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.

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.

And that is Assignment 1.

I have listened to a fair amount of electronic music, but for the most part my experience has been along the lines of survey instead of depth. I listen to a Girl Talk song here, a Caribou song there, Simian Mobile Disco or Prefuse 73 occasionally, but it’s only with certain artists that I really go beyond their major hits or a once-through listen of an album. However, these artists are some of my favorite of any genre of music.

I’m a song-oriented kind of guy, in the sense that music I really love results from music and lyrics that complement each other. I favor songs over mashups- not that I dislike layering things over each over, but I just prefer it when the layers are part of a tight, complete song as opposed to different songs combined and spliced together. I want to do more than dance when I listen to my favorite electronic music. I want a melody, or if there is no melody I want there to be a reason. I want emotion. I want to get the sense that the song could very well stand on its own were it not for the effects/delay/electronic stufff, but I want those electronic aspects to enhance the song and make it better than it would be on its own.

At any rate, I’m just gonna post a couple of songs that I think do this from some of my favorite electronic or electronic-utilizing artists.

Firstly, Radiohead. Incredible songwriters who know how to use their instrumentation to an insanely good degree. One of my favorite Radiohead songs, off of their album Kid A:

Secondly, MGMT, who somehow manages to blend dance-y songs with great melodies and this really raw feeling of desperation. I feel like it’s silly to post this cause everyone’s heard it but I’ll do it anyways.

Finally, I’ll just post one of my favorite electronic songs ever, which is a collaboration of the Chemical Brothers and Midlake, both incredible artists in their own right (Chemical Brothers also does this thing I like of making their dance songs actual songs as well). It’s off of the Chemical Brothers album We Are the Night.

Other electronic bands I enjoy more than casual listener: Daft Punk, The Knife, Ratatat, Animal Collective, Eluvium, TV on the Radio.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC.