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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