final project

final project right hurrr. it's ambient house, I'd say, and goddamn if this wasn't hard. enjoy:

Jonahs Ambient House.mp3 -

So here is the long awaited proposal for my final project. The ideas are still extremely lose, but here it goes anyway. I'm going to try to create an "electro-trip" piece, that would hybridize trip-hop with a more sample driven, electronic music style. The mood of the piece would be creepy and not a little disconcerting. The samples will be drawn from movie quote webpages that I see on the internet, but will hopefully also incorporate one of my opera singing friend's voices reading out a crazy poem, or some other very "peculiar" sounding piece of prose. I have a very diverse group of inspirations that I'm drawing from. One that in particular stands out is Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again, by The Books, which has a set of spoken word sample that gives me shivers every time I listen to it. Some artists which I'm also interested in emulating are Portishead, Massive Attack, and Tricky.

Oh and here's my project:

Fear and Loathing and The Dude in Las Vegas -

James Kallestad, who are you? i like your music a lot. You created a piece of electronic music that is catchy and has a strong beat, but which in no way overpowers the listener. When the first melody comes in it reminds me of animal collective actually, and i'm certainly a big fan of them. The beat is in the background, which is something that i really like because i'm way more into ambient/indie electronic than i am into dance/techno/house (not that there isn't a lot of house that i do like- mmm daft punk). The melody itself is also beautiful, and the "yeah, yeah" sample shows that James has a sense of humor. check it out: http://music295jk.blogspot.com/.

The piece is also extremely well structured: 15 seconds or so of introduction, a 30 second main portion, and a 15 second, funky fresh outro. Each section seems to be building towards the next. For the first 45 seconds the drum beat is constant, with something that sounds like a dry, repeating hi-hat sound, with a tom-tom hit once a measure, which he then replaces with a more complicated pattern. He transitions with a cool fill, and we're treated to a driving guitar melody line. The other transition, btwn the intro and main section is also seamless.

Upon more extended reading of James' blog, however, we find that he is not new at this music business. This isn't surprising at all though considering that quality of his piece, which made me feel better about myself for sure. Within his bluegrass duo he is already used to making tough decisions about finding the right sound for his band and the instruments that they use (synth bass vs. having no bass at all). I can't wait for his demo.

Reason final - me

Oh man, the legend of Zelda theme on a theremin!!!
This is a classic song (at least from my childhood) played on a not so classical instrument. the theremin is played by moving your hands through by the loop antenna (to adjust volume), and the upright antenna controls pitch.
after googling theremin I found www.thereminworld.com which has a guide for purchasing theremins. I found this discussion really interesting, because before taking this class i really didn't think about how much the quality of instruments, reproduction, and compression really affects the sound. For theremins, probably the most important thing to keep track of is "linearity," which is basically the correspondance between physical distance as you play and the distance between the notes. ( a more articulate definition:"Linearity refers to how uniformly the theremin responds as you move your hands around the antennas." - http://www.thereminworld.com/article.asp?id=31).

Speaking of the quality of sounds, I realized that I never uploaded my notes about radial, so here they is:

This picture on the left was the first step of my process. All four tracks were the original click file, with the pitch and tempo adjusted as such. The effect i used was deep bass, but i don't know how much of an effect it had. I then outputted a few seconds of this, and fed it back in, following my excellent TA Hillary Charnas' advice. I named the file clicks v2,1 and then cleared the tracks, and started a new one with clicks v2,1 as the basis.

On the right is my completed composition, but before I reached that is when I encountered the issue of quality, as the 24bit aiff file that I had bounced from logic (after I pulled in the radial output file) was of much worse quality than the actual radial loop symphony. I puzzled over what to do, and just decided to bounce it again, this time to a 320 kbps mp3 file. I accidentally added it to the second track, while leaving the 24-bit aiff version on the first track, and when they sounded together, a new hybrid sound was created with the grittiness of the aiff and cleanness of the mp3 file. It was good. I added the orignal clicks file into the third and fourth tracks, one totally normal, and one sped up with higher pitch. No external effects where used at all for this second step of Dance Beat 2.

Assignment two

Check these ill dance beats. I'll post later with some screenshots and instructions on how I made beat two.

clicks.1.final.mp3 -

clicks.2.final.mp3 -

clicks.3.final.mp3 -