Something new I'm working on

Here's a clip of what I'm working on while on guitar hiatus; it needs to be fleshed out some, and it's unmixed right now, but it's getting there.

Loamy - Final Project

I used three programs for my final project - Logic, RadiaL, and Reason. Overall, the track does not have strictly defined sections, but can be roughly divided into a beginning, theme, alternate section, reprise, and ending. The entire song is synthesis-based - I used no non-original samples, and only one original sample (created from other parts of the track itself).
I started this song with a long note from a slow-building pad. The tempo begins at 190 BPM. Next, I introduce the main pattern used throughout the song. The pad dies, and the pattern continues. Next, a drum 'n bass type drum pattern enters - it is tight and compressed, but not distorted. I use noise sweeps (produced using a Reason softsynth) and snare drum rolls to introduce new sections - an element borrowed from trance, even though most of the track sounds more D'n'B (probably due to the drums). Another trance-like element is the lead synthesizer, which sounds like a trance synthesizer.
After this, I introduce an acoustic piano; this gives a sound somewhat reminiscent of early 90's rave music. In this section, I include several parts of silence, before introducing the main theme and a bass pad over the piano with drums added later. Next, most instruments drop out as the piano gives a short introduction to an alternate lead pattern. I add in the bass line again, and then a different drum pattern.
Following this, the main line enters again. first with a 4/4 kick and next a full drum pattern with the bass pad. This phrase shifts up two keys. I put a sample from the B-flat section through RadiaL and recorded this loop as I increased the tempo until it reached roughly the key of D. I put this sample back into Logic and fade it out in the D-section as a D-note from the lead pad enters again, with a half-speed drum pad. The music plays at half speed for a short time, then the key shifts up a half-step to E-flat and the tempo goes up to 220 BPM. The drum also gets much faster, with a rapidly pulsing bass drum. A new pad is introduced (one with a shorter attack time than the original lead pad, which would not do at such a high tempo) which plays a very fast trill over the bass and drums.
After this, the main riff and 4/4 pattern play again, gradually slowing down from 220 to 190 BPM. The main theme with all instruments plays again, followed by the alternate theme (this time with the piano under it as well). Next, all the instruments drop out except for the lead and bass. Finally, the main pad introduces a short outtro. To the entire track, I applied reverb and boosted the higher frequencies somewhat.

Review of "Invaders Must Die" by The Prodigy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2-VF9u24F4

This song is not incredibly novel or groundbreaking in sound. However, it contains several song elements that have worked well in previous The Prodigy song, and combines them well. The song opens with a low, rhythmically pulsing bass, and quickly adds in other synthesizers that layer in. The scale seems to be minor pentatonic - simple and rock-like, nothing too out of the ordinary in the melodic department. Most of the melodic lines are very similar, meaning that there is nothing out of the ordinary but also nothing distracting from the song as a whole. The break sampled is also not incredibly complex, but in this case it works because it is complex enough to attract interest but not completely steal attention from other musical lines.
The form is mostly standard for a big beat song - the intro is short and quickly introduces the main song (no long trance-like buildup here). There is a drop shortly, an altered version of the main rhythm, another drop, a short reprise of the theme, and a quick outtro. The song keeps the intensity level mostly constant, the drops being short and not too different from the main sections.
This song uses a mix of sampled and synthesized instruments. The drum is most likely sampled, with significant distortion added - the drums sound grainy and lo-fi. The bassline and higher melody aspects are likely synthesized, as they sound very artificial, but it is possible that some variants of the bassline are provided by sampled and distorted bass guitars. In the middle register, much of the melody seems to be provided by sampled and distorted (and possibly compressed) guitar.
Overall judgement: Though this song is nothing new, memorable, or exceptional for The Prodigy, it is nonetheless a very enjoyable song to listen to.

Assignment 4 - Genre Specific (Techno) - Clockwork (Minimal)

I used Logic alone to create this track. The first half has a minimal techno sound - I tried to keep the number of individual lines of music low, and created a beat by using only clicks and a staccato synthesizer playing only in octaves at first, gradually adding quiet and tight drum sounds. There are a few deviations from standard techno form here - the tempo is a bit faster than usual (but still very close to the average techno song) and I added a synthesized clarinet section in the first half (this instrument usually does is not used in techno music). For the second part, I created a more standard techno track. The instruments used here are all standard techno instruments - a punchy compressed and distorted drum machine, obviously synthesized leads and pads used to create syncopated rhythms rather than melody, and a harmonic pad. The drum pattern begins with a 4/4 tight kick pattern and adds in open hi-hats on the off-beats and syncopated claps. The song ends with a redux of the original melodic line, which is just a C-note played at different octaves.

Final Project Proposal

I am not sure what genre my final project will be in. However, I plan to sample my own guitar playing and process this sound in the composition. I will be experimenting with altering guitar sounds to see what kinds of other sounds I can draw out of a raw sound. I am also considering using samples of other instruments, such as piano, but I am not as sure about that. Additionally, I plan to take samples of my own voice and either add effects or run them through a vocoder into a synthesizer. That said, I am not sure whether to include "lyrics" in the sense of a number of different phrases rather than a few words repeated.
I will likely have a distorted drum sound - I like this sound. However, I am still undecided as to whether I want simple or complex drum beats (I initially thought my 1-min Reason project would have complex drum beats, but they ended up being very simple, a change which I felt worked better). I will probably program drums using samples from ReCycle or Logic, as I found the ReDrum interface a bit cumbersome. The piece will likely not have verse-chorus structure, as many of my previously-written pieces do not. Overall, I think my project will end up taking the feel of a rock piece which happens to be done in an electronic medium, rather than a piece in a distinctly electronic genre.

Review of Nathan Griffith's Reason Assignment

This song uses many instruments which sound like synthesized real-world instruments - the bassline sounds as if it has been played with an electric bass guitar, a realistic-sounding drumkit was chosen, and I think I can hear some piano, flutes, and horns in the middle section. The exception would be the pad Nathan uses to start this track, which sounds decidedly synthetic. The song begins with a gradual slow buildup, with drums and a pad in the beginning, starting softly, and some volume of the bass fading in and out. When the main melody comes in, the bass drops out, and slowly re-adds itself. From there, there isn't much of a sharp buildup to the climax so much as a gradual rising that does not sound quite finished by the time the song ends. For this style of song, however, which is rather soft and calm (though I wouldn't call it ambient, as Nathan does, since the drums are too strong), I think this works.
The effects are used well. Nathan makes use of delay, echo, and reverb, which all help to create overlapping layers of sound in the background from few instruments. There are also a few volume swells, and the levels of each instruments are fairly evenly mixed and compressed. Again, these all work well for this slower and softer kind of piece - Nathan creates a big soundscape that still retains simplicity. The one part of this piece I would change is the instrumentation for the main melody line, which somehow seemed to not quite be either artificial or realistic enough and fell in the gap which sounds like artificial sweetener. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the relaxing feel of this track overall.

Assignment 3 - 1-minute Reason song

I started out by creating an 8th-note line at 200BPM using a Minimoog sound (I added a flanger effect to the first four bars of this - effect 1). This loop plays while a distorted (effect 2) hardcore-type drumset comes in shortly afterward with a few beats along with a 4-bar slightly higher melody line. Next, a bass pad (with reverb - effect 3) comes in, along with a full-fledged drum beat. There is a short 2-measure drop phase where the melody line plays alone, a few octaves lower with a unison effect added to thicken the sound there (effect 4). Afterward is a stretch where the drums do not play. The melody line becomes the bass line, while the bass pad is now raised some octaves. Next, another melody line, much faster and higher, layers over the pad and now-bassline. The drums come in again with a different pattern, and several pads play in unison at different octaves to give more background. In the ending section, the two Minimoog synthesizers play in unision, one at a melody octave and one at a bass octave. The bass pads and drums change again. Finally, at the end, there is a short section where only the melody synth plays, and then there is a quick burst from all instruments which is given a delay/echo effect (effect 5).

Blog Post, Number Three

So I've been noticing the posting on my blog is far more sparse than the postings on other blogs. I'm going to start listening to more music now.
I was surprised to learn that Techno and House were fairly unrelated today - I had always thought that the two sounded similar, and that they shared a common history such that Techno developed out of House. I'm going to have to start looking for more differences between the two. That said, one thing that disappoints me about techno is the sheer repetitive nature of it - for every piece of good music, there are countless derivative tracks. I suppose this is true of every style of music in existence, but it just seems more pronounced to me in Techno (and House, I suppose) due to the already minimal instrumentation and repetitive nature of these tracks. A salient example I remember from some years ago was when I listened to the other tracks on the album with "Sandstorm" on it. Everything else sounded like Sandstorm, but worse (with one exception, which just sounded like Sandstorm).
I took a look at the "electronic music guide" displayed in class one day. Somewhat biased (especially towards Trance, but that seems at least partially justified, as he dislikes the glut of derivative tracks), but informative in at least showing how many genres there are (although several sounds very similar, and many labels were probably invented by the artists in their desire to differentiate themselves). Also, the samples on the site are very useful.
The classification of songs in Pandora as possessing "disco-influenced rhythms" now makes more sense that I recognize what the defining features of a disco rhythm are and are not. In particular, the TB-303 and TR-909 heavy sounds that I thought characterized disco applied more to House, and in fact Disco used plenty of non-synthesized instruments as well. Thus, it now makes sense songs from other genres (particularly rock genres) can still be heavily influenced by Disco, and have been labeled in Pandora as such. I have been noticing the syncopated, hi-hat-on-the-upbeat Disco rhythm in a lot more songs now, even from otherwise unrelated genres. It surprises me how much of an influence the Disco beat has had on other styles of music, even though Disco music itself is rarely heard today and is often called "dead".
I'm somewhat surprised by the long delay between Kraftwerk and the widespread emergence of Techno. All the technology necessary for the Techno sound was available from their time, yet other electronic artists continued to use non-electronic instruments for a long time and gradually phase them out. When I first heard Kraftwerk, I remember being surprised by how long they had been around - I didn't know that they started the techno music, and that it started well before 1980 (around the time I thought the "Techno" genre first started developing). All the same, the desire in the video to do away with keyboards and control instruments from a lapel device didn't seem too feasible - it would look flashy, but the range of control would probably be far limited (or else look like a keyboard or a drum pad wired to a suit). Since the range of control would be limited (not too unreasonable an assumption, given the keyboard/piano is about the least space needed to assign every note to a separate key), the "live" quality of playing would be diminished. The next logical step would be to just automate the music entirely, making "live" pointless.

Radial Dance Loops

Contrary to what I expected, I did not drastically increase the tempo for any of my dance loops.

Some Thoughts on Musique Concrete and Electronic Music Notation

One thing that surprised me recently is how we had spent several lectures discussing music created by physically manipulated external sounds only. When we began discussing synthesis on Wednesday, it hadn't even occured to me that we had not touched the development of synthesis for quite some time and had dealt purely with musique concrete and its offshoots. I had previously not recognized this dichotomy between synthesis and manipulation of existing sounds before, and now it somehow seems obvious.
I feel that often during the early development of electronic music, listenability was sacrificed in the name of creativity. This was usually worthwhile and interesting (pieces that come to mind are the breathing piece, whose title I cannot recall, and Come Out by Steve Reich), but was often overdone just as often as not (for example, the piece It's Gonna Rain by Steve Reich, which did not add much from Come Out, and the helicopter orchestra piece, where I found the almost-random screams coming from the quartet unintentionally hilarious, a reaction I don't think the composer intended). Of musique concrete, the pieces I enjoyed most are I am Sitting in the Room by Alvin Lucier and Visage by Luciano Berio, the former for incorporating the medium into the piece itself and the latter for showing the diversity of sounds generated by human speech possible.
I find the attempts to notate electronic music, particularly Stockhausen's Studies, fascinating. In particular, the notation video for the Studie we saw in class was far more visual than standard music notation. While standard music notation does somewhat allow the reader to determine the form of the music to a slight degree by sight alone (through vertical pitch shifts and horizontal density changes), most readers will need to pay more attention to determine what the music actually sounds like. By contrast, the notation that we saw for the Studie was highly visual, and it appeared to be trying to let the reader be able to parse the music left to right and construct a highly accurate model in his or her head in real time. Though I don't think such notation will ever live up to that ideal, alternate forms of notation seem to be very useful in the realm of electronic music, including current ones such as piano rolls.

Ringtones

Three Types of Electronic Music I Like

One of my favorite types of electronic music is big beat, as played by such musicians as The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. I like this music due to the distortion; there is not much synthesis, but the sampled sounds have been so distorted that they sound much different from their original incarnations. I especially like the heavy distortion of the drums, which I feel produces a unique sound. This type of music also shares many elements with rock music (which I also enjoy), such as structure and heavy instrumentation, and so I like big beat electronic music.
I also enjoy speedcore music, particularly that by m1dy. I generally listen to music to focus my attention or energize myself rather than relax, and music at a fast tempo works best for those purposes. Thus, I enjoy speedcore, which is characterised by fast tempos and aggressive instrumentation. However, I don't enjoy all music of this genre, as there is, in my opinion, too much excessive noise in many tracks which obscures melodic elements. Speedcore music, like big beat, also has a distorted drumline, a unique sound which I enjoy.
Finally, I also enjoy trance music. This type is slightly faster than other forms of electronic music, and I tend to like fast music as opposed to slow music in general. It also includes a variety of different synthesizer sounds, and it is interesting to hear the differences in these electronic instruments. Though there is not much rhythmic variety, the underlying beats are strong. Also, I enjoy glowsticking and glowstringing, and trance tracks generally make for good background music for this activity.