Project 7 [more synth]

So far Ive put together a drum loop. This is much slower than I usually have. I definitely like it, but I might have to change it since I havent even considered making the synth parts yet. The drums so far consist of a snare drum, a slight cymbal hit, a hat, and a kick drum with the high end sound cut off a bit to make it more apparent. I was having trouble distinguishing the kick drum from the snare. The drums kind of progress slowly, changing slightly every 16 beats. Again, I like it but it was probably a bad idea to make a drum loop without any real direction or idea for the song.
I have two synths in the making. One I just left with the default sound for now and sent it through the riff machine. Its a long progression thats generally some very high notes and very low notes. The other synth is a simple square wave. I set the panning to move from the right ear, sustain at center, and then continue down to the left. The pitch also is set to quickly rise, lower, rise, sustain, then lower. It sounds pretty cool, but it definately restricts possibilities. I have copied the lower notes from the other riff and this synth will play those. The lower notes on the default sound were so apparent and boring that I knew they must be accompanied. Ive changed the default synth to a triangle wave and played with the shape slider to get basically the same sound just sharper and more apparent at the higher pitch. I also put a delay effect on it and played with those sliders but all I can remember is it is on the ping-pong setting. So far it sounds pretty cool, very industrial which I Love, but I havent a clue as to how to continue. Sounds fine on repeat, but that wont get a very good grade, will it? Im editing the A Pattern by taking the initial progression teh riff machine ised and chopping that a different way to get something new. Its working nicely so far but it isnt finished and i dont know how the two patterns will fit together.
Today i finished the vocoder project so I didnt get much done on this one. Odd coincidence, Mr. Rabuse decided to show us this thing to do with harmonics and multiple tones being played at once that we could use to get a much nicer sound with our synths. The funny thing is that I was just playing around with that very thing the other night on the demo version at my house. Except I was attempting to make the most obnoxious noise I could make, not the warmest or richest sound. He told us to make a downward slope in the OSC in one of the operators (this made a trumpet like sound), so I made an upward slope on the other end of the OSC and got a noise that reminds me of a computer issuing alerts or something. So I have this playing a high pitched quick riff, I have no idea if Ill actually use it but it might be a cool intro or outro. Or maybe I could just turn the noise all the way up and make static (pathetic cheap way out but fun).
Ive basically been stuff all period. Ive been looking for where to go with this project. Ive tried two things, not sure which im going ot stick with. Ive used slayer and the grand piano preset in sytrus. I did nothing yet to the grad piano but im sure I will if I stick with it. With the slayer I moved the pickup all the way to the neck, put on the tube amp and dry cabinet settings with no effects. I used the dampening knob to make it more of a palm muted sound. I figure im either doing a fast piano melody or a deep guitar background sort of thing. No idea which yet. I ran both through the riff machine a million times to try to get ideas. Im thinking about having an AAB(C?)pattern for the song. Ive got mostly silence for the C part, and the B part is undecided yet (guitar or piano).
Right off the bat today I made a simple piano part. This part continues right where the original piano part left of, but it only plays the second time through. Its a very simple part, but its sounds very nice where it is. This is going to be that "C" part on the second run through of the pattern. Ive taken the same piano part and edited it slightly and have it running as the first part "C", but through the guitar (slayer as mentioned earlier). I put an automtaion for the slayers volume on just to fade in and out (it over lays the surrounding parts a bit). Ive added two sustained notes at the very end (from slayer) to play with the drums. The feedback kicks in a little and then the song cuts. I added the fruity chorus effect to the slayer (in all occurrences). I like the sound, its like a mix between a synthesizer and guitar, and I like that (yes, I know a synthesizer is supposed to sound like other instruments, for the most part). Im just doing minor changes now, done with this for the most part. Ive played with the volume on everything alot so everything can be heard better throughout the entire song.
Today I just did more minor changes. I got nicer headphones, so it doesnt sound as nice (just different). Im done with it though. Hopefully its not as bad as I hear it being right now.

Sytrus/Riff Machine

All I started today was playing with Sytrus and coming up with "my sound". I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I navigated through all the little switches and shaped up a cool sound. Its kind of space-y and has a delay. I really like the mid and low pitches but the high pitched notes remind me of video game music so I'm trying to stay away from that. Since it has the delay on it I’m planning on doing short notes spaced a good distance apart to utilize the delay. I’m kind of imaging watching the stars glimmer in an intense way, each shine being this sound, at an almost random pitch. If I need to (and I will) I can do something like the guitar solo in some Muse songs and a few other riffs by other various guitarists. I’m thinking if (when) I need to speed things up I will do some fast transposing riff with random "tapping" of the high notes. I’m sure that will be nice. But, I’m still stuck working on the vocoder project, so hopefully I can finish that up and get on to this project.
Still I have not had the chance to work on the vocoder project. I didn’t like that project anyways. This is much more fun. I’ve got two or three riffs from the riff machine saved using the synth sounds from the Sytrus. I feel like it will be pretty easy to put them together. I need a bass line for this. The drums are simple and something else is needed. I feel if I get that done all ill have to do next is put the pieces together and export. I’ve already got alot of rough automations and effects and short transitions in mind and experimented with but not set in stone. I feel like I never have this class and when I do it is for only 15 minutes. I don’t have much else to say with this, feel its going good, but still have to do the vocoder project so I'll be busy.
Today was pretty productive I would say. I added in a bass line that is ran through the vocoder a little (I turned down the effect to avoid too much fuzz). It matches with the kick drum very well but transposes with the synth riff from the Sytrus. I repeated the A-A-B-A pattern again but with distortion on the main synth sound and the bass. The distortion on the synth fades in and then holds while the drums start back up. Then I put the little intro riff in again at the end, but with distortion and thats all I got. I’ve just got some tweaking left I think. I’ve changed the very beginning from fading in volume wise, I added in a filter shift. I added in a preset synth sound from Sytrus and put a few long (crunchy?) notes in towards the beginning to help with the transitions. I don’t know if those will stay for the final piece though. I am suprised to say i dont have much influence in this project. Just what comes to me by playing random notes on the keyboard with the synth sounds selected.
Today i finished this project (hopefully). I mostly made a few small changes. Mostly small timing changes. I changed the vocoder effect on the bass to . I also added "fruity fast dist." to both custom synth sounds and the second Boobass channel (which barely does anything through the song). I have the second Boobass playing the bass line of the A pattern deeper in te mix of the B pattern. I didnt feel the two patterns fit together nicely so I kind of cheated. I also added kick drums to go with the main bass line in the B pattern. I put a flanger effect on the bass, a small but nice effect. I edited the snare drum pattern i had slightly. Its a bit more apparent at the very beginning and the change doesnt make a big impact on the rest of the song. Im hoping that everything is in this post somewhere... I have alot of unused automations and channels laying around in the file so its hard to tell if I missed any details. Hope someone likes it...

The Vocoder

For this project I need to take some sort of audio file and send it through the vocoder, and then fit that into a song. I have two audio files I cut from one of Winston Churchills first speeches as Prime Minister. Ive heard this speech a few other places and I just like it, I dont know why. It took forever to get a .wav file of it, I had to download it as an .MP3 at my house and use a program to convert it to .wav and then bring it to school. That was a good waste of my day. I ran those through two separate vocoders, since one line has a different tone to it and I tried to make them sound like the same line, but with a pause in between. I came up with a little piece using SimSynth and some drums. I would say that was influenced by NIN. I put the speech pieces in and Im planning on intensifying the patterns after Churchill says "heavy losses have been inflicted". When I put the speeches through the vocoder, I had a big problem. The vocoder had been set to produce a harsh effect, and then I started to get static throughout the song. So I had to set it to a gentler sound. Im hoping to use Sytrus like Mr. Rabuse mentioned to lay some long background notes ran through the vocoder in the more intense part of the song. Ill probably fade in some distorted note and then transpose a little.
I basically wasted my day today trying to move the song along and away from what I had already had. I had a nice pattern in SimSynth, but it would never fit into the song so I moved it into Slayer and edited it a little. The vocals are abour war so the song needs to be loud and crashing. Mr. Rabuse showed me how to modulate the X and Y parameters of the beginning snare drum beat which I Love, but Im having trouble recording the modulations so they automate during the song. I feel if I could get that down i would have no problem moving into a new part of the song. Im beginning to feel that I might be getting myself wrapped up in too many technical edits. Im hoping im able to finish this project without losing everything by just getting lost in confusion.
Well I feel like I havent worked on this project in like a month. I despise this project and I hope I can finish it up next class, whether I like the outcome or not. It needs to be done. I started the next project with Sytrus today, didnt even open this project...
Well I finally got around to finishing this off today. I gave up on recording the automation so I simply made a separate automation for the X and Y factors of the filter on the snare drum at the start. It builds up in pitch (bass is cut) then when the bass part and such comes in it quickly fades back and into the mix till you can barely hear it anymore. I also repeated pieces of the clips I found throughout the rest of the song and then it ends with "Inflicted, inflicted, inflicted...", not original but I like it and cant specifically name a song that does that off the top of my head so im not copying. Last I just messed around with the volume of some parts so you could at least hear everything. Glad I finally decided to finish this. Hope its okay.

Automations

To start out I boosted the reverb on a kick drum and tried to immitate a heartbeat which gets faster as the song progresses. I also put in a rapid hit which pans left to right over the rest of the song aswell. I used SimSynth and the chop tool to get a little dance riff and tranposed that all over the place during the song. I automated the SimSynth to fade in after a few seconds. A distorted riff from Slayer fades in next and then everything is cut while the Slayer riff fades out quickly, almost as if it echoes. The SimSynth riff comes back louder and overlaps itself at different pitches, kind of that "dun-dun-duh" idea, but with the previous patterns so it fits. Last the pattern fades in and out which was a pain to do and Im not totally happy with how it worked out. With certain notes in the pattern being more pronounced, an odd fading pattern would rarely work out well. I was inspired by just the steriotypical techno/dance song with the contrasting pitches (kick drum and SimSynth) and the fast patterns (SimSynth and the hits panning left and right).

FX Project

To start with I put together a drum loop and a bass line, pretty simple but I like them. I added a quick guitar part and messed with the pitch, settings, and effects endlessly and finally got something I was good with. I intended for it to be in the background like a few Muse songs Ive heard. I put phaser on the riff, it totally changed, it sounds nothing like it now. Its much more apparent in the mix and even harder to call a guitar riff. I had to turn down the volume from slayer each time i touched it since the effect made the riff totally tune out the other patterns. It sounds more like something that would be coming from a keyboard, not a guitar. I finally deleted another guiatar riff that played along with everthing since it only sounded nice when it was very high pitched, but my headphones couldnt handle it or something and it quickly faded out, even when played alone. The guitar part shifts alittle in the middle of the song along with the bass. the bass changes up again which gives the two patterns a slightly different sound. Then I had to put together a bass [solo/fill]to get back into the main loop. The bass line I tried to do everything to but since its mostly the same repeating note, nothing made a big impact so I left it. I put reverb onto the snare drum, I thought it was fine but I needed some more effects so I tried and it stuck. The main loop towards the end of the peice is the same as the beginning but I added delay onto the cymbals, It basically sounds like a totally new loop. The cymbals also have alot of feedback to them, so when I dropped the other parts of the loop the cymbals echo out for awhile. I had to put in an empty pattern a few seconds after the others stpped to capture this fade out. I Love sitting in my room, turning up the amp, hitting a power cord and listening to it very slowly fade away. All songs should end like that. I finally deleted another guiatar riff that played along with everthing since it only sounded nice when it was very high pitched, but my headphones couldnt handle it or something and it quickly faded out, even when played alone.

The Chop and Transpose Tools

My second assignment here was to incorporate the chop tool and the transpose tool into your loop. This assignment proved difficult and time consuming to me. I finally got some sort of inspiration or influence from Psyclon Nine. I am very happy with how the drums worked out, I tried to go for the slow but harsh beats they use in Psyclon Nine. Although my drums dont sound anything like theirs, id still say I was influenced. Also the fuzzy guitar parts came from P9, again though i couldnt get a heavier sound like them since I was falling behind on this assignment. The chop tool was my worst nightmare, I had thought it would be eay enough to let the computer make some long notes into a nice riff, but I was not happy with any of them. I finally just picked one and let it go. I used the transpose tool on the bass part but splitting the riff in half, lowering the first half by an octave, raising the second half by two octaves from their and then returning. Matching the chopped guitar with the chopped bass was also difficult, i couldnt use the same riff but they couldnt sound too different. I started and ended the song with a simple drum piece, slowly added in the bass and then the guitar.

Drum Loop

The first thing I decided when making this was to contentrate on NOT allowing it to sound like any of the bands I listen to. Whether or not I truely like what I was going to make, I didnt want to just copy somebody else. For the first pattern I tried to refrain from using snares, I wanted it to sound less active like rock. I used toms as a substitute to get a more free flowing sort of thing, since the toms rang out longer. The second pattern sounds alot like to first due to the same sounds going off at close to the same time, but its slower and simpler sounding while keeping that same flow from the first pattern. I tried to get the first fill to make the second pattern seem less slowed down, since the first fill is fast. The second fill was meant to kind of erase what you just heard so the third pattern didnt seem so foriegn.

Test

"blah blah blah"