This is a movie my suitemate made for his film class last semester. I’m in it and I also did the music for it. It’s called “64 Colors”

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.

YaleMusicScene also posted a video and some photos of the concert on their website today. There may be more to come- I don’t know.

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.

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.

A sketch track I made today for a song I think my band will play at some point, with more guitars and less tech. It’s called “Have You Considered the Alternative?” and you can probably work out where those lyrics go, more or less.

I’ve finally started to figure out how to work Logic Express, so any tracks I post should sound better and wander less because I have more control over what’s going on. Like this one, hopefully.

This was made, along with some other tracks, for a rave that never happened. Why did it never happen? Because this was what we made for it.

I’m posting it anyways. Crank it up real loud and let the beat overwhelm you, or if the beat alone doesn’t do it, physically force yourself to be overwhelmed by the beat. It’s called “Love in the Time of Cholera,” after the novel by Gabriel García Márquez. NOT the movie.

Lyrics (you have to sing them):

Bum. Bum BAH BAH BAH DUM. Bum BAH BAH BAH DUM. Bum BAH BAH BAH DUM. Ba BUH BUH BUH DUM. (x many times)

Bridge

LOVE…IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!

LOVE…IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!

Ooh yeah yeah yeah

MHM nah nah

(repeat verse)

LOVE…IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA!

LOVE…IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

LOVE! IN THE TIME!

OF CHOLERA!

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.

BLOG CROSSOVER!