Author Archives: Studio User

Hi everyone, my name is Rosemary Li, and I am a biology major and music minor. I’m a classically trained pianist and violinist, and have no experience in electronic music, so this is going to be fun! I enjoy reading, winter sports, tennis, horse-back riding, and drawing. I’m looking forward to meeting you all!

My name is Jasmine Edison, and I am a Music major in Arts and Sciences. My favorite things include chocolate, hiking trips, horseback riding, really thick fantasy novels, the films that are adapted from them, and the soundtracks from those films–especially the soundtracks. In fact, my main motivation for taking this course is to learn how those soundtracks are made. I am a classically trained violinist, so the technical side of things will be an eye-opening experience for me. I can’t wait to get started!

I like not only the music from Mass Effect 2 but also the way in which it is played.  There’s a really good video from the composers showcasing this but I can’t find it, so here’s this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimJxMXnIsI (don’t watch all of it though).

Basically, the instrumentation changes and more parts are add/removed as the action changes.  I wanted to do something like this for my final project, but I made the mistake of listening to this to get an idea of the style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiL3YSlX4zs .

See what I did wrong?  The second video doesn’t really show off the transitions.  I basically said, “I like how this sounds, I’ll make 2 tracks kind of like these and then I’ll figure out some transitiony / performancy things to do with them later.”  That’s no good, you don’t transition between two totally different tracks.  You can’t fade between the first two tracks from the second link and have it sound like the transitions from the first link, which I found out the hard way when I started writing my second piece for the performance.  Ultimately, this was an instance of me not planning ahead.

So what do I do from here?  As I said, transitions generally involve changing instrumentation and adding / removing parts.  But my first piece, in my opinion, depends on its specific MIDI instruments, and I don’t think it would sound full enough with some of its parts removed.  The only remaining option, then, is to add some new parts.  But I already sort of did that halfway through the piece, and for a performance thing I want more variety between the two songs I play to keep it interesting.

But writing song #2 as “new parts to add to #1” did help me get started, even if I didn’t stick to that mentality for long.  I had to write a new standalone piece that sounded sort of like the first in terms of notes and song structure (so that they would sound at least reasonable if played together at any given point in time), but it also had to be different and interesting.  And I still wanted the second piece to be similar in tone to the first but more actiony.

These are more constraints than I had originally anticipated.  Still, I think I did a good job of fixing my incorrect initial approach, and I like how things turned out.  I think the B track is a little less good than the A track (partially due to these constraints but mostly due to me running out of time to compose things) but I like how both came out, and I feel comfortable transitioning between them at any point in the song.  I considered the idea of leaving the transitioning up to the audience / a volunteer, but in the end I decided to do it myself because I want to make sure everyone gets to hear the full 2 tracks and in a way that showcases them well.  I’ll post the 2 tracks separately after the performance.

For the projects in this course, I took to heart the advice given in lecture: that we listen to music we like.  I am a fan of video game music so that’s what I’ve listened to, but there’s a lot of diversity in video game music; my choices of inspiration had observable effects on my approaches to composing, and on my results.

Back during Project 1, I was nervous about composing and wanted to listen to basically everything I think is good music.  I eventually settled on the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze because 1) I like the series’ composers and their music, and 2) I hadn’t heard it yet.  This was a mistake; I should have focused on an earlier entry if anything because I’m more familiar with them and they do a good job sounding good with limited sound quality (which is important to be able to do, especially when you’re playing around with MIDI for the first time).  More importantly, a lot of these songs are fairly melody-based, which I have found to be not my forte.

For Project 2 I was a little more careful.  The style I focused on was the one used here: Sanctuary Fortress (Metroid Prime 2) .  I found that focusing on making good sounds and then adding more good sounds at a constant but leisurely pace is an effective and really easy way to make a song, even without a melody in mind.  This was definitely a big help.

Another thing I keyed in on is that Virtue’s Last Reward has a really good soundtrack.  It all sounds like things any of us can make with the provided software alone if we really know what we’re doing.  It’s also pretty unconventional while still being easy listening.  The takeaway is that we can do really cool stuff if we can imagine it, and that it’s okay to make a song that sounds not like what one would expect.  This isn’t even one of my favorite songs from it but it’s still great; I’m also most likely sampling it for my performance for reasons that will be covered in a future blog post: 

As for what I’ve been listening to lately and how it’s affected me, the short answer is “Mass Effect 2 OST; good dynamic music, poorly interpreted by me.”  The long answer will be in an upcoming blog post, along with my observations on dynamic music in general, a cautionary tale, and what I started doing earlier today to get back on track for the performance.

Hi everyone, here is my project 3, which I haven’t thought of a title for. I composed this multi-track piece intended for the piano, violin, cello, etc. Let me know what you guys think about it.

http://1drv.ms/1fS3Lmr

Here is my submission for Project 2:

I made it in Live with only MIDI, just like my first project.  Originally I had planned on using Reason to make my instruments and playing them in Live, but I had more success finding the instruments I was looking for in Live than I did making them myself in Reason.  I didn’t really like how my Project 1 came out, so this time around I focused on getting more layers of sound to add to what I already had rather than looking for ways to extend the melody.  I used the vertical mode extensively; it was a big help.  My biggest regret was that I should have lowered the volume on one of the tracks.

https://soundcloud.com/jeffrey-wai/djfy-do-we-yiruma-remix

Please feel free to comment! (Attempting to beatbox while being sick definitely made me a little offbeat at times…). In addition, I’m looking for potential partners for the final project, please message me if you’re interested (I mainly beatbox and play the piano by ear). Thanks again!

I didn’t get to present this, but I would like feedback, so let me know what you think

Hey guys hope you take a listen to my first project. I played around with reverb, fading, and gating to try to get some cool sounds out of the guitar. I’m definitely open to any suggestions and comments! 

Hi Everyone,

Let me know what you think of my piece, Hymn of the Forest. I composed this piano piece piano awhile ago, and I mixed in drums, wind-chimes and some other effects in it. Thank you.

Nicole