My final project, which I’ve named “Homeland”:
Quick note before getting into the post: I’m only now realizing how long this is, and the amount of audio and video clips and screenshots I’ve included is kind of insane. So feel free to skim through, or just read the concept section below to understand my concept.
Concept
As many of you probably know by now, I love using my own recorded samples in my songs. Something about taking an everyday object and transforming it into its own instrument is so fun and fascinating to me, so for my final project, I wanted to take it a step further, and challenge myself to not use a single MIDI or electronic sound in this project. All my sounds would be sampled from everyday objects around my house, or from a live instrument like my piano or ukelele.
Running off of that concept, I sought to also create a song with more of a meaning going in, as opposed to my last two projects. I eventually settled on splitting my song into two sections: one outdoors, and one indoors, and each comprised of everyday sounds and samples from only either outdoors or indoors. For example, I couldn’t use the sound of a pot boiling for my outdoors section, or leaves rustling for my indoors section. I decided that I wanted the outdoors section to be louder and more chaotic, reflective of the chaos of the outside world and society as a whole, and the indoors section to be quieter and more intimate, sort of like life at home – the feeling of being wrapped up in a blanket next to a fireplace. Throughout both sections, I had a few main instruments as a constant, mainly the piano, guitar, and my voice (yikes), sort of representing how music is the bridge between the two worlds for me as a form of expression and communication. Real deep, I know.
Structurally, I eventually designed the song as a whole to begin with a bang with the outdoors section, then slowly warp into the middle indoors section, which eventually builds into a dramatic, intense climax that combines elements of both the outdoors and indoors. A pretty standard arc, but I did find it to be a challenge to effectively and smoothly transition between the sections, given the great contrast in both sound and mood.
Recording
To achieve all of this, I logically had to start by recording. And with only my measly iPhone 7 at hand (although with the excellent Voice Record Pro app), I was nervous (I ordered a mic for home, but too late…). I certainly didn’t have a shortage of sounds around me, both in my house, and in my backyard and surrounding woods, where it had just snowed. The challenge was to 1) narrow down the sounds that were actually useful, and 2) produce good quality recordings of them. This was difficult, especially with wind, trains, cars, and my neighbor’s lawn mower outside. Even inside, it was hard getting my family to be silent as I scurried around like a madman, tapping kettles and pans against the kitchen table. But I did try to use some of the close mic techniques I learned from researching my iPhone mic all the way back in Homework 2, so that certainly helped. Over this week of work, I eventually recorded over 84 samples of everyday objects and instruments (not including maybe twice as many of mess-ups and second takes). After a painstaking process of deciding which sounds to use and for what, I ended up using maybe less than a third of those. Welp.
Behind Each Track
I’m not sure how exactly to do this in a way that’s easiest to follow, but I thought I’d go through each of my tracks in the song and go into the background of all the recorded sounds and samples that went into recording them. Back again by popular demand are the original sounds, video reenactments, Waveform screenshots (when available, I wish I had taken more when I was making each individual sound for the drum samplers) and the end products. Unfortunately, I can’t include all 84 videos, although they are fun to look through for myself.
Outdoor Drum Sampler
All of the sounds in this sampler were taken from a fun walk my sister and I took outside in the woods near our house, and in our backyard. I used mostly low pass/high pass filters, reverb, and compressors plug-ins to manipulate these sounds. I still do not have a MIDI keyboard, so I had to make do with my Qwerty keyboard to input my beats.
Kick: This is simply me dropping a rather large rock I found into a patch of dead grass. It was hard recording it without also picking up the brush of grass and snow, but after many, many takes, we got a good one.
Snare: This is a combination of me hitting a solid block of snow with our shovel (the thump), and my shoes crunching in the snow (the tzzz of the wires). Also a tough one to record well and to manipulate into something resembling a snare.
Hi-Hat: This is me breaking a small dead branch. Surprisingly the branches in our area all broke rather dully, except for this single clean break that I managed to pick up.
Crash: This is me smashing an icy piece of snow against a rock. I now admit I may have cheated my indoor/outdoor rule (only on this one though!) and layered sounds of me ripping paper and drawing with a Sharpie to make the sound more convincing.
Toms: This is me smashing an icy piece of snow against the backboard of my basketball hoop. I pitch shifted it to create a high, mid, and low tom.
Indoors Drum Sampler
Again – a lot of low pass/high pass filtering, reverbing, delaying, chorusing, and compressing here.
Kick: This is me hitting a large candle against our carpet floor. It achieved the deep, muffled sound I was looking for.
Snare 1: This is me clicking a small wooden jewelry box from my mother against our marble kitchen counter.
Snare 2: This is a combination of me slamming our metal kettle against the kitchen counter (for the metallic, icy sound I wanted) and me slamming my toilet seat shut (to beef up the actual hit of the snare).
Hi-Hat: This a combination of me clicking two marbles together (for the main sound), and me flipping the light switch on my lamp (for more depth and fullness to the main sound). In general (for both outdoors and indoors), it was difficult to control the sound of the hi-hat, as it often cut through everything and stood out like a sore thumb. Eventually, with some slight panning (as hi-hats often are) and added plug-ins on the original sample, I was able to remedy this issue.
Pedal Hi-Hat/Brush: I started out envisioning this sound like a brush, but eventually it turned into something resembling a pedal hi-hat. This was me spraying our bottle of alcohol spray.
Pianos
I recorded piano parts for both the outdoors and indoors sections. I had to do a lot of experimenting and adjusting in terms of where to place my phone to record, and at what angle, to get just the right effect I wanted. The outdoors isn’t that interesting, I just applied a lot of reverb, chorus, and some phaser to give the illusion of the piano being played outside (combined with my outdoors ambience). The indoors “piano” is a little more interesting, as I mimicked the sound of a synth using heaving low pass filtering and chorus-ing, and by reversing each clip of the chords I played. I had to use a LOT of automation on this, as the nature of reversing the chords and cutting and splicing clips created a lot of pops, which I had to conceal by manipulating the volume. What a pain. Someone please tell me how to copy automation points.
Guitar/Ukelele
Not the most interesting part given that I can’t play guitar and had to again break my self-imposed rules and dig into the Smooth R&B Guitar sample library again. I used pitch shifted snippets and spliced pieces of two main loops, putting in high pass filters to make the guitar sound more tinny and distant when it first comes in, as well as reverb later on at the end for a Western-y effect. But for the random ukulele outro that I added as a whim a day before this project was due, that was actually recorded by my sister. But she’s also not the greatest at it, so we recorded each individual chord and note on their own while looking up chords online and I pieced it together from there (along with high pass filtering and reverbing to make it sound more distant and outro-y).
Bass
Both the indoors and outdoors bass were just me playing on the lower register of the piano. I really wanted to find a natural sound that could mimic it—I tried the hum of my microwave, my printer, my electric toothbrush, but nothing would sound right. So I gave up and just ran my piano through a lot of plug-ins, notably a low pass filter and this cool distortion plug-in called Bass Drive to make it sound convincing. Using the piano did make it easier for me to play more complex patterns and basslines in one take rather than having to piece every note one by one with an everyday sound. This track was also one of two instances (the other being the ukelele tracks) of me using a bus rather effectively! Yay!
Ambience
I used four main ambient recordings of my own: a general recording of the outdoors (leaves rustling, birds chirping, all that) to create an outdoors atmosphere for the beginning and also to transition into the ending, a recording of my mother’s soup boiling to create a warm home-y feeling for the beginning of the middle indoors section, and a gong-like effect created with a combination of me tapping two wine glasses together and ringing my sister’s singing bowl (which is usually used for meditation) to signal the transition from the outdoors intro into the middle, quiet indoors section.
Lead Fake Out-of-Tune Trumpet
Now this is my favorite. I struggled with the right instrument/sound to play my lead melody for the longest time. I really did try everything, including my electric toothbrush again, my sister making a farting noise with her hand, door hinges creaking, assortments of bleeps and bloops from machines around the house, both nothing seemed to either fit, be capable of producing a melody, or resemble anything like an instrument. So I gave up and just sang it, and then heavily distorted it and filtered it, among other plug-ins, to make it somewhat resemble an out-of-tune trumpet. I really did try to sing in tune, and tried to use pitch shifting to correct some of it, but I eventually just decided to let it be in all of its imperfect glory. Something about it being slightly off rhythm or out of key at times is perfect for me in this song, especially given that everything around it is rather polished and in key. There’s a metaphor here that I won’t try to hard to force about me and my place in this world being just like this out of tune fake trumpet, yada yada. I’ll leave it up to you.
Mixing and Mastering/Final Product
I spent a LOT of time on the fine details of this track compared to my previous projects, especially with mixing, which would make it even more embarrassing if the mixing were bad. I paid attention to mixing throughout along the way rather than doing it all at once at the end, as well as other detail oriented tasks I’ve usually done at the end, including EQ’ing, panning, randomizing velocities for MIDI, getting rhythms precise with quantizing for MIDI and entering specific measure values for everything else, creating automation curves, editing the samples themselves within drum samplers, etc.
I also did a lot of listening through and obsessing over painstakingly small details, also sending drafts to friends throughout so that they could pick up on details I might’ve missed, even after taking a day off to rest my ears. A snare hit that may have been slightly too loud. A guitar strum that seemed to clip a little bit as it was cut off. A piano chord that seemed to be just a little bit off rhythm. An ambient sound effect that could be panned just a little more to the right. Stuff like that. I exported the entire song several times, and each time listening to it out loud, through headphones, and through a speaker. I was VERY careful (and was throughout the entire process) to make sure nothing was redlining so as to avoid clipping or distorting in the final exported versions, given that this was a problem with my last project, even though I also paid a lot of attention to mixing and mastering then. I also uploaded it into Audacity just to make sure the amplitudes were in check, and also added a compressor/limiter to my master track to be safe.
Conclusion
Generally, I am satisfied with how it all turned out. I spent a lot of time on this, and I think I’ve come up with a piece of work that has meaning to me, and is pretty unique in terms of its concept and sound. It’s really made me appreciate just how much can be achieved without having much access to real instruments like drums, and how there is music in many everyday objects in our lives, waiting to be unlocked and found (how poetic). I had a few goals from my last Waveform project for this final, and I think I achieved most of them:
1) import sampled sounds to create my own drum sampler with more unique sounds that I have more control over (and can actually apply plugins to) – check (very glad I was able to achieve this as it was so cool and fun)
2) employ buses more, just for convenience sake – check (somewhat? But also didn’t need them as much)
3) figure out the balance between the lead and beat mixing-wise more, as I feel like I may have overcompensated a little bit with this project (as last project, I had problems with the beat overpowering my lead), and struggled with the balance this time again between the guitar and beat – check (I definitely had a far better sense of mixing, and actually went back to edit my samples within the drum samplers to achieve this balance)
5) experiment with more changes and variety in chord progression, so it isn’t just the same progression over and over again (this would require me to rely less on samples) – check (definitely! Compositionally this piece was far more all over the place and complex in a good way I hope….)
Finally, it’s been such a good time learning along with all of you this semester, and to hear all of your amazing work. It’s so cool to be able to get to know people that are passionate and talented in so many different ways, and I’ve been so inspired. Thank you also (especially) to Professor Petersen for being a fun, cool, and understanding professor through these unpReCEdENteD TimES. Hopefully we all stay in touch and maybe can see each other in an actual studio/classroom at some point.
