Timelapse of a Student 3

In lue of the missing updates to my last big project, the composition for Blake’s time lapse project. I have a large blog about different aspects of this piece.

So to re-cap what the goal was for this project.

The goal was to create 10 minutes of songs (which ended up being 3 songs plus some transitional parts) in a fast DnB/club beat style that was requested by Blake.

So lets start with the grand scheme of things across all

This song uses a vocal sampling technique that I’ve never used before, I’ve done research on how to create these sampling effects and thankfully within Logic, it’s relatively simple.

Step 1. Record vocals

Step 2. Tune vocals with something like Melodyne (Or in my case Ozone Nectare)

Step 3. Add the effects you want. Which in my case was mostly another pitch correcter that made the vocals slightly more synth sounding. During my research I found that it’s best to leave the reverb out of the equation until the very end.

Step 4. Bounce the audio in place and create a sampler instrument for the ESX24 which can be done with 1 click.

Step 5. Re write the vocal track using the vocal cuts that were created in the sampler.

So really creating this vocal technique wasn’t that hard, but using this way within logic made the whole process much easier and taking the time to do the research into how this could be done made the task so much easier.

There are 2 layers of vocal samples in this first song and I wanted them to sound slightly different so the chorus vocal (right) I added some distortion to the vocals which gave it a bit more grunt, and also I added a frequency ring shifter plugin of around 830Hertz to the reverb, just to give a slightly delayed ring to the verb. Both these things combined gave the two distinct traits that could be layered upon each other without too much incident.

The bass line I used incorporated a side chained noise gate. Something I found worked better than a compressor to get a pumping baseline, the noise gate was set to 5dbs and set so that it’s always reducing by 5 db except when the drum hits, so the drum hit would get a punch from the bass line. I loved the way it gave a sudden pump, and even setting the compressor to the fastest attack possible.

The drums started with Logic’s drummer instrument, which helps generate an adjustable drum track including fills and breaks. I then transferred this track into a midi track using a different drum kit, and added the fills in the places I wanted. I also added distortion to the drums like I mentioned in a previous research blog. This helped bring the drums into the foreground a bit more as the drum samples used were a little light in tone.

The organ-like synth that plays throughout is a standard plugin.

I started this song first, and it was used as the baseline for mixing the other songs, and I feel that this song is the least well mixed because of this. I’m happy with the overall mixing, the vocals take centre stage, without taking over the drums, the synths peak their heads around every now and then, and pick up the slack in the non vocal parts. There are some cuts with the vocal samples that are a bit jarring that I could have possibly fixed this if I experimented around with time stretching and/or other edits.

There was some trouble initially with the composition, it was a little odd and the vocals didn’t fit right when it came time to implement them so I had to come back during the mixing stage and re write the composition in order to fit better. This just made the whole thing a lot more complicated than it should’ve been.

Something I’m very proud of is the mixing of the 3 songs together into one song. I’m no DJ but I feel I mixed them together in a way that feels natural and it follows the production plan in that aspect. They all sounds like they are from the same album or artist and they’re mixed together in an album type way.

Moving on to the second song I used similar instruments like the arp synth in a slightly different

progression, to match the new song. And a slightly different organ synth that I changed into a more pulse-like synth that comes in over the top of the first during the transition. The second song has more of a 90’s theme to it, because I wrote it with a specific person in mind, the singer, (who’s vocals I used in the song) is a lover of the 90’s and I wanted it to be specifically her song.

I have a stereotypical 90’s guitar sound that plays through the song to hit home that 90’s feel.

The bass line is an evolving chord synth that opens up high freqs the longer the note is held by using a LP filter that follows an envelope as shown on the right. This effect gives a slow release of high frequencies (3 second attack). The chord aspect uses a chordtrigger that automatically plays chords in the key when a single note is played Something I found very difficult to deal with was having to push my creativity to be within a time restraint of 4 weeks, usually I take longer and let the creativity come naturally.