For my final project I cut up the song Suo Gan, which is a Welsh lullaby used in the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun (where Christian Bale sings it in a boys choir as a 10 year old - his 1st big movie, it's so legit - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNonF2n4qdE). One of the biggest problems I had was making the tempo consistent to use with certain underlying beats. The singer kind of drags and so it was hard to make it sound constant. I changed the tempo by first bringing the clip into recycle and labeling the bars so it gave me the original tempo. I then brought it into waveeditor and changed the tempo to various tempos that I used throughout the song. The first other clip I used was the intro of No Sex for Ben, by the Rapture.

I used a lot of different effects on Suo Gan in Metasynth. The program was one of my favorites because it was so simple and effective. But every time I did an effect and exported the file, the program would quit immediately. So, I had to do every single clip separately and it was a little frustrating. I think that, overall, Logic was the best program we used. It has such a simple layout and is a really powerful program for putting different elements together. My final project turned out a little psychotic - the different parts of it are only tied together by the Suo Gan sample and it is not in any one sample. But I had a good time doing it and just being able to use different sequences and effects.

I've listened to a few other final projects on people's blogs and I have been really impressed every time.

Variations on Suo Gan (Final Project)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/527386145d3b2499/

Could only make a direct link because boomp3 is down... will write about the song later.

Zach Klion's Trip-Hop Assignment

I think this project really exemplified the trip-hop style. The drums were pretty mellow and minimal, so when the vocal samples came in they were definitely the focus. I think the "we all go a little mad sometimes," was a good choice to portray the trippiness, terror and general dark vibe that is often found in trip-hop music. One sample (the woman's voice singing ooh, ahh) had static, or at least a very raw quality that really reminded me of the sound of Portishead. The samples were mixed well and the buildup and acceleration of the samples really created a feeling of craziness. Overall, I think this project was pretty sweet - it definitely followed the rules of the style (trip hop clearly) but with some creativity. Nice work Zach

Just wanted to post a link to a super cool dance/music video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJ423MqfsQ. vixy is down so I can't just post it on the page. these guys are ridiculous dancers - although the song is kind of over the top.

also - I've been meaning to put up video of the mgmt concert I went to last week in NYC but I need to find my camera cord... sadly my friend and I couldn't get tickets to the Justice concert that was right after in the same venue. unfortunate..

For Project 4 I decided to do trip hop instead of jungle/drum & bass. I made samples from Portishead, Massive Attack and Morcheeba. Then I created my own drum line and and added a little melody line that comes in and out. I still have some more samples that I'm hoping to incorporate to make it more complex. Recycle was great for cutting up the samples but it was hard for me to incorporate everything together because of different keys. I'll see if I can do more on this one later...

Project 4

Boomp3.com

Comments about Assignment 3

I started out wanting to do this project in the Ambient style. I began with some drony synth sounds but I didn't really want to deal with environmental sounds and some other aspects of the style, so I switched to Techno. First, I created a drum beat with a strong bass drum on every count. I used a few different techno drum patches from Dr. Rex but other than that the percussion part was relatively minimalist. I used one melodic progression, starting with a C-minor arpeggio, and recreated it with a few different synthesizers in different patterns. I used a lot of the reverb effect. I tried to avoid having any sort of climax in the melodic structure. I think the parts are a little too separate, and the melody is very distinct from the underlying drum pattern, so it is not actually classically in the techno style.