cover image: https://unsplash.com/photos/ZMagdVZTryE?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

For this project, I knew I wanted to create something abstract. I have a decent understanding of western music theory and I have some experience using DAWs to create music with guitars and keyboards. Because of this, I wanted to step outside of my comfort zone and focus on experimenting with unique sounds and get creative with the techniques we learned in Reaper.
 My initial idea was to create a futuristic/industrial soundscape. Looking on the BBC sound library, I found some cool metallic and machine-like sounds. I tested out a ton of sounds in Reaper, slowing them, cutting them up, reversing them, and fading them in and out. One of my favorite sounds was a person hammering a nail. When I reduced the rate, it sounded almost exactly like the Minecraft XP sound. Feeling nostalgic, I knew I had to incorporate it. I also really loved this sound of a ball and chain crane which I slowed and faded in so that it gradually gets louder over time, creating a feeling of increasing tension. Working with the crane on the “macro” scale is a slowed clock tower bell which lasts the entire piece. Mixed in are several other short sounds including someone hitting a bucket of water played in reverse and a person shoveling gravel.
 At this point, I had a project that I was okay with, but it didn’t stand out in any way. The piece sounded like I had tried to imitate futurist composers. One night however, my suitemate was watching a nature documentary and one part featured two elephant seals fighting for mating privileges. I was instantly struck by the insane sounds these animals produce, and I thought they could be the missing element my project needed.
 Sure enough, the BBC library had plenty of elephant seal recordings. I wanted the elephant seals to be the stars of the show, so I re-mixed some of the other sounds to free up some sonic space for the seals. Mimicking the intense battle that I witnessed in the nature documentary, I panned one seal to the left and the other to the right. At the end of the piece, however, the two seals join in unison. I’m interested in the meanings people pull out of the finished project; I’m still working one out myself. The seals are certainly a juxtaposition to the industrial soundscape, but at a larger scale, I feel like they join to form a pretty coherent piece.
 In future projects, I want to apply the same kind of creativity and experimentation as I did with this project, while starting to bring in some of the components of western music I have experience with, such as meter and harmony. This project opened my eyes to the sheer amount of possibilities when working in a DAW (and sound in general!). It’s easy to feel trapped and uninspired when you limit yourself to the boundaries of western music theory, and it’s fun to step out of those bounds!

Elephant Seals In A Coalmine

Found sound project!

For the recording portion of this project, I was shocked by how many sounds I could get out of a single object. For instance, I used a can of sparkling water to record three of my sounds (flicking the can, plucking the tab of the can, and recording the bubbles), each of which had very different tonal qualities. Similarly, I got three sounds from a skateboard by spinning the wheels, rocking back and forth to make the trucks squeak, and having my roommate grind a curb.
In my reflection from the last project, I wrote that I wanted to go a little less abstract and incorporate some elements of music I was more familiar with, while still keeping the piece creative. For the three short compositions, Smriti sent me some cool recordings of what I think is a sitar, which I was able to use for melodies to my pieces. I also incorporated more rhythmic elements and gave each piece a consistent tempo.
My favorite 10-second piece to make was the delay piece. Since I made the composition to a regular tempo, I was able to mess around with the delay in musical time intervals. I put a dotted quarter note delay on one percussive track, which I thought sounded similar to the Edge’s dotted 8th delay from U2. I also used the ping-pong delay setting, which gave the piece some more dimension. On the reverb track, I boosted the wet signals to highlight the effect. I incorporated some techniques we had learned previously like adjusting the rate. For the EQ track, I tried to bring out some of the chimey-ness of the sitar by boosting the high frequencies. I also altered the frequencies on sounds to make them sound like kick drums or snares.
When I got Smriti’s 10-second compositions back, I really liked the melodies she had created. I pulled a short motif from one of her compositions and made it the main melody of my long track. I went through each recording and pulled out pieces that I thought would fit well together. I incorporated some techniques like panning, and reversing sounds, and adjusting their pitches.
To keep my piece original and avoid sounding overly corny, I added a few transitions and some more rhythmically and tonally abstract sections while maintaining the pulse of the song.
I titled my piece “Xtreme” after the JBL speaker sound that I recorded. While I’m not completely sure, I think this is the sound Smriti used which I ended up turning into the main motif of my longer composition. I also think the word “extreme” also fits some of the chaos going on at the end of the piece.
In the future, I want to work on smoothing out the transitions and making the composition more “polished.” Some of the parts in my piece are a bit choppy, which works with the style I was going for, but I want to be able to create seamless transitions as well.
Enjoy!

Xtreme

For this project, I decided to create a dramatized version of picking up food at the Ratty. The piece starts with my walk, which I use as a sort of “rising action” to create tension. For this section, I tried to find some thick, but stagnant sounds on the BBC sound library that I could layer to form a “wall of sound.” I added two synth parts with the Reaper sequencer; one of them is more prescussive because of the short note length and the other more of a baseline; I tried to get the two to work together to represent footsteps. I automated the volume on the “baseline” part, so you are able to hear each sequencer part come to the foreground, then retreat to the background. The parts in this section fit together to create a sense of anticipation and unknowingness– analogously, a lot of times when I walk to the Ratty, I am wondering what will be on the menu and don’t know what to expect (yes, I know I could look it up pretty easily). 
Partway through the piece, the layers of sound cut out, a door opens, and you hear a crowd of people. While these sounds are pretty literal in their representation of walking up the steps and opening the door, I wanted to keep a balance between the actions I represented literally, and the actions I represented more abstractly. For instance, further along in the piece, I used synth sequencers to convey the actions of serving food and eating. For the former, I automated the “detune” variable on the synth to make the notes ascend over time. Through this, I was hoping to convey the feeling of the food tray getting more and more full over time. As for eating the food, I have always thought of the sawtooth waveform as a pretty hungry sound, so I automated the sawtooth wave to become more and less prominent in the synth, to represent the time between and during bites of food. I did a lot of experimenting with automating different parameters during this project, and it took me some time before I landed on the right parameter and pattern to get the sound I wanted.
	For my next project, I want to spend more time researching equalization. At the beginning of this piece, I knew I wanted to create a very rich soundscape with a lot going on, but I think a lot of the sounds I chose took up similar frequency ranges, and it ended up getting a little muddy. This worked out because I wanted the piece to feel a bit hectic in the beginning, but I think it would be helpful to get a bit more experience using EQ to make different frequency ranges clearer when I want a more polished sound. 

stock image source: https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/portrait-of-domestic-rat-gm492988792-76661691

Welcome to the Ratty

This mix was produced for nonprofit, educational purposes.

I had never attempted to make a remix before this project, so I didn’t really know where to begin. In order to prevent feeling overwhelmed, I decided to start with the J Dilla technique of taking kicks and snares from different parts in a song and mixing them together. I listened to all of the songs in the mixtape folder and found one that I thought could work well called “Burn Slow.” I chopped up a ton of different sections in the song and messed around with their locations until I had a groove and melody that I was happy with. At the beginning of the song, I halved the tempo of this loop so that it starts out easy before ramping up to the full speed (the original sample was super fast, I ended up slowing it down a little in the final version). I automated a high frequency shelf on the loop and did the same for a white-noise generator to make the introduction feel a bit more dynamic since it was so slow. I wasn’t really sure where to go from here, so I ended up looking in the folder for another song I thought could work well. I chose a mellower song “When She’s Gone” to provide some balance for the loud horns in the first section. I used spleeter to take out the drums from the track, and faded them in to the end of the “Burn Slow” sample at the same tempo; I think they fit pretty well and create a smooth transition to the calmer section. During this section, I did not change much about the actual song besides automating the panning so it shifts from ear to ear. About half way through it, I used the Sitala Drum Machine plugin to make a beat similar to that of the song I knew I wanted to use next (“Making Flippy Floppy”), but with some added cowbell on the upbeats. I cut and looped one line from the mellower song to create a more static part of the project. Then, ran “Making Flippy Floppy” through spleeter and added some of the vocal lines over the loop to sound sort of like adlibs. I used the white noise generator once again to add a buildup/transition for the last song. Using the white noise generator could be difficult at times– it was hard to get the eq automation to do what I wanted at the right time, but with some trial and error, I figured it out. I added heavy delay to some of the sections of “Making Flippy Floppy” and had it fade out at the end. I decided to call this piece recitation because of its extensive use of repetition. For future projects, I want to use some more of the synth techniques we learned in class. I think it would be fun and creative to have some original music in addition to the samples!

Recitation

This whole semester, I’ve been pretty eager to try recording some live instruments, so I thought this project would be the perfect time to try that out. That said, basically my entire musical background is in traditional instruments, and I took this course to get outside my comfort zone and learn new ways to create music using a DAW. For this reason, on top of just recording a live instrument, I decided I wanted to challenge myself to consolidate as many techniques from the semester as I could into one project (e.g. sampling, recording, effects, plugins, automation, etc.). Patrick was super nice and let me use his interface so I could incorporate some high-quality guitar recordings.
 Since the scope of my project was very wide, starting was definitely the biggest challenge. After a good amount of indecision, I decided I would start with drums. I’d heard a Coldplay song earlier that week that had a cool drum part, so I tried my best to emulate that sound on a midi keyboard. I downloaded a free drum pack and plugged the sounds into the Sitala drum machine, and after a bit of quantizing, I was pretty satisfied with the result! When I recorded with Patrick, I had an idea that I thought would work well as a melody, and some power chords to go with it. Recording through an interface was a new experience for me, and I’m still not super comfortable listening to my own recordings; it feels similar to listening to your own voice on a recording. It’s also sometimes hard to know when you’ve made a decent recording since in most cases, you can always have a take that’s a little bit better; I learned to be okay with not getting the perfect recording. In the end, though, I felt like the guitar played really well with the electronic instruments, and I experimented with EQ and convolution reverb to get new and exciting sounds.
 Another large piece of my project is the synth melody that carries through most of the piece. I tried out new techniques with delay and reverb. One of my favorite parts of my piece is how different of a feel the synth melody has at the beginning versus the end. Messing with the delay time and place of each beat can completely change the way a recording sounds. While my piece wasn’t as complex, I had the “violin phase” recording we listened to in class in my mind. I also used a synth at the end of the song where the tempo slows down. I used an LFO to make it “pulse” and used convolution reverb again to give it a bigger sound. Throughout the piece, I did a lot of experimenting with white noise generators (including a downward version of the sweeps Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith would use), phasers, and filters, rate, and volume to keep the piece dynamic.
 In the future, I definitely want to continue recording guitar in addition to making electronic music. I think the blend of the two creates so many more creative possibilities than a traditional instrument has on its own.

Sample: Mavis Staples, "Holy Ghost"

Cover art: George Nickoll

connor francis

Popular tracks