Chris’s Music Tech Blog

So for this project I decided to make a loop or two with Reason and then use them in Logic to make a catchy tune. Before I get into logistics (no pun intended) I found this to be an incredibly interesting writing process. I wrote two loops with Reason which wasn’t so tough. I put a melody line and a bass line along wiht a drum track. Each loop was about 12 beats long. The hardest part was settling on a processing sound. I knew what I wanted to hear, but still had a world of fun playing with different pre-programed sounds and them messing wiht the oscillators and such. After this, I’m left with 24 beats of loop (one in C major the other in G) and I’m left to write a song. Typically when writing a song I’ll come up with most of the music and then the lyrics will follow. This added to challenge of having predisposed loops which I wanted to incorporate. I enjoyed the challenge.

I put both the loops into Logic and decided to make the whole song loop based. So I started to record a couple guitar lines 4-8 measures long. As I started to play around with putting these things together I realized I made the loops in different tempo markings. Not to worry, this would simply require a lot of fine tuning and tape cutting. Well I found this task really difficult with Logic, mainly because I don’t know the program and this was a bad way to learn it. So I turned the project over to Garage Band. This made the cutting and taping easier and now opened the doors for more creativity. I went a little over bored with the looping and such, but had a lot of fun. This was the first time I’ve spent more creativity on building the song with Garage Band than actually writing it.

As I said nearly everything on the track is some kind of looped recording or sound. The only exceptions are the lead vocals which where sung all the way through and hte guitar solo at the end. Anyhow I hope you enjoy it, it’s called Gimme Attention. You may have to right click and “Save As” to hear it. Thanks!

So it dawned on me today. As a general population we don’t seem to want to educate ourselves on how to entertain ourselves. Allow me to elaborate. It seems to me that years ago, people took the time to learn activities and, more important, skills in order to entertain. One really great example is dancing. Now I know we are still dancing around these days. But things like Ballroom Dancing are now this competition based, talent show. Things like minuets, watlzes, sarabandes, courantes, and even less courtly dances like the jig needed to be learned. When swing dancing became popular, every one knew how to foxtrot and charleston. These days that kind of dancing is left to professionals or niche groups. These are all of course outdated examples, but what kind of dancing do we have these days that takes time to learn steps or patterns, the macarena?
My argument would be that technology has made entertainment too easy. The easiest, and overused, example is television. It obviously takes no energy to squat oneself on a couch and melt away to pixelating light. My point is not that TV isn’t worthwhile entertainment, my point is that there is no learned behavior for something like TV. Even reading requires one to learn how to read. I can see the argument that video games are skills, I’ve seen some unbelievable gaming abilities, but whatever happened to learning card games for entertainment? How about music? There once was a time when the upright piano revolutionized music in the home. People learned to play instruments liek the guitar, piano, banjo, whatever in order to entertain others and themselves. Recorded music has taken away the necessity to learn instruments. The whole disco phase (passing phase thank God) proved that we still prefer our music played by human beings. Much of the hip-hop culture is challenging this possibility but I don’t see the live musician ever being useless. However, the casual musician may very well become that way. I know there are still plenty of people who learn to play guitar and even piano for there own benefit, but as a larger society I think we’ve lost the desire to have family gatherings with group singing and performed music. Even our bar seen is completely recording music (I still want an old school Juke Box that plays 45), if Billy Holiday were trying to make it in today’s seen, she’d have no outlet. Many great jazz musicians honed their sound by playing at regular bars and cafe’s, not jazz clubs.

In a nutshell, we seem to be less interested in learning how to entertain ourselves and more likely to turn to an easy alternative.

I would like to write an original tune and use Logic to record it. If I can I would like to begin with a loop created in Reason and go from there. Although I will be recording sound into Logic, for the most part I would use the synthetic effects in Logic and create loops therein. The length of the tune should be between 2 and 3 minutes. Thanks

Hey everyone. Please take a moment and check out my new website by clicking here It is not completely finished yet, but we’ll get there! Thanks

A friend of mine turned me on to this sound editing software that makes Garage Band look inadequate. Well almost. The product is called Melodyne. It’s a basic computerized studio. But what is impressive is a feature they have called Direct Note Access. Check out the advertisment.  If you didn’t have the patience to watch the entire clip, basically all one needs to do is record or put some kind of audio file into the program.  After that, the rest is up to your imagination.  The program can recognize the sound waves of individual notes.  A user may then move those notes to any other note, or change its rhythmic place.  In short, insert sound - create music.

This brings up the same old question.  What good does musicality to you anymore?  This program is an amazing feat for sound engineering.  But is it helping or hurting music?  I could strum all the open strings on the guitar or play a cluster on the piano, then use this program to alter the individual notes as I’d like, creating new harmonies.  I could even play a single note and manipulate that into a chord or a melody.  The point is, is that the skill soon becomes my agility with the audio program and not with my instrument.  Which, don’t get me wrong, still has its impresive features and skills.  I suppose music could take a turn back to the producer or engineer being the artist.  Sort of like back in the disco days.  But what about the live shows?  Would you want to pay money to see one person click a play button on his/her laptop?

It truly is amazing, the new technologies we come up with.  But at some point we need to ask, is it worth it?  Will a program like this really imporve music or recording at all?  Or would we have been just as good or better without it?  What do you think?

Thanks!  

I had a bit of a brain freeze about what to write this week so I looked up “music technology” in YouTube and here’s what I found.

I cannot really decide on my opinion of this program. The YouTube video was posted in 2006 so this kind of software has certainly been around for a few years now. The thing is, is that it is probably a great tool. I have my issues with it, which I’ll get to, but without having a band or orchestra in your basement at all times it is really the only way to play “live” ensemble music.

I am sure it is something you’ve all seen or heard of before. It certainly helps a student learn music more fluently, but is being pitch analyzed by a computer what we want out of our future musicians? And what about a future generation of musicians who learned to play with a computer recorded orchestra? How will those skills translate when they have to communicate musically with other living musicians? In a world where the internet and computers unite millions, in many ways it makes us less social. The ability to communicate without leaving your home, interacting and socializing almost become a thing of the past. With text communicate we receive no verbal clues and without sight we receive no visual cues. Think about it you grew up without that. If you think this all sounds ridiculous, spend sometime in a technology institute and see how socially inept some of its best students can be.

Anyway, the point being, if our music students are learning musicianship by playing with pitch and time perfect computer bands/orchestras, will we create a generation of musical social ineptness? For those of us who still believe that music is a living, breathing entity, computer perfect playing just won’t give performance the life support it needs.

Thanks for reading, please comment!

So first off, check out this YouTube video of a guy named Raul Midon (accent over the o).  A friend of mine sent this video to me with the simple statement “Multitracking is over rated.”  I can’t say, after watching talent like this, that I disagree. 

Multitracking, for those who may not know, is the ability to re-record over an existing recording without erasing the original track.  For example, if you have ever heard a recording with three part harmony all sung by the same person, that is multitracking.  The thing about multitracking is that it has completely changed the way we record and more importantly perform music.  Now, I know what you’re thinking, “dude, multitracking has been around since the 50’s.”  Yes, this is true, although quite crude by today’s standards.  In fact, the Beatles changed pop music for good in 1967 when they stopped gigging live and recorded an album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Albums, at one time, were cut in order to advertise the band for the tour.  Suddenly the live show was no longer the recording artists’ shtick; the studio album became the performance and the gigging was the advertisement.  To cut the history lesson short, multitracking made a live replication of the recordings near impossible.  It also changed the need for musical talent.

Taking away the importance of a live performance, takes away the need for superb musical talent.  Mediocre musicianship becomes good enough to make a record.  Take for instance Mr. Midon.  What he sings, and what he plays on guitar are both challenging enough.  In a studio, he could record the guitar, the vocals, and the “trumpet” separately, mix them together and get a stellar recorded performance.  For a lesser musician, this would be a necessity.  Raul, however, probably went in and played exactly what he did on the Letterman show, do maybe two or three takes, and his record was finished.  No multitracking, little to no mixing (making the engineer’s job easier albeit uninteresting).  

Studio recording as a whole seems over rated.  Here is a guy (Raul) who can be three instruments nearly simultaneously and rather flawlessly at that.  He is a case for someone who can use an album as advertisment for his live playing.  A sort of lets-see-if-he-can-do-it plug.  Other artists seem to spend so much time working on a perfect album these days, that the live show wains becuase now they have to duplicate the product.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the recording be the product of the live performance and musicianship?  We forget that Sgt. Pepper and later albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (often refered to as the Sgt. Pepper of the 70’s) were inovations for thier time.  They (along with some brilliant engineers) streched the boundries of what could be on a record.  Those bands also had thier live gig down pat before they ever stepped foot in a studio.  I am not sure if we can really inovate much more in the studio.  I mean, could they really put anything on a record that would surprise anyone anymore? 

I don’t mean to say that talent was better back when…but I think there has a been a focus shift.  We focus less on what the musician is capable of and more on hearing a perfect product in the studio.  Sometimes, perfection is just lame.

 Any thoughts? Please comment, thanks.

I recently read a blog by fellow classmate Bonnie about what and how we are are teaching our students in the 21st century. She poses an interesting question, are we teaching students real life application of the materials? I’d like to say, does it really matter? Whatever happened to education for the sake of educating? Sure a student may grow up and never use a geometric proof a day in his or her life, but was it so wrong to expand the child’s mind? Should they have never read those Shakespeare plays in high school if they did not want to be an actor or playwrite?

Remember back about 200 to 300 years ago. Public education was not a common practice, in fact it was something many great people, Benjamin Franklin to name one, fought in favor for. Basically, if you did not have the money to send your child to private schools and colleges the only other option was to get them an apprenticeship in order to learn a trade. If we really want real life applications of education, that’s our answer. Let us revert back to direct vocational education. The reason we wanted public education was to create well-rounded citizens in a well-rounded society. And, truthfully, if you look at the speed at which technology increased and human output increase throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it’s almost blinding. I cannot say with certainty that public education was the cause of this but I am sure it played a part. Point being, when we ask “does what we’re learning matter?” we should not forget the reason we went to school as children in the first place. To learn. Whether it was about biology, trigonometry, literature, art, music, politics, or physical education the goal was to supply our youth with various skill sets to make them better rounded adults. Hell, I even had a class where I learned how to weld metal and all my parents had to do was pay thier taxes. Brilliant.

Now, I am not going to say that our schools and school systems are increadibly up to date. We do have classes teaching kids how to type properly and how to use the computers. Could we do better? Of course we can. I think the biggest problem with incorperating technology in the schools is that, depending on the demographic, the education stays in the classroom. We cannot expect everyone to have an up to date computer at home with high-speed internet. Yes, it’s true, here are still those who use dial-up. The thought makes me shudder. But in the golden olden days, schools provided you with text books to bring home. Whatever the teachers taught in the classroom, the schools provided the means to extend that education outside the school doors. If we really want to use technology to the utmost in education, the school needs to provide the means for the students. There are some schools who give laptops to thier students. The students must return them at some point, but the schools are giving those kids the means. The problem is, many of these school are private schools. If there are public schools that do these sort of things I am simply unaware of them. The problem, as I imagine, is the cost and concern. The equipment is expensive and suppose a student damages or loses it. Text books may have been 60 bucks, but that laptop will be $1200. And for many families with kids in public schools that is no small fee. So what’s the solution? Well, I don’t know. Raise the taxes? More candy bar fundraisers? Whatever the solution is, just as society got involved to initiate public education, society will have to get more involved to update and change education to make the better rounded, technology savy people of the future.

Thanks, feel free to comment!