Audition Pop Quiz 2

3 different 4 bar beats and a sound to let you know it's starting.

Assignment 1: Drum Programming

Beat made with my shower
I used my shower scraper, my bathtub, and sounds from my shower. For most of the clips, I trimmed them and adjusted the volume to make them a bit louder. I added fade in and fade outs on most clips but created an especially strong one on the prolonged showering clip.

Assignment 2

I created a synth bass and overlaid that with beats using the crisp drum kit in ableton live. For the synth, I messed a lot with the settings in hopes to create something with spooky sound and lots of reverb. I'm not familiar with a lot of the settings so I fiddled with things until they sounded the way I liked them. I also added a tape reverb, heartbeat kick, and a compressor to address all required parts of the assignment. My intention for the song was to be spooky, but I struggled for a while with chords and figuring out what each note meant as I'm not experienced with music.

Assignment 3: Drum and Bass

Synths I used for this project: 

Wavetable: Used the LFO 1 sine wave, tweaked the frequency a bit.
Electric: Made the stiffness a little higher, reduced the tine and increased the tone. Reduced the symmetry immensely. 
Collision: Used resonator 1, turned down the brightness and slightly upped the inharm. Turned up the volume quite a bit.

I used the chord progression g#m, c#m, D# and g#m. I struggled a bit with integrating the beat, the call and response, and the drum track so I think the whole thing sounds a bit discordant, but this was a huge learning process for me so I'm proud I produced something.

Assignment 4: Call and Response

I wanted to create a sound composition that sounded like a choir singing in a cathedral, and then someone brings a drum kit in to synchronize. I think that the choir singing ended up being a lot more quiet than I wanted it to be, but it was hard to balance it without making it feel too loud to me. 

Effects I added: 
- Panned the final and most energetic drum part all to the left ear, to make the high hats really stand out. 
-Used classic compression across the board to increase volume
- Used the airy vocal EQ eight to add to the choir feel of the majority of the synths
- Added gentle vintage EQ eight on returns to further increase that choir feel

In mastering, I added a cathedral reverb that changed the sound of the overall piece. I used the multiband dynamics speech enhancer to try to emphasize the choir part of the song. I also used a vocal presence EQ eight for similar reasons as a final touch.

Assignment 6: Sound Composition

I used a simple upbeat chord progression with an electronic piano synth to create the backtracking for this project. I included sound snippets from various games in the backtrack to make the listener feel as if they're immersed in the game. I punctuated separate parts of the narrative by separating them with a short music swell. I also emphasize a solid point with a moment of silence.

I wanted to talk about my favorite game genre, while including some moments of personal narrative to make the overall piece a little more interesting than a simple history lesson! I think it came out pretty okay.

Lily Battin