When it comes to producing music, I have a difficult time mixing and matching different kinds of sound samples. The problem with using sound samples is that the internet is filled with them. My point being that there are too many sound samples available to sift through. I encountered this very same problem while working on the HW3. Hence I decided to go through with a shortcut.
BandLab is a music production software for beginners which allows you to record, produce and master your own tracks. In fact I’ve been using BandLab for quite some time now. Not wanting to go through the large number of sound samples available on freesound.org, I logged into my BandLab account and utilised the ‘Looper’ tool. The ‘Looper’, as the name suggests allows you to create your own tracks by using pre-existing loops within the software. However, trying to stick to the homework guidelines, I didn’t compose the whole project in a single BandLab project. I first created a base track consisting of only drums and bass. Once this one was done, I placed hi-hats and percussion onto another track while listening to the base track in order to ensure that I created a steady rhythm. I repeated this process of establishing a separate track once again in order to add guitar and synth and voilà my sound samples were ready.
While arranging the tracks onto the DAW, I decided to make the intro coarse. A ‘cement-pipe’ sound followed by hard drumming made it sound more like an alternative rock track and less like the theme to be established (LoFi). I wanted the drums to sound loud, however at the same time I wanted to create the impression of the drums being played in a room, like a basement. This is where I decided to plug in the Reverb. I played around with the ‘Room Size’, ensuring that the adequate perception was delivered to the listener. As far as hi-hats and percussion were concerned, I didn’t want them to be the main highlight of the track. I wanted them to have a subtle effect at the back of the head. Hence, I decided to add a little bit of Reverb to the hi-hats as well. It was enough to ensure that the hi-hats stayed in the background without the drums completely undermining them. My aim from the very beginning was to make the guitar the main highlight of the track. Luckily I stumbled upon a plugin called ‘Iron Oxide 5’ which ‘boosted’ the guitar track and made it stand on top of all the noise at the back. One could say that the ‘Iron Oxide 5’ plugin worked as an ‘anti-damper’. To enhance the strumming of the guitar I also used a Delay plugin (length = 150ms), which gave it a longer lasting effect.
The fiddly controls of the user-interface caused me to have a difficult time while trying to instil animation onto the track. Animation was mainly used on the audio recordings – a vocal and a bracelet-sound. Trying to do something creative, I used a bracelet to make a sound by crushing it in my hand. By producing a series of these sounds I tried to line them up with the hi-hats and percussion to give an ‘un-neat’ perception. While I was trying to make the track less neater, I still used a compressor to smoothen the bracelet-sound. At this point I was literally making something neater to make the track less neater – the wonders of music production I guess ? Last but not least, I recorded myself singing the word ‘hey’ at a stretch. Applying a pitch shifter and a phaser animation I tried my best to line this up with the synthesiser to create a harmony – but to be fair I failed badly ( it was worth a shot I guess).
Critically speaking, I think that I could have done better. While fairly composed the track does have its cons which could be fixed with better mixing and proper implementation of plugins and animation.