With this final composition, my main composition goal was to create a bittersweet piece that I myself would return to if I ever feel a little down in the future. From a technical perspective, I aimed to utilize all the skills I had acquired from the Supercollider module into my song.
Currently, my default “simp song” is Pressure by Draper.
This song’s balance between sadness and motivation works wonders with encouraging me to carry on in tough times. Musically, I’d pinpoint the reason behind its effectiveness to the fullness of it’s sound. Before taking CPSC035, I never noticed all the harmonies and pads in the background that fill in this song’s blank space; I always just heard the lead, bass, and percussion. Though I am still unable to pinpoint the exact number of tracks and their respective notes throughout the song (although I suppose that’s also sign of a good pad), I certainly planned to have ample padding in my musical composition. Another aspect of this song that I wanted to carry over to my song was the tranquil break between powerful drives.
With respect to the more technical side of this song, there are a few things I learned throughout the SuperCollider module (some are SuperCollider related, others are just me pondering about Waveform in the shower):
- You don’t have to find the perfect sample for what you’re looking for. I specifically struggled with this in my first two Waveform Projects, spending hours trying to find just the right Kick, Snare, and Hihats, before being left dissatisfied an just using the 808 and 909 drum kit samples instead. Yet in SuperCollider, the fact that I was able to program base and snare sounds from just simple waves a few effects proved to me that the sample only has to be close to what is desired, after which using an abundance of effects is completely acceptable
- Use automation curves for apply effects to certain notes. In my last waveform project, I really struggled with the applications of automation curves because I was never able to quite figure out how to automate effects parameters. Turns out, I have to first drag it into the effects chain before being able to select the specific parameter of automation (I thought you had to make the automation curve first, then map it to a parameter). Now with the ability to automate effects parameters, I was able to selectively apply effects to certain notes. For example, if I wanted to add reverb to only the last notes of a musical phrase, I could use an automation curve to turn the reverb’s wet level down to 0 for all notes except the last note.
- Use automation curves to give sounds more character. One really cool thing we learned in SuperCollider is how we could use oscillators to modulate certain parameters on an effect. Because of this, I also aimed to use automation curves to mimic the oscillator effect on some of my parameter plugins
- Envelopes: To be completely honest, I didn’t really have a full understanding of how envelopes functioned, and what the difference between adsr and perc envelopes were. Yet through Supercollider, the whole concept of treating an envelope like a time-based function that modifies its input signal really helped me understand. The most helpful was the assignment where we had to create our own subtractive synth: while having to juggle the whole envelope difference between adsr and perc was really frustrating, it undoubtedly helped me understand envelopes in general
The first thing I knew I needed to do in this song was to separate my different percussive instruments onto different tracks. On last waveform song, I decided to use just the multisampler as an easy way to get by with a genre of music that usually had a repetitive bass, so I did not expect myself to do any percussive automation. However, I eventually ran into the problem, albeit too late, that using the multisampler meant that any plugin or effect I wanted to add to one instrument would have to be added to the rest of the percussive instruments. Thus, this time I created separate tracks for the kick, snare, hihat, and claves, allowing me to also set their own filters and automation tracks so that the percussion would have more life.
The 2nd step in my song was to find minor chord progression that would set the tone of the song. The chord progression I ended up going with was c minor -> g minor -> Ab major -> Bb major, which follows the i-v-VI-VII progression. Right away, I wanted to test the capabilities of using automation curves on more than just pan and volume, so I decided to have incorporate a bass drop immediately in measure 10. Yet more than just a gradual buildup in sound, I also wanted have a gradual buildup shift in the EQ. In order to apply this to both my Viola and Low Pad, I used a bus that both the channels fed into, and applied a 4-band EQ with automation in the bus.
When thinking back to what made the bass drops in Draper’s Pressure so effective, I noticed that the main contrast was the amount and level of padding . Yet, since I already used a padding in my buildup, I thought, “Meh, I’ll add another Pad.” Because the point of this padding was to be almost like the lead post-drop, I had placed in the sweet-spot of frequencies that our ears are most sensitive, which is to say around 400-800 Hz. However, having both the Lead and the pad be the same instrument was quite a problem, because the pad had to be adsr but having such a powerful sustaining lead was actually kind of painful to listen to. Thus, in order to emphasize the attack of the lead even more than just adjusting the adsr levels, I added another track built from 4OSC, which had sine and triangle waves within a percussive envelope, repeating the same notes as the pad to give a more distinctive character to the lead.
Despite the many parts of my liquid drums composition that I disliked, one aspect I wanted to keep was the high-pitched secondary melody complementing the lead. Since the doubling of my pad with my lead led to a more boring lead, having these bells as a secondary melody complemented very well throughout the chorus. In this case, however, I enjoyed the sound having the secondary melody being centered.
With both the 4OSC and the high pitch adding character to the low pad, I decided to use another approach to add character to the lo pad: automation (that I described in point 4 in the envelope). I chose to automate the 4-Band equalizer in similar fashion to what I did with the bus during the build-up, but this one was solely on the lo pad (without the viola). I first tried a linear oscillation, but I soon realized that such an oscillation was not good because frequencies are not a linear in nature (the whole 1/wavelength thing), so curvature was necessary for the intended effect. I also incorporated a pan automation that creates something that resembled a little bit like the Doppler Effect.
As mentioned early, I also really wanted this song to incorporate a rest in the middle of the chorus. Though the rest I had incorporated in my last song was alright, I was adamant about being more meticulous about the fade and the build-up beyond just one decrescendo and one crescendo. My central misconception was that quiet did not necessarily mean boring; there was still room for fun plugin automation and effects in the rest. The idea I eventually came up with was to increase the volume of my Lo pad up to the beginning of each measure, only to have it fade out immediately while also using the hihat to slowly fade out, similar to a delay.
The most challenging part for me was definitely the 2nd bass drop; I wanted to make this bass drop even more grand than the first, so one heartbreaking compromise I decided to make was to decrease the overall volume of first bass drop just a bit to give more room for the second bass drop amplitudes. From the juxtaposition between the first bass drop/ chorus and the rest, I noticed that there was certainty a complementary juxtaposition between silence and sound; since juxtapositions run both ways, I decided that I’d add a beat of silence just before the drop to creative an even more dramatic emphasis on my second drop. In addition to this, I also added drums immediately at the drop, using a percussive drum beat that resembled that of dubstep and hip-hop (since dubstep always has the strongest drops). This section is also where I decided to add panning to create even more fullness to the room. For my high secondary melody, I had each note pan between completely left and completely right. Finally to add even more volume to my sound, this was the only section that I incorporated a dedicated low bass track.
Below is a screenshot of my entire Waveform, and the mp3. I decided to name this song Mask: just as many people go to a mask-like facade during difficult times, I will go to this song.
Final Reflection thoughts:
Overall, I am really proud of this piece; to me, what’s most important was that I could say I really did show my best work here; the largest problem I had previously with filling in silence behind a melody was solved because of the pads I used throughout the song, and at no point did I, as a listener, feel like I was bored. I have yet to have another down-in-the-dumps type of mood since creating this song, but I know that I’ll at least give it a listen when the time comes: just hopefully not too close to finals. As far as further questions and improvements, one that already comes to mind is this issue I commonly have with inconsistent sound levels of Sine wave sounds: when experimenting with pure sine waves I could never get the track to play at a consistent level, and adding more tracks to it when only made the sine wave more and more distorted and quiet. Yet another issue I had was how sometimes there’d be popping and cracking despite the fact that I’m not redlining and that my sound envelopes were not attacking too fast. For improvements, I’d next try to be able to add more audio samples to my tracks that I record, whether that be just a piano or percussive sound effects. When peering at some of the pre-loaded projects on waveform, I noticed that almost none use Waveform MIDI to create sounds, but instead use Waveform for its plugins and for mixing.