This assignment was to create a 2 minute track in some sort of genre. I started out with the goal of making a house song, but I veered more and more towards trance as I went along. I think I ended up with a hybrid of the two, but probably more on the trance side because of the melody line and the more song-like structure with a chorus kind of thing. I dunno. Here it is. It’s called “It’s Only Music,” and as with most stuff it sounds much better on headphones.
I made the whole thing in Logic using Reason as a rewire slave for some of it. I had some trouble figuring out what I wanted to do with the vocals, but I couldn’t get them to sound right when I applied heavy effects (even though I wanted really heavy effects, I couldn’t figure out the right ones), so I just let them more or less be except for some filtering and reverb.
My band The Fortune Five just played another concert last night, which went pretty well I think. Yalemusicscene.org is this pretty cool website/group of students who help put on shows and open mics every week, so they got a concert together for us (as they did in our previous performance, although we were an opener then). We had a decent turnout, and we played 9 songs more or less how we wanted to play them, excluding a few tempo and technical difficulties.
In somewhat belated response to Santana’s comment on my other post, the division of labor, for the most part, is that I write the songs, or at least the basic idea, and then we all kind of tweak with it until we can play it as a band. In terms of electronics, we aren’t really doing anything spectacular except for using different sounds- synthesizers on my keyboard and then distortion/effects on Will’s (our guitar player) guitar. I’ve been messing around with sending my keyboard through my computer, which I can do pretty easily, but so far it hasn’t been necessary- all the sounds and effects I need are on the keyboard currently. But it’s good to know I have the resources of Logic and Reason at my disposal should I want them in the future.
This assignment had us use Reason to create a minute-long track with five effects. No other requirements, so I had a lot of freedom with this one.
I didn’t really do anything crazy in terms of effects or really innovative/insane musical stuff. Pretty much just took a couple of ideas that worked together and stuck them together, pulled them apart, then put them back together again. I used eight instruments and five devices (to create the effects). It’s called January because part of it I made up in January as part of something else that never happened.
So, currently we’re learning how to do stuff with Reason in Electronic Music. It’s a pretty awesome program where you can more or less synthesize any instrument or sound you want- you set up racks with the different synthesizers and then sequence everything. This past week, instead of studying for my midterms, I decided to play around with it and try to work out an instrumentation for a song that had been in my head for a while. I layered on some piano, drums, and synth, running things through reverb and distortion machines until I had something that came out like this:
I kind of scrapped up the lyrics together as I went, and got lazy and repeated the first verse instead of writing a new one. But sometimes famous people do that too and no one gets angry at them. I tried to create a sense of dark space in the track, which I think the reverb helped with a bit. I wanted this feeling of expansive desperation as opposed to a more claustrophobic one- I’m not sure how well I did at that because I’m certainly no expert at this program (about a week and a half or so since I first touched it). Also, Reason just allows you to do a lot with sound that other, normal sequencers don’t. You can kind of get an idea for that when you compare it to my initial kind of sketch, which I did on Logic instead of Reason (shorter):
It sounds flatter to me, as if the sounds are pressed up against a wall. It might also stem from the fact that I spent more time, clearly, in Reason than I did in Logic. Ultimately I did all of the vocals and final mixing of the Reason version in Logic (because, as far as I know, you can’t record vocals directly into Reason), but the sound of the backup track was all Reason.
Also, on an unrelated note, my band performed live on Yale radio yesterday and it went pretty well…at least well enough to get the host of the show to extend an offer for us to go and record something at his studio. It was all acoustic, so it meant changing up some of our arrangements pretty drastically, but I think they all turned out ok.
For our first Electronic Music assignment, we needed to create two different ringtones in the style of musique concréte.
The first ringtone we created from sounds we recorded in the environment. I initially thought I would go and record my material in the post office because mail is another form of getting in touch with people, but I forgot the post office is closed on Sunday. Then I decided to go to record in the church and take advantage of my previous obstacle, but the service I walked in on was in a different language and I thought it would be creepy if I recorded people without being able to tell them what I was doing.
Instead, I made the theme of my ringtone “Winter” because it’s winter outside and I didn’t have any other ideas. I recorded myself walking around in the snow, I recorded melting snow dripping down the drainpipe, and I recorded a heater to kind of bring the two ideas together. It starts with me walking in the snow, then the heater warms up and the snow starts melting (in rhythm). It ends with the dripping water, and you can hear the water sample I stole in its original context. So it tells this incredibly emotional story.
I wanted the beginning to start arhythmic and slowly evolve into a rhythm. I really like what Animal Collective does in Peacebone- essentially starting with random/uncoordinated sounds and gradually making them into a beat. It was kinda tough to do effectively in 15 seconds, but I tried. This is “Winter Ringtone”:
The second ringtone needed to be taken from a single sample instead of lots of different recordings. We needed to repeat the sample at least three times and put different effects on different repetitions. I wanted it to have something to do with cell phones, and a little bit of Youtube searching gave me this clip:
I broke it up, changed the speed and pitch on a lot of the samples, did some audio smoothing on the waves with a magic pencil (although I still couldn’t get some of the pops out…hopefully I will learn how to better get rid of them in the future), and made it into “Compromised Ringtone”:
The repeated samples aren’t uninterrupted or unclipped, so I guess I’m kind of hoping that’s ok, but the assignment didn’t specify the repetitions needed to be continuous.
So my band had its first performance last Saturday night on a basketball court in one of the residential halls. We played six songs, about a half-hour set. My suitemate, coincidentally, was filming a video project that weekend, and as a part of his assignment he recorded sections of the concert. I extracted some audio from his video, and there was enough of it to post this song. The audio quality isn’t great, the balance (especially vocals, guitar, and keyboard phaser…) isn’t great, and since it was our first performance the performance itself was not superb, but it didn’t come out too badly, I don’t think.
Anyways, this is a song called Can’t Hold On, and it’s more or less complete except for a small part of the instrumental intro.
I just started writing a webcomic with Cole called Quiet Glen Mind Police. You should check it out- we update Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is part of the reason I am not posting as much on this blog (my joke ideas get funneled there). The other reason is that my band is taking up more and more of my free time in a very good way. We have our first concert this Saturday, where we’re basically inviting a very small amount of people who won’t care if we suck. I think we’re recording it, so if anything turns out I’ll post some stuff here.
Also, this blog is now going to be used for my Electronic Music class to post assignments and things. I guess I’ll be writing more frequently with those deadlines.
Back when I was in Junior year of high school, we had a Spanish assignment wherein we had to pick out a poem by a South American poet (my country was Venezuela) and record a reading of the poem. It was an exercise to practice oral skills. One of my friends, Michael Ayoob, had the idea of recording his poem over a song so there was music in the background; I don’t remember what song he picked, but it sounded cool.
This assignment came right around the time I got my new keyboard/sequencer, so after I heard Michael’s poem I thought it might be fun to do my poem to music too but make my backup track on the keyboard. So, as often happens with easy school projects, I spent a huge amount of time (hours and hours) putting together the presentation (in this case, the music, sometimes it’s powerpoint or a video) and about 10 minutes on actual content or learning. Spanish is a subject that this occurs frequently in.
Anyways, I thought I’d share the track, which takes its lyrics from a portion of the poem Angelitos Negros by the Venezuelan poet Andrés Eloy Blanco (who later became foreign minister of Venezuela. Poets and politics often go hand in hand in South America).
I found out tonight as I was trying to refresh my memory as to the poet’s name that Angelitos Negros is actually a very famous Spanish language folk song (even covered by Cat Power). Here is that older folk version in case you want to hear it, and it even has a translation so I finally kind of understood what this poem I was reading is about:
I didn’t mind so much that the track took me so long to record when it was completely unnecessary- I enjoyed doing it and making something to have afterward.
The same thing goes for this otherwise unrelated Art History video, which my friend Adi and I made for a single bonus point of extra credit (later raised to two after careful politicking). It’s about an exhibit we saw on Dali:
Somehow this video has gotten a ridiculous amount of hits on Youtube (by which I mean over 25, 000- we’re small time). Viewers reactions have been divided, in multiple languages, and concerned with the USA’s world image. Check out the comment sections if you have time. Also it will give us another view and raise our stats.
Anyways, I’ve strayed a bit from my initial intentions with this post, but I guess if I were to somehow extract a main idea it would be about how making stuff for seemingly no payoff is a very good thing to do. It’s why I started this blog. It’s why I create things just to create them regardless of quality. It’s the same point Cole mentioned in his most recent blog post, and you should just read that cause anything I write would be redundant.
Right now it is snowing, and this is the only time I have seen the first snow of winter anywhere. It isn’t a very heavy snow- it is a light, romantic snow that you see in comedies starring people like John Cusack (those movies would be different if, after the scene where he proposes, they walk out of the hotel lobby into a huge blizzard that immediately blows them over and suffocates them on the sidewalk. Also, if John Cusack turned out to be a black hole disguised as a person). It’s the kind of snow that you can appreciate even when you are not immediately dressed for it, and I walked back to my dorm very content with the East Coast and nature in general. It reminds me of a time when I was much younger and in New York visiting my grandparents. We had just gone to see the Radio City Christmas Show, and we walked out of the theater to find New York City showered with snow. It seemed very much like magic; in fact I’m sure that somebody in my family used that phrase.
At any rate, this felt like magic too- I again walked out of a play and again the snow caught me completely by surprise. Winter on the East Coast is more important somehow than the West Coast- obviously this is mostly a result of the weather, but it extends further than that. Before I went to the play, I attended a Holiday Dinner in our main dining hall. Entirely for freshmen, the huge building was decked out in glorious decorations that ranged from very classy (ice sculptures, all kinds of dessert displays) to tacky (blinking christmas lights all over the ceiling), but it was all great. Then there was a food parade which, as one of my friends pointed out, combines two things everybody loves. The dining staff carried a giant turkey on a platter, the biggest challah bread I’ve ever seen, lobsters and shrimp, everything. Followed by Santa Clause and Mrs. Clause, who gave out candy (I took Nerds).
It all made me feel so happy- that my college was throwing an elaborate freshman holiday dinner, that all of the non-freshmen were getting their own holiday dinner in their respective colleges, that winter is a bigger deal here, and that it is snowing. All in all a very good evening, and a great way to begin what should be an awesome reading week (two improv shows, a music showcase, a rave, movies, band practice, sleeping in, fun fun fun fun). (also studying)
