MD5313

WEEK 1!

After quiet a few months off university, and secluding myself to 4 walls. I had my first day back! Seeing everyone was so lovely and really propped up my mood! The summer was very much so filled with ups and downs mentally, however I’ve came out of it possibly the most focused and motivated (and happy) I’ve ever been!

It feels like a switch has been flipped in my head and I’m genuinely so excited and motivated to get stuck into my course! A few weeks before we all came back, I decided I wanted to really sit down and focus on getting better at recording and getting some basic mixing skills worked up.

My first voyage was to learn to program drums, at first, this was extremely daunting and made me want to throw my computer out of the window. However I persevered and then the next day it clicked. I learnt the value of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes etc and I was instantly able to create decent, serviceable drum beats to assist my songwriting. Linked below is the first song i’ve tracked while fully knowing how too program:

WEEK 1 CHALLENGE!

So this week we were challenged to create a piece of music utilizing the ‘tresillo rhythm.’ This term, was alien to me. Which is ironic because I have actually listened to many pieces of music that utilise it.

I’ve never actually tried writing music with a set agenda/idea carving what I do. So to do this for me seemed pretty difficult at the beginning. Although after about half an hour of messing around I started to get the hang of it, and i’m genuinely very happy with what I was able to come up with.

I started off by making a drum beat as a basis to follow, as it’s typically in the percussion that this rhythm is most prominent in. I made a simple beat for the A section and then for the B section i veered away from using it as I wanted to create a chorus for this piece to test my ability to flow in and out of different rhythms.

I then started to track the guitars which began to be a problem for me, as admittedly I do need to be tighter. I believe this is because I usually play music that falls under the metal sub genres, and with that I’m just used to playing it, as the music fits to a click perfectly. With this genre (latin? salsa? i don’t know) there is a lot more flair and nuances that typically I wouldn’t try technique wise such as playing muted chords to fill in little areas of silence; Which I find difficult to do, however practice makes perfect and i’m sure with more practice I will inevitably crack it!

What changed this track for me, was bass. Now I absolutely adore playing bass, as I feel that it is SO underappreciated. Bass can completely change the dynamic of songs and spring so many ideas on where to go next. I looped the tresillo drum section and just played around until I created something I was happy with. It turns out, that I wrote my favourite section of music yet. It had SO much feel and groove and it just made me want to dance! The bass tone merged extremely well with the guitar tone as well and made it sound really warm and full. I tracked guitar individually on two tracks panned hard left and hard right (100%), and tracked two bass tracks individually as well both going straight down the center. I tracked a clean bass sound to give it a deep, rich sound. I tracked the second layer with a slightly more dirty tone to give the bass some definition in the mix as well. It is probably the best bass sound I have gotten so far! For the guitars and bass I used the Neural DSP Cory Wong Archetype plugin as I found that the clean tones are absolutely gorgeous and extremely good for a digital plugin.

I also had a pretty cool idea spring to mind, which was too record me clapping another variation of the Tresillo rhythm over one of the sections. I used my Shure SM7b to capture these claps. However unfortunately I didn’t really get a good sound because my room has a lot of space in it so the room reverb lessened the quality of the sound and I didn’t have anything to isolate the sound enough!

Linked below is my piece:

To conclude, I have found this challenge very beneficial. It has given me a new insight into how to approach song writing, and it has made me so much more interesting in exploring other rhythms in the future!