Being a guitarist for a few years, the first thing that popped into my mind when this project was outlined was that I wanted to use this opportunity to make a musical composition of my own. The next step was to determine what I wanted to record and how I wanted to shape it from its base. After some doodling I came up with a base riff I was happy with which I felt I could build off of fairly easily. In the track it is the first layer that appears in conjunction with the percussion. To describe the percussion component I have a little bit of background I need to provide.
About a year and a half ago I was searching for a guitar pedal that I could use as a replacement for an amplifier so I could have the satisfaction of having an overdriven guitar sound without being that pesky roommate with an unfortunate inclination to make noise. After extensive research I decided on this guy which had a handy 3.5mm jack so I could make all the noise I wanted to in my headphones. It wasn't an important component at the time but it also had a USB connection which allowed for direct-to-computer recording without the necessity of an intermediary microphone. Another valuable component was the built in drum machine/metronome on this device which is where my percussion comes from. Within the drum machine there are five or six genre styles with about three distinct beats to choose from in each.
Having played around with a few I decided upon one within the GROOVE set and I felt that 90 beats per minute captured the feel of what I wanted to do. The first track I recorded into audacity, then, was this percussion track.
From there I recorded the base riff. With that done I had to translate it a little bit so that the beat of the percussion and guitar track aligned. From here I just played this guitar and drum combo over and over, trying different augmentations until I found one that I liked. After some failed experimentation I decided I'd do something on the higher strings that would easily stand out. In the waveform picture you can see this is the layer titled "High Strings, Compressed, Crossfade In". This title describes the sound and how I used Audacity to expand on it. I used the compressor to make the sound a little bit tighter and punchy and the crossfade tool to make the introduction of this new layer more gradual.
Next I decided I wanted to do something involving the wah component of my pedal. In the composition this is the fast picking part that comes in at about 24 seconds and is titled "Wah, Phaser, Delay". Despite it being a feature of Audacity, I did the wah component manually, however the phaser and delay were done in postproduction. These were utilized to make the sound a little bit more differentiable within the composition and were the result of yet more experimentation to achieve a sound I was looking for but not sure how to manifest.
At this point, I was feeling pretty good about my composition, but I felt like I could do more. I remembered in our lab our presenters talked about changing the pitch of a track so I decided to play with this, specifically with the high string track. The first thing I did was copy this track to a new layer and make sure it was properly aligned. As a result of more experimentation I found a satisfying sound after adjusting the pitch 5 semitones down, which is a fairly common technique used to harmonize. I then realized that I wanted this to gradually come in as opposed to having it come in simultaneously with the sister track. Both of them playing together sounds kinda like a synthesizer (and a little cheesy, in my opinion) which I thought was cool to achieve considering my tool set.
Finally, I realized that as much as I liked the base riff I had created, it was getting a little boring and I wanted to concoct another solid riff to take up its place. I also needed a transition for this to occur. I found this to be advantageous, however, as I thought the wah track was a little faint and wanted a way to draw more attention to it. To manifest this, I stopped the base riff and just had the higher string tracks with the wah and percussion tracks going.
With this space opened I played the project through a few times and found a new chord progression that I felt added to the piece well. This is the bottommost track. I also used a crossfade in filter again to make its introduction more gradual.
From here I had to decide how to cut it off before a minute. Listening to the composition I decided that I wanted everything but the replacement base riff and percussion to stop at about the 53 second mark as it was the end of the measures for the other three tracks. Because the drum track was obviously looped I had to cut it in a way so that it didn't start into another measure and that when it stopped it felt natural. To achieve this, the replacement base track goes on a fraction of a second longer, but I was pleased with the way it turned out, as it added a sense of finality.
The final step for me was adjusting the volume levels and the distribution onto the left and right channels for balance. This attempt at balancing can be seen in the waveform picture.
Aaaaand that's it. I look forward to hearing responses! 

AME294 Project

Guitar has always been my instrument of choice and while I've written some music over the years that I'm proud of I don't quite have the bandwidth (deep musical understanding) to assemble my doodlings into full songs. And so I decided to put them up on here with the hope that if I can't develop fully constructed songs maybe others can benefit from the fragments I've accumulated.

aaron.gubrud