Blog 5

I'm kind of going to shoot from the hip on this one, but there's a bunch of different things I wanted to talk about.

Having spent the semester working with music production software, I was surprised with how well the different components work together. It appears that from the beginning, the designers of music production software have kept this point in mind. When it comes to the higher-end products such as Reason and Logic Pro, the ability to run them through other programs sound engines is a huge advantage in music production. In my opinion, Logic is a fantastic program that pays incredible attention to all aspects of music production, and includes an extremely powerful group of synthesizers and samplers with which to create a vast array of instruments. Yet, Reason contains another extremely good set of instruments and the ability to have access to all of these within Logic is an incredibly powerful tool.

What I'm most impressed with is the judgment on the side of the software designers to allow such inter-connectivity between programs for the sake of music production. Beyond the example I have given above, other examples abound; take for example the proliferation of .rex files or as far as inter-connectivity is once again concerned, the ability of programs like Logic and Reason to synchronize with Ableton Live, one of the premier live electronic tools.

On another and completely unrelated note, I also wanted to comment on how impressed I was with the discussion of the trip-hop genre. Trip-hop was one of the genres we covered this semester that I had never really heard (or at least realized I had heard), and I was especially drawn to the Massive Attack body of work. I was able to see how it had partially influenced a lot of the Ratatat I listen to now. I loved the dark feeling of tension building as typified by the song "Angel" and how the drum beats conveyed a feeling of their own.

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Assignment 4

For this assignment I chose to create a song in the genre of trance. To start, I set the tempo to 137 BPM (the "magic number" for a dance song, since the average heart rate of someone at a club is roughly 137), and created several beats. The song opens with a kick drum and a slowly evolving pad building on an e minor triad. Shortly afterward, the four-to-the-floor pattern enters with a very analog style bass riff. A snare roll signals a change and the claps in the drum beat enter along with a synth pad and lead, in addition to a new bass riff (which is an entirely different bass track, using the "sub-bass" effect to create an extra deep resonance). Another snare roll signals a change, and only the kick drum and pad are present, which plays a different progression. Again, another snare roll signals a change back to the previous progression and the lead enters again for another eight bars. Suddenly, the four-to-the-floor pattern drops out and the original kick pattern returns accompanied by a new lead (which is an arrpegiated Malstrom slaved from Reason via ReWire). The drum pattern builds back up, and is accompanied by a new bass and synth pad arrangement. After a few more bars, only the kick drum and driving bass remain, setting the transition to a new song. I used compression widely throughout the song to try and get a good overall mix in which all the elements are able to be heard, and while certainly not perfect, I learned a lot in the process of messing around with compression. Additionally, I also realized one of the problems of composing trance music, which is the fact that it relies on very harmonically rich instruments which when layered on top of each other can compete for the same registers. To combat this, I applied some filters to block out some of the higher frequencies of the pads to create more listening room for the leads.

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