MUS 494: Creating 10 minutes of music

SUBMITTED TO:
Sam Kincaid Chief Engineer of Recording and Editing Oregon State University

SUBMITTED BY:
Jack Baker Pre-Environmental Engineer Major Oregon State University Corvallis, OR 97331 November 2012

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................................................2

CADENCE. ...................................................................................................................................................3

HALL OF THE QUESY MOUNTAIN KING..............................................................................................4

SPANISH BALLAD.......................................................................................................................................5

ETUDE IN A MINOR.6-7

WOBBLY WATER...7-8

INTRODUCTION
This paper analyses reasons, methods, and tools used to in producing five different songs. In the creation of these ten minutes I wanted to bring in my own personal music production goals so that I not only learned the software and methods involved but was able to grow as a composer and producer. I accomplished this by taking different areas of personal musical pursuit and translating them into music production. 2

CADENCE
Rudimental drumming, specifically marching snare drum, is currently my greatest musical pursuit. Im involved with three independent drum cores in Oregon and was playing on the OSU drumline last fall. The schools audience however is often football fans rather than musicians so this year I decided to voluntarily teach the second drumline. During my time I wrote them a Cadence to play at games that I hoped would more musically interesting but still simple understand, backbeat oriented, and exciting.

I originally began writing the rhythms into Pro Tools midi piano grid. I later realized how to use the notation option for protools and the translation became much easier. However, after playing with sibaleus some more I realized that I can actually export the individual parts as midi when can then be imported into Pro Tools and assigned instruments. I then edited the note velocity and sounds for different articulations.

HALL OF THE QUESY MOUNTAIN KING

Currently Im taking private piano lessons in OSUs music department and I wanted to try and utilize some of this instruction in my project. At the time my main study piece was the song In The Hall Of The Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. I wanted to make this a very eerie piece because the traditional song reminds me of a bad guy chasing little kids. I wanted to learn how to utilize the keyboard in Bentons recording rooms to record the midi rhythms, note value, and velocity all in real time rather than editing individually. I also wanted to assign Xpand2s sounds to the notes on the keyboard. I recorded the percussion track, the harmony track, and the actual piano piece I learned on the keyboard and quantized the rhythms using Pro Tools. The quantization is very valuable to me because I tend to work with MIDI a lot. The strange wobbly sound on the keyboard piece was made using the keyboards pitch changer. Though I started this as my MIDI assignment, I ended up putting a lot of time into it and decided to use it as a part in my final 10 minutes. 4

SPANISH BALLAD
I began guitar lessons when I was about 14 years old under Dan Mish. I learned how to sing and play but I eventually became more interested in classical music. As a result I have two analyzed and practiced guitar songs that Ive been wanting to somehow utilize in music production. Spanish Ballad is a song that was hard for me since I couldnt find any MIDI files online. I am slowly figuring out the chords to go with this song but am having a harder time. I unfortunately was unable to produce a good enough mix of the recorded guitar and chord accompaniment in time for the presentation. So I simply recorded the song on guitar itself.

ETUDE IN A MINOR
This song is the second of two guitar songs I love to play. Luckily I was able to find the MIDI file on the internet to use as a starting point.

After adding MIDI I decided to add accellerandos through a certain exciting part of music that repeats. The piece starts at 70bpm then goes up in incriments of 1bpm 10 times to reach 80bpm, then on the repeat the same happens leaving the tempo at 90bpm.

After getting the skeleton done I started adding chords to the piece. A few years ago I was already planning on doing this so I asked my guitar teacher to help me find what chords would work with the arpegiations so I had the option of adding chords if I ever wanted to. Because this piece is all 16th that change very often the chords that will work with them are few. When choosing chords with my teacher I put priority to more contemporary sounds such as A+9 rather than D and choices similar to that.

Making this song was very hard because often dont have access to the lab Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays from class and commitments in different towns. To solve this problem I eventually ended up using Cubase 5 music software on my computer to make the MIDI so I could make up for lost time. I ended up writing some of the MIDI parts using Cubase and then transferring them to Pro Tools. Originally I also transferred some recorded audio from of plugins in Cubase using the arranged MIDI but then had to delete them once I decided to put in the tempo changes. Using both Cubase and Pro Tools in conjunction with each other really was a valuable experience.

WOBBLY WATER
This song is one that uses only audio recorded from the sound of water bottles, a concept Ive been trying to actualize for a year or two. For sounds I took different water bottles with varying amounts of water and used drum sticks to hit them. A really cool effect I found is to tilt a metal water bottle while hitting it to change the pitch. I took sounds and cut and edited them together for the music, this took a long time. Later in the song I wanted some bass sound but wanted to record it in the recording room. Eventually I realized that if I turned up the microphones sensitivity

very high and tapped the base of its metal stand the vibration caused from the tap would travel into the microphone giving a pretty sharp low sound that resonated for a few seconds. I turned up its gain and reversed it to get a crescendo effect as well.