Final Project

Here's my final project, enjoy. 

I built this song over the course of the semester, beginning first with the introductory synth pattern and beat and slowly progressing piece by piece as I learned more about Logic. I used Logic, Audacity, and Sphere for the project (the latter two to create a reverse cymbal sample).

Though I had initially wanted to have a friend of mine sing for the song (something trancy, as I had mentioned in my proposal), I was unable to in the end because of timing. I still plan on making a song in this way, but for my final project for 295, I had to fall back on a style of more spoken vocals that I've used in other songs:

While I was working in the lab yesterday and struggling to add depth to the piece, I half-jokingly asked Jonah (the Quinn) to listen to it and sing for me. The deep voice of the "verses" in song ("This is a song about flight...") is thus that of Jonah improvising over my beat (using the built in iMac mic). I had to work hard to eliminate the background laughter, as everyone in the lab at the time was cracking up. The effects I added - mainly some flanger and reverb - were intended to make the voice sound more a part of the song and less randomly included. His lyrics are as follows:

This is a song about flight 

Not in the sense of the Wright brothers, though

But, like, flying and shit.

You know too much

You know too much

Now you must run (Run away)

Now we're on the run

Now we're on the run

We hide, away

For the "chorus" vocals, I used a poem about music I found online. I couldn't come up with lyrics of my own, so I searched "music poem" in google and recorded the first result I found:

Music is my life 
Music is my laughter that makes me cry 
Music is the thing that changed my life 
Music is my happiness I always feel in side 

I played this through a vocoder to make it less intelligible and thus less obviously cheesy - as a result, it sounds more like an extra instrument than a vocal track. I would have liked to have real vocals for the song, but think this turned out alright. 

The song is driven by a series of drum loops I found in logic, which are supplemented by some simple ultrabeat tracks (although not original, beats in audio files will always sound better than controlled drum machine sounds). Aside from these loops, everything in the song is my own material. 

I don't have much more to say - there are too many tracks and sounds to go over individually (22 - see below), but would be happy to review the file with anyone interested. I'm still struggling to make my songs sound "real," but am generally  pretty happy with the way this one turned out. I hope you like it, please feel free to give me any feedback you have.