Final Project

This is my final project. It is called “I Saw It In a Movie.”

I knew I wanted to do a song instead of some kind of dance track or soundscape or something. I guess there were some elements of a soundscape in the song, but I wanted a definite melody and lyrics that I could then add to and play around with. I had written a kind of outline for this song over winter break, but most of the lyrics hadn’t been written- I only knew what I wanted the song to be about, more or less, and I had the majority of the melody sketched out (including the movie phrase, obviously). It took a while to get the lyrics finished, and once they were done I got my friend Raphael Shapiro to play the guitar for me. It’s an electric acoustic, so I was able to record it directly into Logic.

We recorded with a metronome, but the tempo didn’t exactly lock in, which was understandable because he was playing 3 over 2. Initially, I had written the song in 4/4, but it was tough to find a satisfying guitar song that filled up the space well enough, so I ended up keeping most of the instrumentation constant and simply putting the guitar and drums in 3. Because the tempo didn’t exactly match up, I couldn’t quantize the drums and other instruments like I would have normally done. I synthesized most of the instruments in Logic alone, but I used Reason as a Rewire slave for a couple of them. I applied a lot of effects in Logic, including reverb and filters.

In terms of structure, there’s basically only two parts: the kind of intro section of G to Am7 and then the main verse. If the intro is A and the verse is B, the form is A B B B A B. I thought it’d be interesting to start with more instrumentation on the first B then the second- normally, the first repeat of the verse adds some more instruments or grows musically. I thought it’d be cool to have it shrink, and then build in the third B. I’m not sure how effectively the third be works, however, because the vocal transition is a little rough. I put the vocals for the third B on two tracks, and then heavily filtered one of the tracks so that it ended up wavering, resonating, and panning back and forth underneath the normal vocal track. I’m not sure it works very well initially. My levels are also slightly off, so things get too loud and abrasive at points, but I’m not entirely sure the best way to smooth everything out- I’m not good enough with Logic yet. The second A kind of adds a break, and its instrumentation bleeds into the final B, which ideally means the momentum keeps up until the end. I like the second A and final B the best, I think… the vocals fade in and out so you can’t entirely here the full words at points. I like that.

My biggest influence in terms of genre, I guess, was pretty clearly ambient music. The guitar is slightly too loud and harsh for it to sound exactly how I want, but the limitations of recording just the electric output of an acoustic electric guitar necessarily means some of that softness is taken away. I want to create a space for the lyrics to kind of inhabit, a soundscape to frame them in. It should be a forward-moving song, and I think it is a pretty clear-cut song, but there’s a kind of swirling background to it that hopefully makes it wander a little bit. Had I longer than 4 minutes, I would have added more space to it. I considered getting rid of a B section to add the space in this version, but I decided against it ultimately. Not sure why. Ideally, I’d add a little bit more time before the lyrics come in, and more space in general. There’s a fair amount of space as it stands, I guess, with the extended chords at the end of the phrases, but I probably would have done some more instrumental stuff.

Track Review

I’m taking a look at The Knife’s “Is It Medicine”:

This song begins with a punchy synth jumping the octave. A drum machine enters fairly quickly, some kind of techno kit because of the laser-like bass drum and the crisp snare. It’s a disco sort of beat, the bass and snare alternating with a high hat. This establishes the basic beat of the song- there are no other instruments, in fact, underneath the voice. The vocals enter with an initial phrase that comes in directly over the established pattern. The octave note changes when the phrase is repeated, but the phrase is repeated exactly. The vocal phrase is repeated four times identically, with the instrumental phrase repeating twice (two vocal phrases to each instrumental phrase, as the note changes on the repeat of the vocal phrase). This entire thing is then exactly repeated again, but the high hat now plays on every sixteenth note instead of just the offbeats. Then, the 4 vocal phrases and the drum beat stays constant, but the synth changes rhythm (although the harmony is still the same). Once this final phrase of 4 vocal phrases ends, we return to the sixteenth-note synth and claps are introduced for the first time. It prepares us for the next part of the song, in which the synth and drum beat stay the same but the vocal line becomes a kind of chant on “is it medicine, is it medicine, is it medicine or social skill.” Another synth enters the picture as well, providing counterpoint to the chant. Later, voices take the place of this synth, sighing and moaning in the same place as the synth did. Finally, with the music remaining unchanged except for claps again, the song ends with various grunts and moans from the vocalists.

This song demonstrates The Knife’s ability to take simple musical ideas (in this case, a single vocal phrase and then a vocal chant) and still keep a song interesting. They repeat the same phrase 12 times, but the changing instrumentation keeps the listener engaged- sometimes the drums become more active, sometimes the synth becomes less active, etc. The complexity comes from the ways in which they change the music, however, and not from added instruments because there are only really two instruments in the entire piece: the synth and the drum kit. By establishing a strong beat, however, and then shifting that beat, the artists can still surprise the listener and keep us waiting to hear what will happen next.

The song structure is sort of unusual, in the sense that there isn’t really a traditional chorus, verse pattern set up even though the song seems primed to do so. The “verse” phrase at the beginning doesn’t return later in the song, we simply turn to what could be a “chorus” phrase with the chant. The song has simply two parts, related through instrumentation and beat, but not recurring in the larger scheme of the piece. The Knife simply repeats a phrase several times in a row, then moves on to something else.

Final Project Proposal

For my project I’m going to produce an original song. I’m not sure exactly which one I’m going to do, but it will most likely  be an acoustic guitar in an ambient electronic atmosphere kind of thing. Effected voice, etc. Along the lines of “How to Disappear Completely” by Radiohead (a video I posted earlier). I’ll do the vast majority of it in Logic, I’m sure, but I’ll probably use Reason as a rewire slave and then maybe use Frequency or something to get my third program in there.

Review of Nick Simmons-Stern’s Assignment

I decided to review Nick’s Reason assignment because I liked it. Maybe that isn’t a great way to pick the kinds of things you review, but whatever. It’s my blog.

The initial texture of the piece comes from the swirling synth pads with a metallic, droplet sort of synth playing over that background. It has a pretty straightforward House beat, but the random feeling of that ping-y synth combined with a lack of any real melodic material makes the beat seem less driving- we’re not moving forward, we’re just creating a kind of atmosphere to hang out and dance in for a while. The fact that Nick chose not to add some kind of catchy synth hook or melody is why I really like it- making a hook is, in many ways, sort of easy and feels a little cheap. This is a complex song that holds your attention because of the slight ways it varies the soundscapes and rhythms it establishes on the way through.

The first shift occurs with a swell of more fuzzy synths that are actually framing chords- they stab in and out in the higher registers and build the momentum as we fade out of the first established environment and into the next one. By gradually increasing the volume of the lower, more drill-like buzzy synth while fading down the most distinguishing part of the beginning section (that metallic, random synth), Nick makes the transition very smoothly, aided by the kind of masking/distraction effect of the higher chordal synths. We are left with this lower synth and the background pads for a while, and then the lower synth fades out, leaving only the pads and a few chords to take us through the ending. This final section, before the synth leaves, still makes reference to that beginning part because Nick brings back that metallic synth, although this time it plays more recognizably melodic stuff, so it’s not just a repeat of earlier. All of this sounds awesome, especially when compounded with Nick’s liberal use of panning that helps not only add variety but also make it feel as though you are constantly moving through the music that surrounds you.

I guess I pretty conspicuously haven’t made reference to the voice over the track that says, at various times, any one of the words in “Introduction to Electronic Music Juraj Kojs.” This was my least favorite part- I thought it detracted from the music, and at the very least sounded more amateur. It didn’t blend very well and I didn’t see much reason for the inclusion of voice. It didn’t really establish a pattern or add a new angle to the otherwise really solid soundscape. The fact that Nick put a lot of focus on the voice towards the end makes me kind of wish the track had ended around 2:15. I understand the effect he was going for (we’ve all heard that echoey, detached voice in ambient tracks), but something didn’t quite click. Maybe it was just a filter or effects thing. I’m not sure.

At any rate. I thought the song was more than great overall. I really enjoyed it. Wooooooo.

Webcomic Success

I’ve pretty much been neglecting this blog, but since I finally have something semi-legitimate to blog about I guess I’ll do it.

The webcomic I write with Cole, Quiet Glen Mind Police, has been doing pretty well thanks to sites like Reddit and now Digg. We had two comics on the front page of Reddit last week and also kept the top two spots of the Comics subsection for most of the day. We ended up getting almost 40,000 hits last Thursday, and various trickles around that. Our previous record before the influx of Reddit links was about 1400. Today, we’ve been on the front page of Digg for about 9 hours and currently hold the number one spot. The guy who submitted it submitted a mirror instead of an actual site link (to prevent the site from crashing), so we haven’t gotten huge amounts of traffic, but it’s a cool thing.

And that’s all.

Fun with Reason

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.

Click Dance

For this assignment, we were given a track of 4 clicks and, using a program called radiaL, we needed to create 3 dance loops. radiaL is kind of a live DJing computer program- you load the loops onto circular “discs,” and then you control/add effects to the loops to create different sounds and rhythms. So, I loaded the click track into four different channels and messed around with pitch, tones, filters, etc. The toughest part about radiaL, which I guess is also a cool part, is that it isn’t a sequencer software like Logic where you can splice up samples, loop them, effect them, and then basically just play through whatever you edited. Because radiaL records live, you need to mess with your tracks as you’re recording. To do this, I used the MIDI keyboard as a controller, mapping the different keys to mute and unmute tracks, restart tracks, affect filters, etc. For dance music, I have some trouble getting away from the idea of a constant beat, so there’s no really crazy rhythms here, except maybe for a little bit in the second beat. Anyways.

This is the original click track:

Here is the first beat I made. It uses the original click track in four different loops, layered over each other, effected, and muted at different times.

The second one also was four tracks. One is slowed way down, and since the clicks are really a compressed sample with inconsistent tone quality, it helps create that kind of weirder rhythm in the middle. Can you dance to this? I don’t know.

This final one had three tracks and took the longest to record because I had to keep controlling the track that sounds like a bass drum and I screwed it up over and over.

And that’s it. radiaL is a pretty cool program, but I doubt I will use it much in the future not only because live recording is somewhat tiresome when you’re trying to get it right, but also because it’s really glitchy. Sometimes things just stop working and you need to restart it. Also, the version we’re using has all kinds of unlicensed effects that screw up the recording occasionally. In fact, the radiaL in one of our music labs was just a free trial that expired. Top notch.