Tag: HW3

My desired piece

When first starting off, I wasn’t too sure what I would end up with. I knew that I wanted something relaxing and steady, but besides that, nothing was really set. I have never actually composed music before, and I always imagined it as harmonizing different instruments and creating an instrumental score. So, when it turned out that we had to find tracks to mix, that in some ways made it harder, since I couldn’t use any of the instrumental/music theory skills that I had, but at the same time made it easier by removing the hassle of getting an instrument and recording something crisp from it. As I began looking through more and more clips, I decided that I would go ahead and create something that had a steady beat propelling the song, and also have a few sections of melody/chorus.

The creation process

The beginning:

I started my process of learning waveform by binging all the Tracktion quickstart videos on youtube and following along. I was able to get a sense of how to record tracks, move them around, apply basic plugins, and gained a good understanding of the user interface, which helped me when actually mixing the music. After watching the videos, I downloaded the Sanfilippo Imagina drum presets and played around with how to get them into Waveform. It was interesting to see how there could be multiple layers of clips for each preset, and each one could be adjusted to our needs separately. I didn’t need that feature, though, so I just inserted the presets as single clips.

The sounds I used:

I was able to incorporate looping percussion, bass, and ambient sounds, and also had water bottle recorded “bell” sounds, the chorus, and the intro. I first started off with the melody track, which was a catchy loop that I found online, and sped it up to 100 bpm. I next experimented with choosing the right drums that would drive the piece. There were so many loops to choose from in the Imagina loops, and I ended up picking a standard verse drum loop for the melody. I next added a bass line to see how it would sound, but it was just so terrible because it was too bouncy for my piano melody, and was in a very dissonant key relative to my melody. After unsuccessfully trying to find a good baseline, I decided to leave that for later and began searching for an intro clip. I found a beautiful one with chimes, and I knew I had to use it. As for the ambiance, I picked a soothing and steady synth one which would give an airy feel that goes well with the piano melody, and I made it start after the first couple measures of the melody to give a greater sense of buildup. Finally, for the bass, I chose a synth bassline. At first, I thought it was first way too staticky, but after learning about filters I easily solved that problem. I also used a modified version of the bassline to serve as the chorus. For my recorded clip, I recorded mono audio of my water bottle being struck, which produces a nice ring. I chose to record this in the bathroom so the acoustics would be amplifying the resonance.

Audio Plugins/Effects I used:

For the intro clip, I wanted a plugin that ramped up the tension at the end of the clip. At first, I thought a phaser would serve the purpose, but experimenting with that, I realized the point of the phaser is just to make things sound wobbly, which was the opposite of what I wanted. Looking around for more plugins I could use, I quickly turned to the pitch shifter, applying automation to increase the pitch near the end, which makes it seem like entering another dimension and sounded cool to me. For the percussion, I applied an equalizer to increase the lower bass sounds and increase the effect of the hi-hat, which was a bit too quiet. Another major plugin that I used was the low-pass filter for the bassline, to get rid of all the staticky higher-pitched noises of the synth until the chorus, which made it sound much better and placed a greater focus on the piano melody rather than the synth. For a few other clips, I added reverb to make it sound BIGGER, like with the water bottle “bell” and the ambiance. I also placed in audio automation so that the overall volume would peak near the middle, and dissipate near the end.

Challenges:

The hardest part of creating this project was finding clips that meshed well together. As I said before, I was expecting to be able to in a way compose music using virtual instruments, so finding good clips was rather difficult. I attempted to use the pitch shifter plugin to change the pitch to better match my track, but that proved futile and lead to quite a bit of distortion. I first searched for clips and sounds on freesound.org, but they didn’t have too great a selection of clips, so I was able to find looperman.com, which was a decent site for content. 

Also, another difficulty was that I had no experience mixing or really thinking about how to mix music before, so I wasn’t really sure whether the clips I put together were natural or very artificial. For example, I’m not sure whether synths and pianos go well together, but I thought it sounded great and included them in my piece. As I get more experience with using the software, looking for clips, and listening to music analytically, I should be able to get a better sense of what goes well together.

Also, a difficulty I experienced near the beginning of the assignment was navigating the interface. I was frustrated that scrolling didn’t do what I expected it to, and it was a pain to try and resize all the windows only by clicking. However, as I worked more with Waveform though, this problem became less and less relevant.

Conclusion:

I can’t wait to learn more about how to use MIDI so that I can create more custom sounds. Also, the next piece I create I hope to make my parts more closely related and sound better together. The piece I created this time has both minor and major intervals, and as I listen to it again now that doesn’t really sound the best. Anyways, I hope to be able to learn more about Waveform and create some more exciting music. I have attached my piece below, please let me know what you honestly think so I can make it sound better!

What Genre?

Despite the orchestral sound of the final piece, I actually started this project off with liquid drums in mind. Being my favorite type of chill electronic music, I thought composing my own would also help me appreciate my favorite genre even more.

Yet the first roadblock did not take long; after looking through freesound.org and the Imagina drum loops, I was unable to find a satisfying drum loop that fit what I was trying to create (reasonably understandable, liquid drums is not very popular). The few that did have the percussion loop which I desired unfortunately also had their own harmony, which would then limit my create freedom over the piece. Plan B was to create my own drum loop, and then use that loop within the track. However, two more roadblocks arose. First, my continued search on freesound.org and Imagina, this time for just percussion sound effects (kicks, hihats, and snares), also resulted in disappointment: many had too much background noise, or the timbre of the percussion did not fit the liquid drums style. In addition, I was also unable to figure exactly how to use the multisampler plugin to make a drum loop.

Thus, with neither option of finding a loop nor making my own, I decided to move on to another option: emulating orchestral music through electronic music. I was luckily able to find an orchestral instrument sample pack online, “Virtual-Playing-Orchestra3-1-wave-files” accessed from  http://virtualplaying.com/virtual-playing-orchestra/, which had suitable samples of almost every orchestral instrument, among which I picked the trumpet, flute, and trombone. Though I was also keen on perhaps adding some vocals, my singing sounds like a horse dying. Instead, I chose to whistle. Luckily, my residential college (Saybrook) has a small room next to our common room with outstanding acoustics.

 

Recording Whistles

Creating a melody for me to whistle was the easy part; I ran in to the most trouble trying to perfect the sound quality of my whistles. As a consequence of outstanding reverb in this room, the airy sound that accompanies whistling was also amplified. When listening to my 1st take recording, the airy sound almost overpowered the whistle itself. On my second try, I decided to move further away from the microphone (with respect to the image above, I placed my phone on the left armrest of the black bench in the bottom left corner, and whistled from the position of the camera). Unfortunately, the airy sound still had not been reduced to a satisfactory level. In addition, the microphone was oriented such that I sang from one side of the microphone, producing a panned audio recording. On take 3, I placed the microphone at the position of the camera while I ran to the 3rd step of the stairs and whistled facing away from the microphone. This time, I made sure to have the microphone facing my direction. Though there was still was noticeable airiness in the recording, facing away from the microphone did help reduce much of the noise; the remaining airiness was minimized using filter plugins in Waveform.

Playing with Waveform

As Bob Ross once said, “There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.” Turns out my stereo pan error in my Take 2 recording became an inspiration. After replaying the Take 2 track Waveform along with some ambient sounds I found on freesound.org, the stereo pan created the atmosphere of a very large room mimicking that of a concert hall. Since the Take 2 track still had the airy sound, I decided instead to use the Take 4 track as I had intended, but this time also utilize the stereo pan plugin to pan the sound to the left. Then, I used an automation track so that the whistle would slowly move towards the center through the introduction.

After the high-pitched whistling then came the juxtaposing low frequency bass and kicks. I was able to create a very deep bass by using a combination of the 4OSC plugin to generate the sound, then using a low-pass filter on top of that to only allow the low frequencies to pass. Along with the low-frequency bass, I also was able to use the low-pass filter on a previously unsatisfying kick sample. The low-pass filter was able to remove most of the noise on the kick, resulting in a very clean kick.

After the whistle and the bass, it was time for the orchestra. After learning how to use the filters and automation in class, I was able actually able to modify and clean up many of the percussion samples that I had previously ruled out. In particular: I fell in love with a timpani sound after applying a rapid stereo-pan left-to-right. I decided to use a roll of the timpani as part of the buildup to the orchestral melody. Within this orchestral movement, I used trumpet as the main melody, flute as supporting melody, and trombone as the harmony/ bass. While both brass instruments were panned center, the flute was panned to one side to add more character to both the room and the orchestra: since the flute’s timbre had a texture that contrasted well against the brass timbre, panning the flute to only one side seemed to make the contrast even more appreciable.

Below is the mp3 of my final composition:

Concluding thoughts:

With respect to the original liquid drum composition that I had in mind in the very beginning, the only idea that actually made it into the final track was the ambient background sound. Beyond that, all the other sounds (the whistles, timpanis, trumpets, trombones, and flutes,) were all the products of happy accidents. In particular, the implementation of the panned whistling would not even have happened should I not had made the mistake of not orienting the microphone towards me. As I did not fully master how to utilize the pan, filters, and automation capabilities until near the deadline of the musical composition, I was unable to explore the potential applications of these plugins to the extent which I’d have wished to do. With our next Waveform Project coming up soon, I’ll certainly be using more plugins to enhance my music productions.

Brainstorming/Samples

 

To start out, I spent a few hours searching through the SSLIB for samples. Essentially, I just listened through every single one, while marking in a notebook which samples sounded nice. My favorites were in the R&B realm, with the keys, guitars and beats from that section really catching my eye. Some others, not so much for my taste (basically anything dubstep or deep electronic bass-y house).

 

Then, I went through all the samples I had marked out, and then listened through them again, beginning to make links – which ones I could see going together, which ones had similar chord progressions, which ones complemented each other in terms of timbre or overall vibe, and so on. I eventually narrowed all the samples down to my favorite 10 – two keyboard ones, two guitar samples, two beats, two ambient/atmospheric sounds, one bass track, and one nice synth-y accompaniment. Soon, I began to map out a plan for my song (specifically two possibilities of mood/structure) – including a rough outline of distinct sections and the instrumentation/dynamics of each. I eventually settled on a concept of gradually layering more and more tracks and elements to slowly build up into a climax, and then stripping everything back down again.

 

Recording Sound

 

I didn’t really have anything in mind going into this process. I don’t have access to any instruments, so I just looked around my dorm room and looked for anything that caught my eye, or anything I thought would have an interesting sound. I also have no professional microphones, so I just used my phone and the Voice Record Pro app, using the techniques that I had investigated for Homework 2, and also everything I had learned from Huber and class lectures. I recorded in my room, because where else would I go. Unfortunately, I’m on the first floor on a busy street, and my suite is always full of people coming in and out, but I did my best to make the recordings as clean as possible. 

 

I eventually found five sounds that I thought would be unique and offer a nice variety: dropping Ibuprofen pills on a handheld mirror, opening a plastic water bottle, pouring water from my suitemate’s Brita filter into a metal water bottle, pulling tissues out of my tissue box, and jingling my keys on my keychain. Later, encouraged by my suitemate who said that I had a nice voice in the shower, which I don’t think is true but whatever, I also recorded myself singing a potential vocal accompaniment to the tracks that I had already laid out in Waveform.

 

Here are the original, untouched recordings I made, along with some helpful video reenactments of each.

Bottlecap Video

 

Waveform: Plug-Ins and Automation

 

I first imported my samples and recordings into Waveform, splicing them and matching some of them by tempo and key. There were some difficulties in terms of making them match, so I did have to go back and search for new samples that would fit better. I also went through the great challenge of getting Waveform to play sound from my AirPods (since I have no normal headphones, thanks Apple). Whenever I selected my AirPods as the output source, the sound would come through incredibly muffled and low quality. Eventually, I gave up and stole one of my friend’s headphones.

 

With my samples and recorded sounds imported, it was time to apply plug-ins and automation to bring them together. The six plug-ins I mainly used were: HP/LP (mainly using low pass, though it took a while for me to figure out how to toggle between HP and LP), chorus, reverb, delay, compressor, and phaser. And as for automation, I experimented mostly with volume, pan, and a little bit with reverb. I’m not sure what the best way to go through my process is, but I figured I would outline it by the main building blocks.

Sound Effects

These first show up in the introduction, which consists of three parts: an atmospheric drone sample, the water pouring recording, and the keychain recording.  I layered a reverse version of the drone on the original version, creating a nice symmetrical intro. Then, I layered the slowed-down keychains (with reverb and a low pass filter to clean up the sound), and the water effect with a low pass filter (to make it sound cleaner), phaser, and chorus (both to add more texture to the sound), all to create a nice, sensory build-up to the main track. I used automation to have the volume gradually build up, and for the drone to pan from one ear to another, adding to the symmetrical effect. The keys also come back at several points throughout the sound (although a little sped up and pitched up) to add ~flavor~. The atmospheric drone also was useful at a few other points to create a buildup to ensure a smooth transition.

Beat

For the first part of the song, I assembled a “beat” out of several of my recorded sounds. This was because my sampled beat (which was actually a combination of two different beats) was too aggressive and intrusive for the calmer beginning. So I used my bottlecap sounds as hi-hats, and then combined my tissue and my Ibuprofen pill noises (sped-up significantly) as a ~crunchy~ snare. I added a compressor on each sound to make them more crisp. Rhythm wise, I tried to match the general cadences and hits from the sampled beats. (Side note: there must be an easier way to mass select clips to copy and paste, right? For this makeshift beat, I had to select individual clips over and over to copy and paste, as I wasn’t sure how many more loops I was going to be doing. Let me know please so I don’t have to suffer in the future.)

For the second, more “climax” part of the song, I layered my two sample beats on top of my makeshift beat from the first part. Since I had matched the cadences earlier, the three fit together very well. I slowly increased reverb with automation in the latter part of the climax, just to ramp up the energy a little more and to open up the track.

 

Lead/Main Accompaniment

The constant undercurrent throughout the entire track is a vibey keyboard loop. It sets the tone for everything else, including the lead guitar loop, which I had to pitch shift down and slow down to match the keyboard tempo. The guitar loop did NOT match the overall vibe at first, because even though I like the melody, and it fit with the chord progression, it was very dry and bland. To fix this, I applied reverb and chorus to add more texture to the melody, and a low-pass filter to distinguish it as the lead from the accompaniment. And under it all, I put in a simple bass loop that fit well with the lead.

 

Miscellaneous Accompaniment

Besides the recorded sound effects sprinkled throughout, I also needed to beef up the accompaniment in the climax, to add more dimension to the backing track. To do so, I added a nice synth-y/keyboard loop that fit well but didn’t overpower the other tracks. I wanted to add a synth pad to add to the atmosphere, but couldn’t find one that fit with the chord progression and overall vibe. This was also the perfect place to insert my simple vocal accompaniment that I had recorded. I created five layers, with one in the original pitch, and four an octave up (I tried to create harmonies with thirds and fifths, but my intervals were off and I didn’t have time to re-record), and applied the chorus, delay, reverb, and HP/LP filters to create a sound that still was human, but rather ethereal and distant. I loved the vocals so much that when I stripped the climax down, removing the beats, then the bass, then the keys, I left only the guitar lick and the vocals, which I think provided a powerful contrast to everything that had come before.

Final Product

 

Overall, I’m really happy with the way that it turned out! If I had more time, I would’ve worked on mixing a little more, just tweaking it to make sure everything is at a good balance volume-wise. I would’ve also worked on expanding upon the climax to do something more radical with the outro. But all in all, given that this was my first try at creating music with a DAW of any kind, I’m pretty satisfied, and can’t wait to hear everyone else’s work as well!

 

Here is my final track, which I’ve named “Iridescence,” because I think it’s a cool word:

Getting Started

With essentially zero songwriting and digital music production experience, I was a bit daunted by this project at first. I didn’t really know where to start. So, to get a feel for things, I started by looking through some of the demo projects that came with Waveform 11. Clicking around an established mix proved a very useful way to orient myself to the program. I acquainted myself with the interface, learned about some of the more common plugins, and got to see automation in action. With a much more tangible goal in sight, I set out to start on my own production.

Looking for Loops

Without much of predetermined artistic vision (nor the practiced means to realize one I might have had), I started by searching through SSLIB for tracks to base my song off of. This proved to be incredibly difficult. I spent hours systematically searching through directories and jotting down notes as I listened through every different kind of sample I could imagine. Whenever I came across a sound I found cool, I’d copy it to my machine. This ended me up with a laughably eclectic collection ranging from spooky halloween EDM to to non-rhythmic robotic beeps and boops to chill lo-fi piano. Regardless, I’d managed to pare down to a much more manageable selection.

Putting it together

I found basing a song entirely off samples to be a significant artistic challenge. While I could imagine a lot of directions I would have liked to take each specific sample in a vacuum, I often felt as though the difficulty of finding a group of tracks that coordinated with one another prohibited me from taking the song in the direction I wanted to. I could hear the drum tracks, baselines, and melody accents I wanted to appear, but neither could I ever find any sample remotely close to what I wanted to search for, nor did I feel like I had the ability to synthesize my ideas using the software. (I tried using MIDI. It didn’t go incredibly well.) This was really frustrating. After a few hours of dragging random samples into an empty project to little avail, I put my computer down and decided to come back the next day.

With a fresh look at the project, I quickly came across my first breakthrough. With an energetic low-synth/bass lead, vibey drums, and some cool reverb-y accents, I had my first groove going that seemed to click. I even managed to find the track setting to pitch up every other two octaves, resulting in a simple (yet much more interesting) I-IV-I chord progression. Success! Well, not really yet. But it was a good start at least.

Recording

With some material to start with, I decided it was time to hit the recording studio. Equipped with some of my generous friend’s gear (Most importantly, a Blue Yeti Blackout microphone), we put together quite the satisfying setup:

I found the process of recording to be quite fun: with the Yeti on the lowest possible gain and set to cardioid (the Yeti has three condenser mics for multi-direcitonal selection), I’d record into ocenaudio, splice the sections I’d want to keep, and then normalize the amplitudes. Often I’d drape my duvet over my head and the mic to capture quieter sounds without any noise, but in almost all situations the Yeti produced pristine recordings with little interference.

With several friends eager to be featured in the song, I got together a few people to record some sounds for the track. Now, let’s play a game. What happens when you put four teenage boys in front of a microphone and tell them to make whatever sounds they want? Here’s the answer:

While this wasn’t exactly what I had been looking for, I held true to my word and made sure that the boys would be included in the final cut. Oh look, there goes my dignity.

Filters, mixing, and edits

After a bit more track aggregation, I was ready to start tuning the sounds I had mashed together into something a bit more artful. I lowpassed a bassline so that it would sit under the rest of the tracks. I put a narrow bandpass over a bothersome snare to make it a bit tighter. I added reverb to the leads in the chorus to make them more full. At one point, I came across a chorus plugin, and doubled one of the voice tracks I had recorded at a higher pitch. Certainly my favorite additions, however, were those that involved automation. In an early buildup, I decided to sweep open a lowpass filter to slowly introduce more and more of a drum track. At the same time, I decreased the bandwidth of a bandpass filter on the leads to let the drums pop, until reopening it, adding reverb, and removing compression after a sort of drop. These sorts of experiments proved to be a lot of fun, and certainly added a lot to the overall quality of the song.

Throughout this process, I ran into a lot that didn’t work, of course. At one point, I tried to split the bassline and melody of a single track with filters, then splice it in different ways to get some chord variation. While I managed to split the instruments, I couldn’t figure out how to get the hard breakpoints I had created to flow with the legato nature of the sample. Moments like these, though, were those that taught me most about the software. It’s certainly cliché to say, but I learned a lot from my failures.

Conclusions

In the end, I found this project to be a quite challenging, but very fun introduction to Waveform. To be frank, the results I ended up with are far from something I’d enjoy listening to. To offer some self criticism, there are certainly two ideas going on that (despite my best efforts) don’t mesh incredibly well. That being said, I feel like the spark is now there: I’m inspired to create new music, and I’m having a good time learning to do it. With a little more instruction (especially on MIDI), and a lot more experimentation, I’m excited to see where I’ll be able to take my artistic visions. For now, I can be proud of where I’ve started, and look forward to doing better on the next project.

The Track:

 

Although there isn’t a particular “style” or “genre” of music with which I identify, there are definitely similarities between all of my compositions. To that extent, whether consciously or unconsciously, I had a general idea of what I wanted the track to involve: some kind of fusion of acoustic and digital sounds, swung drum beats, murky atmospheres, heavy bass, and distortion. From there, I began the crate-digging process:

The Samples:

At the outset of this project, I spent an hour or so scrolling through different sound libraries. I really enjoy foley and atmospheric samples, so I downloaded a bunch from the SSLIB. I took a variety of samples from the “Household,” pack, the Adobe “foley” and “ambiance” packs, as well as from the “Liquid” pack. For this project, I wrote all the melodic samples in midi —  one melody, one chord progression, and one sub-bass line — and rendered them to audio. I wrote these three samples together at 110 bpm, so I could use them together with ease, though I ended up chopping the individual samples anyway. On top of various percussion samples that I imported, I threw in some snaps, which I recorded in my dorm room. I tried semi-treating my room by hanging my blankets on the walls; the recordings turned out better than I thought they would! For the snaps, I used a lossless recording app on my phone and sent it to my computer. Since it was a wav. file, I could just drag it into my project without any issues.

The Composition:

I started working on this track by programming the two drum grooves. I knew I wanted the first to be swung and have a “pulling” effect, while the second would be a more basic drum pattern. To produce the actual loops, I took the individual kick, clap, snap, and hi-hat samples and placed them in their respective tracks. The claps were fairly easy to do (2 and 4), but getting the kicks right was a bit more laborious. The process involved me looping eight bars, first adding in the claps, and then adjusting each kick as needed.

The first groove (seen below) didn’t have too much processing. I compressed all the drum samples gently to make the beat a bit tighter and slapped widener on the snaps/claps (just because I like the way it sounds.)  I found a jazz drum break sample in one of my sample libraries and put on an apple high-pass filter to get rid of the lower kick frequencies, which were conflicting with the kicks that I already programmed. I left some of the higher kick frequencies in because they added to the rhythm without conflicting with other frequencies (they sound similar to a tom). 

 

The second groove is much simpler (seen below). Again, I put a clap on 2 and 4 and programmed in kicks to complement the sub-bass. (Usually, I put a kick on each sub-bass hit, except for passing sub-bass notes.) In the second groove, I added hi-hats, which I didn’t include previously. I have a love-hate relationship with hi-hats, which originates from the fact that it’s very hard for me to make them sound convincing. In this part of the track, I also reversed some open hats, hard-panned them, and added reverb to play off of the synth lead.

In terms of the melodic elements, I didn’t alter my sub-bass, piano, or bell samples too much, other than chopping them here and there. I learned this trick by listening to other artists –there’s something about actually chopping up the rendered audio, rather than just repeating the notes in midi, which I like. (See Below)

For the bass in the first half and outro of the track, I took a sample of a bass guitar playing a low C and arranged and pitched shifted the sample to make an artificial bass line. Although I used a lot of audio effects on the melodic aspects of the project, 90% of them were EQ, and compressors (I tried side-chaining). That being said, I did end up experimenting with some really cool waveform plug-ins, such as “Melt”, a modulation effect that seems to have made my piano riff a lot muddier (in a good way), as well as “Bit Glitter,” which I discuss later on. 

I also did A LOT of automation. Most of the automation was volume control (fading clips in and out), panning, or reverb wetness levels. During the post-drop section, however, I created an artificial tremolo by automating the volume on the piano. In addition, I automated a bit-crusher in the outro (which I discuss later). 

Mixing Atmospheric Samples with Rhythmic Elements

I spent a lot of time messing around with atmospheric samples in this track — from what I can tell, when used tastefully, they can make any track a lot more interesting. In the first groove, for example, I added a random SSLIB recording of someone starting and driving a car to provide some background noise. I found that the percussive elements of the atmospheric sample complemented the rhythm of the track by adding unordinary ghost hits and mid-frequency warmth. I was actually quite happy with my background noise samples being a bit rhythmically out of sync with the beat at times, as they made my track sound more “real,” and less like a DAW project. I didn’t just use atmospheric samples for background noise. For the first time, I experimented with using foley/atmospheric samples in the build-up and drop, instead of using classic risers and impacts. For example, instead of using a crash cymbal on the drop, I used a combination of a scream sample, which I previously owned, and water droplet and door-shutting samples from the SSLIB. I really like the way it turned out, and I think I’m going to continue doing this going forward. 

Messy In A Good Way

In pursuit of developing a new sound, I tried to experiment with “imperfection” in various ways throughout the track. For me, the drum groove is the focal point of the first half of the project, but when I initially programmed in my drum rhythm, the gridded perfection of the beat felt a bit boring and didn’t capture the “loose” groove, which I was attempting to accomplish. One way I remedied this was by moving the claps forward, off-grid. It was interesting to see how I could artificially mimic the slight imperfections of a drummer, as well as to see how purposefully moving bits of the drum beats a bit off-grid animated the track.

Grimy Tones:

It turns out that I LOVE bit-crushing. If you love distortion and haven’t checked out the waveform plug-in “Bit Glitter,” I strongly encourage you to do so. I used the plug-in a couple of times — notably, on my melody during the drop, and once on my piano riff during the outro. In the first case, I wanted to add something to the melody to make it a bit more interesting and messy (for lack of a better term). Although I don’t fully understand what the “glitter” parameter of the plug-in specifically does, applying the effect made my lead fuzzy and obnoxious. The second case was similar in that I wanted to make the outro more interesting. This time, however, I tried something new. I discovered that upon adding Bitcrusher to the piano sample, a new tone or harmonic element was introduced. I experimented with automating the Bitcrusher to create a sub-melody out of the resulting tone. 

It was really fun learning to navigate Waveform, and I look forward to the next project!

Day 1: 

I began my Waveform journey on September 20th. I tried to find as much in common with Logic Pro X as I could, since I’m very familiar with that software. I tried to use Logic keyboard shortcuts many times through this

process. My first instinct was to look for software instruments and create a MIDI track, but I failed to do so – which was probably for the better. I dug up some old samples I downloaded a few years ago, and in my project I mostly used these.

Day 2:  

On September 23rd I put audio files into my project. I started with a synth lead loop that I really liked, and I added drum one-shots until I had a beat. Unfortunately (and this is something that happens a lot for me when I’m making music), I had a realization that the synth lead loop I was using sounded similar to another song (Good Thing by Zedd and Kehlani). I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I tried to shift the song in a different direction, but no matter how hard I tried I just thought of Good Thing. This sample is below. This was extremely limiting in my ability to think of other creative lines so I scrapped the synth loop and swapped it for a slightly slower (92 bpm) plucked guitar loop. I adjusted the drum beat I had slightly and made the kick hit on all four beats (I think this is called four on the floor) to keep the song sounding uptempo.

 

Day 3: 

First, I tightened the beat by putting EQ on each of the drum tracks which made it sound less messy overall. I thought that using only a clap as a snare sounded empty, so I backed it up with a snare drum as well. I put reverb on the clap to designate it as the wet part of the sound, and kept the snare drum dry so I had both wet and dry at once. 

I added a crackle pad for my ambient sound and turned the volume way down. In the past I have gone a little crazy with ambient sounds in the background as a crutch, because the other tracks don’t sound like they fit together. Chirping birds is a personal favorite of mine, but in this song I went with the crackle to give it a lo-fi feel.

Then began my battle with automation. I attempted to automate the volume of the crackle to cut out on the fourth beat every two measures right before the synth hit to give it emphasis. First I tried it intuitively but it wasn’t working, so I watched many videos. I was puzzled to see people doing the exact steps I was doing, but their automation was working and mine was not. In the end, it turns out I was doing everything correctly, but my automation was turned off. I must give credit to John Brockett for this idea. Eventually I found the green button, turned on automation, and breathed a sigh of relief.

Day 4:

It was time to add vocals, which meant it was also time to decide what I wanted this song to be about. The slightly detuned synth hit was reminiscent of Glass Animals’ Dreamland album, which reminded me of a trip my friend and I went on to Vermont, when we listened to Dreamland nonstop. The acoustic guitar also brought me feelings of nature, so I wrote some lyrics about the Vermont trip and the sights we saw. The lyrics are mostly a list of the best things from the trip. We were at a woodworking school – Cassidy was a friend we made, and Swami G was a dog who lived in the school.

I recorded a few times in the bathroom since I knew I wanted the vocals to have more echo than the rest of the tracks. Unfortunately, recording far from my phone’s microphone made the recording quiet, and I had to bring down all the other tracks substantially – at least 12 dB. I decided instead to record very close to the microphone, and add reverb digitally to create the echo I wanted. I moved to the practice room in the basement of Pierson and this recording was successful. I doubled the vocal track and offset one track slightly, and pitched it up ten cents to make the sound fuller. I also designated one track as wet and the other as dry. I put chorus and reverb on the wet track and an EQ on the other track. 

In Logic, I’m used to using pitch correct on individual notes and formant shifter to get my voice to sound better. This recording was not fun to listen to at first because there are no vocal enhancements on it at all, however I am desensitized to it at this point and now I am okay with it. In retrospect, I buried the vocals in a little more reverb, and made them quieter than they should have been, so I didn’t have to listen to the raw vocals.

To enhance the trance feeling of the song, I used automation to give the plucked guitar loop a wobble, by automating the pan in small oscillations from left to right. 

Overall takeaways from the project:

• Getting the recorded audio to sound like it fit with all the samples was difficult. I eventually got there with some effects but without them, the vocals sound much closer than the rest of the tracks. This may be because the other tracks are already echoey. I would love to use a microphone that does not require close miking to get a decently loud recording – this would allow me to hear the character of the room in the recording.
• This project was a discovery of many different plugins. I learned that a little bit of reverb goes a long way, and like Michael, I learned that pitch shift is very helpful for combining samples originally in different keys.
• Waveform does not have software instruments! Unless I’m not looking in the right place. This was a tool I utilized a lot when working in Logic, so this was a new experience for me.

Here’s the final track! It is called Cassidy.

It’s always interesting for me to reflect on my creative process and discover that my subconscious was working on something for weeks before deciding to fully reveal it. Let me start with an example! Now I know that the music I was making was inspired by fall all along, but I didn’t actually realize it until the very end, when I was searching for some ambient sounds (to fill the requirement). Almost automatically, I searched up water and leaf sounds. I quickly realized that I could bookend my off-center 17/16 groove with some leaf crunches and peaceful water whooshes. It just felt so right. 

So at the start, I played the water sound and the clip of someone walking on leaves at the same time. I panned the water to the right and automated the walking pan from left to right so that it sounded like you were walking towards the water (and automated the water volume to increase as you approached):

Spoiler alert: at the end of the piece, the opposite happens, so it’s like you’re walking away from the brook. (Although I think the water sorta overpowers the footsteps, in the future I would want to at least reduce the gain.)

I really liked the effect of introducing the groove modestly, with just the piano in the treble, as if it was emerging out of the leaf and water sounds. To enhance the “emerging” effect, I turned a nice chord from a somewhat out-of-tune Steinway upright (more on that later) into a reverby ambience that rises out from the rocks. I reversed the clip of the chord (removing the harsh attack at the beginning and creating a cool crescendo) and then automated a pitch shift from -12 semitones to original pitch. This ambient sound takes center stage at the same time as some aggressively reverbed piano arppegios.

I used different reverb plugins (just ones I had lying around) on two different recordings of the piano arpeggio (one with the mute pedal, one without). I played with the plugins, just twiddling until I liked it. I enjoyed the TSAR plugin’s dark effect. I ended up combining the two differently treated clips because it gave a prominent/full/surreal vibe that really stuck out later at the end of each groove cycle (4 repetitions of a 17/16 pattern… yes, I’m getting to that!).

Lighter use of TSAR reverb:

Gooey use of AUReverb:

I kept the water sound going in the background as a sort of sweep that crescendoed into the end of each groove cycle:

So you’re probably wondering about my groove. Yes, it’s in 17/16. I suppose I could have called it 17/8 (friendlier?) but what I really had in mind was that the clave sums to a 4/4 bar plus a single sixteenth beat. As for the actual grouping, it was 4+4+4+5 (sixteenths), which feels like shortish + shortish + shortish + a bit longer. On the 5-beat part, you get the effect of sort of rolling into the next cycle, which is why I emphasized this with the water sweep, as well as sustained notes in the piano and later, rhythmic intensity in the bass and drums.

Here’s the groove with just piano (try counting along):

And yes, this was just with acoustic piano. I got a reservation to a practice room in the Pauli Murray basement just in time, and I had an idea for a groove in 17/16 I wanted to try. To my initial chagrin, the piano was pretty badly out of tune, but I think it ended up adding character to something that was supposed to be wonky all along.

This is where I experimented most with mic placement. I had my dynamic cardioid Shure SM58 on a mic stand. It’s directional as heck, so you betcha I pointed that thing straight at the sound source.

You can also see my Scarlett Focusrite (NOT sponsored by Scott Petersen) on the nice carpet. Speaking of carpet, the soundproofing in here was pretty good (I think the panels on the wall are semi-soundproof). The best sound quality was pointing the mic as close to the source as possible, although there was a rattling on the right side of the piano so I only recorded from the left side. This meant that less of the rattly sound reached the mic, while minimal room noise was mixed in, either (because the room sound was very flat). I liked the flatness for this particular groove because I was going for something almost mechanical and as clear as possible.

As a cheap dynamic mic, the SM58 was great at capturing my mostly mid-range groove sounds. You’ll notice though that there’s a bassline in the clip above. That’s just EQ’ed piano. I know, right?? I EQ’ed the heck out of the piano, trying to compensate for the abysmal bass frequency response by increasing the gain near 100hZ for the bass. I also sorta aggressively minimized everything else. In the future, having learned about frequency filters in class, I would simply use a bandpass filter to isolate the bass area (much simpler)! I was so pleasantly surprised with how bassy the EQ made the piano sound. I think it’s largely because removing the high frequencies removes the very timbrally-characteristic piano attack sound.

I also used compression on the bass (I didn’t know what the parameters meant so I was going by ear) and sidechained it to the drums to create space for the kick (although I personally could only hear a subtle improvement).

Oh yeah, the drums. So I had this idea for a drum beat where I would take the most agonizingly typical 4/4 loop (the Sanfillippo 140 bpm pattern) and then add an extra 16th-note kick at the end to make it 17 sixteenths. (On the fourth cycle of 17/16, I added an extra cymbal hit to make it 17). I did this by rendering the loop and then splicing and reshuffling.

Transitioning into the beat was even more fun. In this section, see if you can hear how the water sweep crescendoes and then falls out for a split second, leaving space for the drums to bombard. Also, you can hear how the piano fill halts and lingers when the drums come in (I just time-stretched the chord it was playing).

After a two cycles of the full 17/16 groove with all the instruments, I wanted to spice it up by modulating randomly/wonkily. I put all the harmonic instruments into a folder (selected the tracks -> “Create folder track containing…”), and then put a pitch shift automation on the folder. That was fun. At the same time, I experimented with dropping out the drums at carefully placed moments, to make the listener’s ears perk up and be a bit less surprised by the crazy pitch changes.

My favorite moment was when I tried dropping out the groove completely, just as there was a big build/pitch-shift/crescendo upwards! It resolves into the leaf crunches and water, as discussed earlier. I also held a piano chord over this, using the same technique of reversing it and drenching it in reverb (biggest room size!):

But this wasn’t enough. I had been building up to something inexorably with that aggressive 17/16 groove, and now I was taking the big risk of halting suddenly and going somewhere different (more internal/peaceful/introspective?). I thought, the human voice is very powerful. Like, a nice vocal harmony was probably powerful enough to match the groove. I choose a fat D chord with a bunch of tensions, including the 5, #5, 6 and 9. Including both the 5 and 6 spaced out, IMO, makes it hard to tell if it’s a (hopeful) D major chord or a (darker) B minor first-inversion, so I guess it’s in the middle??

I used my Shure SM58 (singing directly into it to give it a really close sound) and accidentally had my fan on behind me (but I ended up keeping it because it gave my voice the perfect airy quality). Autumn breeze?

I hope you enjoyed my self-analysis here. I’m so excited to check out the other projects! Here is the full mp3:

The Hike

The track:

Introductory musings:

I have always been an incessant table percussionist, much to the annoyance of family, friends and exam proctors alike – this is how I decided that my composition’s foundation would lie in a hand-drummed groove that I would record in a stairwell, using my phone’s mic in close proximity. In the intro, this sits on an ethereal four-measure pad sample (played around to attain this sound by adding reverb, more on this later), also to which I added a pitch shift to create a semblance of a chord progression. This is all complemented by an ambient vinyl scratch to contribute to the intro’s texture.

Granted, it’s a peculiar combination that I began with – it took a bit of experimentation to get there. I wanted to build into the piece; this meant beginning with a understated texture, effectively the bare bones of the project. Firstly, I wanted to introduce the chord progression. However, the sample is rather airy to begin with, so it was about striking a delicate balance between complementing the rest of the timbres as well as being full and ethereal enough to indicate the chord progression effectively enough.

Too much reverb/delay seemed to  make it tonally ambiguous and messy; too little made the intro seem too empty. This is why I chose to add reverb with <20% wetness, but also make it sit atop an ambient vinyl sample to “fill up the space”. I simultaneously wanted to retain the airiness of the stairwell space in which I recorded my percussion groove, so simply applied distortion to the percussion line, as well as a reverb-laden snap on the 2 and 4 to marry the natural and electronic sounds. “Quantizing” my recorded sample was a tedious process. Using the timewarp function, I used each transient marker to align the audio with the 120BPM tempo; whilst my recording was generally accurate, I wanted the 3-stroke rolls to be as uniform as possible.

Moreover, in the spirit of “building into the piece”, I applied low-pass automation curves to both the pad and the drums, gradually increasing the frequency threshold to introduce both sounds. I originally thought to simply automate volume (i.e muted to begin with), but found that using the lowpass filter added the necessary complexity to the buildup that volume automation lacked.

Moving into bar 5, our next new element is introduced – Professor Petersen’s voice. I wanted to include a spoken word element to the piece; I tried, to no avail, to use the transient markers in the audio clip to time-warp and have Prof Petersen effectively “rapping”, but found that this added unnatural pauses and stretches in the sample, without retaining the quality of the voice itself. I, however, piggybacked off this result to completely “destroy” the voice altogether. After experimenting with filtering, compression, phasing and bandpassing, I settled on distorting, pitch shifting and reverbing the voice track, giving the impression of a phone line breaking up (the irony of distorting an excerpt from a lecture about audio is not lost on me). Voice was an interesting element to manipulate – splitting and repeating particular parts and pitch shifting individual words allowed me to use it as an instrument, effectively. I also used volume automation to bring life to the more “glitchy” repetitions of particular syllables or tones.

As the voice sample progressed, I wanted to add to the texture to segue into the “hook”/drop more cleanly. This entailed changing the effects on both the percussion and pad (removing the filters from the percussion and adding further reverb to the pad), as well as adding a bassline (I cheated and used MIDI, as I had created a chord progression – a stock sample to underscore the pad that I had already ‘messed with’ would have been very difficult to find). I experimented with different waves, and found that both square and triangular waves were a bit too sharp and aggressive – I didn’t want the bassline to serve a function beyond filling up the lower frequencies and sitting underneath the melody and chord progression, and thus settled on a sine wave. To avoid the bass clashing with the percussion and the drums/lower frequency sounds I would later introduce, I added a low pass filter.

As far as the rhythm of the bassline goes, I experimented with more stabby, uniform rhythms and found that they did not integrate well with what was already a busy combination of sounds. This is how I settled on more of a drone on the root notes of both chords (Dm7, Cm7).

The Hook/Chorus

Moving out of the voice sample, we see more of a conventional “build-up” into the chorus/hook of the piece. I was pretty decided on adding a sweep over 4 measures, and added a bitcrusher to it to sit better on the percussion. This complemented the saxophone sample I added (a snippet from a longer sample from Splice.com) and pitch shifted to suit the original key and chord progression of the piece, which was also bitcrushed. I wanted it to identify the pre-chorus and occupy a lot of space: adding reverb and delay with a large room size made this happen. However given the reed timbre, it was very easy to reach a plugin overkill with the saxophone; having originally phased and compressed the sax as well, I had to strip it down to just reverb and distortion.

With the “beat” temporarily cutting out, I felt that bar 17 was a good time to move into something of a hook. The word that came to mind for me was “big”. I wanted the texture to feel fuller, I wanted the section as a whole to feel less ethereal and more punchy, and occupy more space.

First up, achieving punchy drums: I sifted through the bass drum samples in the SSLIB library, and in the process realize that I didn’t want a tuned 808 bass drum as I’d already effectively created a sub bass. However, each of the more abbreviated, compact sounding kicks didn’t seem to “hit”, or fill up the low frequencies like I wanted them too. This is where I decided to layer a low pass filtered 808 kick with a high pass filtered, reverbed natural kick, giving the impression of an organic kick sound whilst filling up the space. This was definitely an arduous process, as multi-tracking a kick can create serious clashes. They initially did not sit atop the sub bass cleanly at all, and I had to fiddle with volume settings to have them sit underneath the mix effectively.

I kept the 808 theme by taking a snare and hat one-shot from the Apple sample library and creating a standard 4/4 drum pattern with little flourishes on the hats. I wanted to make the snare heavy, dominating the 2 and 4 of each measure. Adding reverb and layering it atop the reverb-heavy snap allowed this to happen. However, when looping that drum pattern, I found that the hats were dominating the high frequencies a bit too much; I foresaw that this would likely clash with the lead, so added a bandpass filter to keep the hi-hats in the pocket I wanted it to remain in.

Similarly I wanted the synths on the hook to be considerably larger. To retain the same chord progression, I decided to reverse the original pad sample – this was a lucky break, as the pulse of the original sample seemed to come out a lot more; this created a clear 4/4 sense to the synth pad, essentially allowing it to double as a surrogate lead. I removed the filters from the original sample and added reverb, making it easier for the chords to fill out our mid-frequencies.

Arguably my favorite part of the hook (and certainly the most tedious), is the pitch-shifted church organ sample, to which I added delay, a phaser and a multiband compressor. This altered the sound enough to make it a synth lead, not really discernible from its original organ form. I was looking for something that would add melodic complexity to the project, and it was a much better alternative to the repetitive, percussive synth leads that I was finding in other sample libraries.

Post-chorus

This dovetails back out into something of a bridge with the distorted sweep. I wanted a sense of structure similar to conventional electronic music – this meant interpolating the intro/buildup as a post-chorus or bridge. Here we see the return of my recorded sample in its bitcrushed and low-passed form. This is, of course, only an eight-bar section. The sweep in the latter half brings us towards the second chorus. From here on out, my thinking is fairly self-explanatory.

Second hook 

The second iteration of my hook is largely derivative of the first. It’s largely an interpolation or a direct copy-paste of the majority of the elements used in the first hook. The notable differences, however, lie in the little rhythmic irregularities at the beginning of both 4-bar phrases. I patterned the bass drums as a little syncopation, to break away from the relative monotony of hearing the same thing twice. I wanted to play around with changing the melody, but found this counterintuitive as the lead melody had already sort of established itself as a motif in the first hook. Also worth mentioning is a one-shot blip that I pitch shifted according to the fifth of both root notes and repeated to serve as a percussive device and keep the beat moving. Lastly, I retained the reversed pad sample and organ leads, moving into the outro with the textbook sweep.

Outro

I wanted to do something slightly different with the outro, as opposed to a standard repetition of the intro. As such, after playing around with various automations and new plug-ins, I opted to pitch shift most bare elements of the intro down an octave, simultaneously ramping up the low pass filtering to allow the track to essentially fizzle out, using the automation curves on both the percussion samples and synth pad. This occurs gradually over eight bars atop the vinyl crackle. For me, this was the bookend that I wanted to end the track with.

—

 

The room I used to create music: 

The room I used to create this music was my dorm room in Ezra Stiles College. The single is a little spacious, and my suite is rather quiet because my suitemates are usually out and about doing their own thing. However, whenever I record at night, I make sure that hopefully my audio doesn’t travel into the hallway space. 

Project Write-Up:

When starting my project last week, I took the first couple of days after downloading Waveform DAW on Monday to binge-watch the Youtube series that showed us what to do and how to begin in Waveform.

I would say my favorite effect that came most in handy was actually the first effect I discovered. This was the slow down or speed up fade curve that you can create instead of using automation. Of course, automation is helpful for buildups in the middle, but most of my tracks faded out or caused a slowing down drop at the end that I was able to achieve really well using that feature.

I also messed around a lot with the “Wet” and “Dry” mix of various plug-ins, ultimately using almost all of them: Reverb, Chorus, Delay, Pitch-Shift, HP/LP, Compressor, Phaser, and Volume/Pan. Below I will write down an annotated version of my Log, so that I can describe my process of approaching this track and how I used and tested different plug-ins to find out the best vibe to create with my track.

In the beginning of the week, starting Monday, I downloaded Waveform and went through the Media Library tutorial on how to set up the DAW. I went through all the videos in this YouTube video series that Waveform created: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaNjetabjrNoWj0ZCETvPEzAnrRQF6OmE.I then throughout the week binge-watched various Waveform tutorial videos and looked at the tutorial on how to insert and use Imagina Drum Loops. I downloaded them from the Tracktion Download Manager. I downloaded the same kind used in the tutorials, by the drummer Alex Filippino. 

Then, after learning how to use and access SSLIB, I looked through some of the samples there (I only ended up using one for a background ambience effect).

Recordings:

On Thursday, I was struck by the creative force that shaped and transformed my track. I knew that i wanted to create something synth and drum heavy, as I’ve never really experimented with that kind of music before, but inspiration to record and “capture the essence” of my location struck when I was at a Black Lives Matter protest in the New Haven Green on Thursday. We were heading towards the end of the protest, and I felt more fired up and energetic than I had in a long time – this caused me to think about how to place my iPhone so that it was about 4-5 inches from me and my friends’ mouths and could also capture the crowd chanting all around us through ambience miking. I recorded a little snippet of the sounds I heard, as I was then being directed by an organizer to walk somewhere. You can hear the words they say like “Can you all hear me” in the distortions that I applied to the tracks. This was one of the only recordings I was planning to include in my track, until I decided to showcase some of my beatboxing (I used to be a beatboxer in my a cappella group in high school) by later close miking my own beatboxing into my iPhone microphone from 2-3 inches away. The picture of distortion and slowing down/fading out from the beginning is what I applied to this audio. This sample formed the main part of the climax of the track I used plugins and automation to center around. I also watched a video that tried to teach about a new Waveform feature called the Drum sampler, but when I tried it it was very advanced and hard to control. The drum samples seemed better for the amount of time I had to complete the project, but I would love to experiment with the drum sampler next now that I have more experience with Waveform.

Samples, and how I used plug-ins and automation to edit them:

I searched through the sample loops provided in Waveform and came across a bass sample called “Epoch Sub Bass” which I immediately incorporated into the portion of the recording that I wanted to amp up. I used my newfound knowledge of the L button for loop to loop it once more, and I then messed around with the Reverb plug-in to add some damping because some frequencies were sounding a little bit crunchy while increasing the room size so you could truly feel that reverb and feel the people chanting around you. I tried a few other plugins like Phaser, which I felt as though didn’t really change anything, and I also tried directly changing the volume using a plug-in – I felt reverb gave more of the desired effect. Next, I used a compressor plug-in on the second Epoch Bass loop that allowed for the first round of bass to be extra loud and reverbery and for the next loop to tamp that back.

After looking for hours through the SSLIB, I found an ambient outdoor storm sound I thought would nicely supplement the resolution of the protest sample, kind of like a storm brewing. I found a nice 100 BPM drum track that could go with the storm sample from the loops in Waveform called “Ghostly Beat.” I used automation on that so that the big cymbal crashes were enunciated in comparison to the drum kicks. Then I found a “Deep Dream Synth” from the Waveform DAW that really went well with my idea of trying to calm down the storm and end this track of turbulent revolution with something in the middle and more calm. The Delay plug-in created a cool full effect of echoing and just a fuller sound. I also added that to the “Silky Smooth Synth” I found that was found to fade out and close the song. I then worked on trying to enunciate the beginning drums from the Alex Filippino Imagina Drum loops, and found to use the Volume/Pan plugin to do a cool effect with the Pan. I made the main top layer drum beat increase in volume and pan to the right, while most other kick snares panned to the left. I liked the disconcerting effect this produced. It took some time formatting all six or so drum loop tracks and trying to add a plugin to each one.

I found a sample on accident in the Waveform DAW after 15 minutes of searching called “Euphoria Pad.” This was perfect for my track. I was able to automate this and blend it with the Silky Smooth Synth to create the fade out, ethereal theme I wanted for the end. I used automation to create a sort of hemisphere curvature, where there is a buildup and then release and fade out (I also faded using the slow down mechanism). I then also went back to my main BLM recording and decided I wanted to somehow make the ending slowdown fade out deeper (there’s a lot of build ups and releases in this track) and so I tried the pitch-correct plugin after unsuccessfully trying the Phaser and the Reverb. The pitch-corrector made me need to split up the ending of the recording from the beginning and somehow merge the tracks so there wasn’t an awkward gap in the recording. I also added the Phaser to the Euphoria Pad, and the Chorus plug-in to the Storm recording, mostly to increase the “room space” so that it was like you were actually in a storm. The Euphoria Pad automation was my favorite because it was a perfect hemispherical curve.

For the beatboxing recording, I imported it and found that I needed to use a low-pass filter to try to take away from weird high frequencies that come at the end of smacking my lips together during beatboxing. That really solved the problem. Next, I added a bit of automation to make it fade out the right way but also build up in sound during the climax/resolution.

Plugins that I didn’t really like or didn’t seem to do anything:

I worked on trying out the 4-equalizer plug-in – I didn’t quite understand what it was or how it worked, especially in deciding how it changed my audio, so I abandoned that plugin. I didn’t love the synths I found in SSLIB, at least for the very hard-hitting/activist vibe of this track – maybe the 4 second sounds or more chill vibes would suit another track. I really appreciated the sounds that were in the Waveform DAW. I also was a little bit confused about how the Phaser really affected my audio or the Chorus. They didn’t really add much.

I’d say my favorite plug-in was Reverb, and I really like tweaking the “Room size” parameter because it creates a more 8D, full effect. I think that was important for this track, which required you to try to place yourself in a situation/location, like the protest or the storm.

Here’s the final MP3. Thank you so much, I learned a lot!