed to go back over them to add some effects/automation etc. This was useful, especially for smoothing the introduction of new instruments, and getting new sounds from existing ones.

Blog #4

Blog #4:

I know this blog is primarily the review of a fellow student's project, but I found this recently and wanted to take this opportunity to share it. It's a great documentary (there are many parts, I'm merely posting the first one) on remix culture - very new/relevant, and featuring popular DJ Girl Talk who will be performing at Spring Fling this year. This clip is only 2:30 long, and it's definitely worth a watch.

What's really cool about the project is that the producers of the documentary have asked others to literally "remix" their film and turn it into something new - much as its subjects remix music.

Check it out, and find the rest of it here:



In any event, on to Jeff's tour-de-force: the House Training Montage

After listening to this song I had a number of reactions:
1st. I had some difficulty hearing the best of the three samples (Joe Esposito - You're the Best Around) in Jeff's piece. I had the sense that maybe it had been sped up to fit with the tempo and to sound a little more tech-y. The effect was good, even if I'm partial to this original sequence:



If that doesn't make you want to kick some ass and get huge, I don't know what will.

2nd. It was a high energy piece - a little to hype for me, but it comes with the genre (Jeff choose House). The tempo was quicker than the 120 I used in mine, but I can appreciate how it adds to Jeff's mission for the track - to pump. it. up.

3rd. The first 20 seconds have a different feel than the rest of the piece. I cant exactly figure out what's going on or why it seems so different, but it definitely feels a bit disjoint. The bass line seems to be reworked, and the change in texture threw me off a bit. I liked the building effect right before the "real" song begins, as the beat quickens and he adds layers to the sound, but otherwise I'm left a bit confused.

4th. I really like the use of the samples in an almost percussive way - maybe I'm hearing it wrong, but they seem to add emphasis to the underlying bass line/beat. Also, whereas I tried to keep the sample as pure as possible, I like how Jeff works to make something almost completely new out of his samples, with effects and changes of the amplitude envelope.

5th. It was my impression, in listening to the piece, that Jeff could have definitely benifitted from more time - not more time in creating the piece (it is very complex, and clearly required a lot of effort to get the effects etc), but more time over which to stretch the piece. One minute is not a long time to really develop a song, and I felt as though the song would have turned out even better had it been given a chance to progress more slowly. When crunched together, it sounded a bit choppy, but if each section were given a chance to really build/transition, I think it would have been great.

Taking the piece as a whole, I'm not sure that I'd choose it over any of the individual samples for a real workout piece, but it's certainly more club-worthy. An noble effort.

With regards to my final project, I would really like to develop a trance song. I've been listening to a lot of Armen van Buuren lately, and especially after the readings on Trance I feel like this would be a cool genre in which to create a piece. I especially enjoy the building melodies of pads, and in trying to create my last proejct, I realized this was where I wanted to go with my final piece. Away from the four-on-the-floor emphasis of house and into the building, shifting harmonies of trance. This would be the primary focus of the final project. Also, Brendan and I had been talking (he's my roomate), and wanted to develop a rap song. This would certainly be secondary, but we thought it might be fun. (Disclaimer: we were inspired by our watching of the movie Hustle & Flow - a true classic).

Also, before I go, this is really cool. I had been fooling around on some online drum kits, and this one is pretty sick. Remake Daft Punk however you like...
http://www.najle.com/idaft/

I found this before Jeff...

Do not listen to anything Jeff might say, I found this song, and take full credit for its finding.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx3S5mqvvig

PURE genius.

Let’s start with ABBA. First off, great band. And I end up listening to them far more than I might usually (though I’m not exactly sad about it) because their name establishes them at the top of my iTunes library. If I click “Play” without thinking I’m greeted by the first track of “The Best Of (The Millennium Collection)”, Waterloo. While this isn’t what I would consider their most “electronic” track, I think their discography as a whole is really interesting in its varied integration of electronic sounds. The title song of the disk “Super Trouper,” for instance, sounds significantly more synthesized than the song that precedes it in my library (another recording of Waterloo). Or see “Me and I” (from Super Trouper) for the best example of their later, more artificial sound.

Before (Waterloo) - you can even see the orchestra in the seconds before the song begins:



After (Me and I):




I suppose what’s really interesting about this phenomenon is not so much that ABBA experimented with different sounds (after all, what wildly-successful band doesn’t?), but instead that we can almost trace the development of electronic sounds in their music. Waterloo, the first track of the A-Side of the “Waterloo” (1974), was recorded over 6 years prior to “Super Trouper” (1980). This is a band that evolved with the changing music scene, and embraced the new technologies (with great success, Super Trouper made it significantly further up the billboard than did Waterloo).

In any event, the movie “Mama Mia” is a must see (as was the musical, but I have no idea if that’s still around). I don’t know that it’s really a cinematic masterpiece, but it’s good fun…

- james

Assignment #2

(sorry for the late post, I was having some "Bounce" problems - would only save first 4.5 seconds of each song. Tried a different computer and it worked fine.)

For assignment #2, we were asked to compose three 20-second clips using only a several-second long .aiff sample of four "clicks." This was very different from our first assignment, as it entailed the live manipulation of sound rather than the doctoring of a sample after recording (all of this live manipulation was accomplished in the program RadiaL).

Each piece displays different features of the program, and my understanding of how to use it. Perhaps the most difficult and time consuming part of the project (besides deciding upon which 20 second portion of 10 minute long recordings to use) was the control mapping. This process, which assigned various functions to the different MIDI channels on our keyboards, was very labor-intensive: not just in mapping the functions and keys/sliders/dials, but also in determining which parameters worked best for each function. For some (ie. a mute-type function, a 0,1 was the correct parameter; for others, like filters, you had to chose 20,20000. Determining how these parameters affected the sound was the most interesting, but also frustrating part of the process).

I would like to add a pet peeve of mine re:RadiaL. It would be nice if you could assign a function to both a key and a slider/dial. For example, I found that I liked assigning a tempo "toggle" to a key on the keyboard, and being able to switch between 120 and 200 at will. This type of control was more precise than a slider. However, I also liked the more dynamic, gradual change in tempo (as well as the greater flexibility) of assigning tempo change to a slider. Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn't incorporate both effects in one piece. (The "toggle" is present, I believe, in the second clip).

Enjoy!









- james

Blog #2

Since the last blog post (and following our discussion in section), I have had much to think about concerning my definition of “music.” What constitutes music? I suppose this is the real question I’ve been grappling with.

What I’ve discovered is that, after several weeks I consider more things to fall under the genre of music than I originally thought. Though I am still unconvinced by John Cage’s 4’33”, (no matter how creative, I simply cannot consider the transformation of nothing into “something” to be music), I find myself identifying increasingly unmelodic sounds as musical. Coming from a background of orchestral music, this was initially difficult – music was a compilation of sounds designed to function together, each with a specific purpose.

This change in perception is likely a response to the work done on the first ringtone assignment (and also, more recently, our musings with RadiaL). In the ringtone assignment, we were asked to record sounds and turn them into ringtones using the tools we had learned up until that point in class. For me, this assignment was difficult to grasp – in my mind, we were being asked to turn noise into music.

I suppose this brought along the realization that the two, noise and music, are really more closely linked than I had initially thought. Last Wednesday in section, we took a series of assorted sound snippets and turned them into a sort of rhythmic melody in RadiaL – again, turning noise into music. Is music simply sound with intent, then?

Enough for those musings on music, now for something slightly more interesting:
Trance



I’ve had a lot of work this past week, and one thing that’s been helping me read is “trance” music. Armin Van Buuren has been my artist of choice, and his “State of Trance” album from 2007 is really tremendous. I think these songs are so appealing because their simple variations on a repetitive beat are fulfill the needs of two types of listening: with the volume, up, you can easily lose yourself in the music; with the volume down, it provides a great backdrop for work or any other activity.




- james

Rediculous Remix

(Warning: NSFW - rife with obsenities)

Christian Bale flips at cameraman... REMIX.

http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?pk=18511

Assignment #1

Assignment one required us to create two separate ringtones, one fifteen seconds long and the other twenty, using various recording and editing techniques. This is what I did:

For the first clip (entitled ‘Drip Drop’), I recorded a faucet pouring water into a glass with increasing intensity. As the clip progresses, there are three “stages” of intensity, in which the water first drips slowly, then pours slowly, then finally pours most intensely.
- After recording this sound, I edited it (primarily in Logic Pro).
- I faded in the very beginning of the ringtone so that it did not begin so harshly. It is a short fade, however, because the recording contains its own manner of varying intensity.
- I then normalized the volume of the clip, and used the gain tool to create greater consistency between the volume of the different water types.
- I slowed the tempo of the clip at two points – at both times when the water type changes, so as to slightly reduce the harshness of each change.
- Finally, I faded out the clip so that it might be more effective if “looped” on a cell phone ringtone.

This is what the end product sounds like:

The process for creating the second piece was slightly different, as this piece requires more digital manipulation of the sound clips.

I began the clip with a recording of a man’s fingers typing on a laptop keyboard. There is an intentional lack of traditional rhythm or time signature to the keystrokes, but they are easily recognized as the true rhythm of typing – the rhythm of the keystrokes, punctuated by strong hits of the space bar, is easily recognizable as type.
- From this clip (which was originally :25), I cropped it down to a roughly :03.5 segment, and separated these segments by a half-second of silence.
(The clip of length :03.5 was first slowed by 10%).
- I normalized the clip’s volume, and then copied the clip five times in different tracks.
- The first track/repetition fades in (to give the cell phone user a chance to answer their phone before the ringtone becomes loud interrupting).
- Each subsequent clip has a markedly increased volume (through gain modulation - +30/70/120/180%) and also a raised pitch (+20/40/60/80%). This is designed to get the listener’s attention more effectively than a static volume/pitch.

This is what the end product sounds like:

(UPDATE: Now it's working! Thanks for staying tuned.)


Hope you liked these ringtones, and feel free to use them on your phone!

- james

Blog #1

Listeners of "popular" music will likely remember the hype surrounding Kanye West's "Stronger" when it was released several summers ago. The song immediately took over the air waves, and in dialing through the available radio stations you were almost guaranteed to hear it's catchy hook - a hook that belonged not to Kanye but instead to the less-heralded, but certainly more talented, Daft Punk.

Those who follow Daft Punk immediately identified the main riff of Kanye's hit single as sourced from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."



This song, released first in 2001, had been a staple of my Top-25 most played since almost that time. So it bothered me when Kanye sampled their tune and the public/billboard lauded his musical inspiration - in my opinion, it was a cheap ripoff of a far better song. Even though the Daft Punk version has virtually no more words than compose its title, it's a much stronger song - as a workout/pump-up mix, to hear when you're out, in every situation it's superior. It's altered variations on a common theme are more subtle than Kanye's lyrics (his words, often genius - see "Last Call" from College Dropout, are very weak on this track), and there is much more going on musically.

Plus, they wear these hats:

(which are rumored to cost almost $10,000 each).

I realize, though, that this is one of the beauties of music however - that once an idea is made public, it is public. There is no taking it back. Though Kanye (in my opinion) was wrong to give Daft Punk so little credit for essentially creating his entire hit single, he broke no laws. That is not to say that stealing a song/lyrics is at all legitimate, only to say that one person's creation can serve as the muse for another's.

That's all for now...

- james

First Post

Hello all,

This is my first post on this blog for the class "Introduction to Electronic Music." Please excuse its appearance as I figure out how it works. 

- James