Month: November 2017

I spent time working on my big band piece for Stonethrow Films, the example they’d given me for what they wanted was In The Mood by Glenn Miller. After listening through the piece a few times I found the song was made up of brass, drums and a double bass. I tried writing many different ways usually starting with a melody however none of them really managed to stick with me or the group so after about 5 attempts I tried something new and started with a drum rhythm, this was a lot more productive but I spent a lot of time fiddling with getting the right time signature and tempo. After I made  a drum loop that I’d liked I started work on making a little bass line, I just made a walking bass line the goes up back down and has a little fill at the end. After this I added the stabs just to add something to increase the pace. Finally I made a little melody that I really slammed on with the velocity of each note, this was because when the velocity was maxed it made the notes bend and break up slightly and sounded more realistic.

http://www.normanweinberg.com/uploads/8/1/6/4/81640608/911811kb_swing_part_1.pdf (I used this to figure out how to make a drum rhythm)

For next semester I will be working on a documentary about sexual harassment in Australia. The group have decided they want to make a crowd funding campaign to raise money to fund our project. I worked with them on making a video to sell our idea to people I made a short, simple piece of music for the film. I didn’t want it to be too busy as it would take away from the narration explaining what the documentary would be about. I made a simple synth line of 4 notes and looped it. I then used a didjeridoo sample, downtuned it and staked 5 of them together to play on points throughout the film where there was vital information that they wanted to add impact to.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/88-days-documentary-film#/ (Link to the crowd funder with the video on it.)

So I played around with Shepard Tones some more. I’ve had various successful attempts and several more failures. I created a Shepard scale easily enough, basically it’s a chromatic scale that starts on a C3  playing 1 8th note, then 2 8th notes on the C# and carrying on on each key until you reach the C4 which you hit once. Playing this over 3 octaves so starting on C2, C3 and C4 and automating the volume of the lower octave up as it progresses through the scale and automating the the volume of the upper octave down tricks the ear into hearing a never ending scale. This was all well and good and easily achievable however as it’s a chromatic scale it’s not exactly the most musical and it’s not easy to hide in a song so I instead tried with sine waves. I used the ESX24 in Logic for this. Instead of playing a scale I simply automated the pitch up on the varying octaves so it was one single tone. This was unsuccessful, after spending 3 days watching tutorials and and trying to blend together the starts and ends of the files I gave in. The problem was that the sine waves frequency rate was different at the end of the clip to at the start so that when I tried to blend them together there was always a pop. I am still experimenting with making Shepard Tones however instead I simply opted to automate the pith over the duration of held notes.This is similar but doesn’t have the same effect sadly but it’s close enough for me to get across what I’m trying to do with the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLdxUsSAzDU – (I used an Ableton tutorial as the the principles are the same it’s just Logic had rubbish tutorial videos)