Hi all,

So today we started work on a second song idea. I’ll give the rundown on how we built it up over the day.

We started in the same manner as I described in the last post – Dominic sent me a drum part over, and then I laid a synth pattern on top of it. Then I sent him the project so he could lay down a bass line. He then sent it back to me, and I worked on mixing it a bit before adding another part and beginning to build up a structure. I’ll most likely work on this a bit more extensively over the weekend, so a draft should be finished sometime next week!

Gus

Hi all!

For this past week so far Dominic and I have been working on the song that we started last week – we’ve got the start of a verse/chorus and we fleshed out what I’ll call the “post-chorus” section. We figured out that trying to work over zoom didn’t actually help us out very much; the audio quality was pretty much unusable. Instead, we use facetime and listen to the audio on our personal speakers. We’ve gotten into a good flow by now: Dominic will start a section by making a drum part, then pass the project off to me to lay down a synth part. I’ll then send the project back to him to figure out a bass part. After he sends it back to me, I add guitar or anything else I think the section needs. Over the next couple of days, we’ll probably start another song idea, and work more on this one. Till next time,

Gus

There’s plenty I know about my senior project’s area of study. However, like everything I’m passionate about I can’t know everything and I certainly don’t claim to, so it’s a worthwhile exercise to identify the aspects of my project that I’m new to and strive to better myself in those areas of my field of study.

We can start with what I know about my essential question (How can I tell a compelling narrative/tell a story through music in a time of quarantine): I’ve got experience in writing and recording music, prosody (the connections between lyrical content and instrumentation), and a more extensive background in producing music. So as far as how that all relates to what I know about my question, I know how to answer it with the instrumental side of music: I’m fairly confident in using various recording, playing, and mixing techniques to convey a range of emotions in my music. However, I could always improve in areas of music-making that I’m already versed in, and in my case that area is vocal work.

I know how to tell an emotional story with pure music, but I’m more of a novice when it comes to the lyrical and vocal side of songwriting. I understand that it’s an essential part of most songwriting I enjoy, so it’s something I strive to better myself at. Also, it more directly answers my essential question. Quite literally, lyrics can be used to tell a story for the listener. When a story is told with instruments it’s highly metaphorical, but vocals can be used to translate those emotions and metaphors into words that can be more immediately understood by a listener. The lyrics can end up giving a narrative to the music, tying a whole piece together and making it stronger as a whole. That’s something that, over the course of the next month, I hope to improve in.

Hi all,

Since the last post, I’ve brought Dominic up to speed on all he needed to know to record and produce in Logic. We’ve taken the song idea that we started earlier last week and have started developing it into a more structured and detailed piece. It’s still in its early stages so there’s no telling how it’ll end up (or if it’s good at all), but when it’s more finished next week we’ll post a draft of it here!

Gus

Hellooooooo! First blog post here, so let’s see how it goes and jump right into it:

For senior project, Dominic and I are making music over the internet. Our original plan was to make music in person, but with covid 19 that’s definitely NOT going to happen.

The past couple of days for Dominic and I have been spent getting one another acquainted with the prospect of music-making over the internet. Mainly, I’ve been getting Dominic up to speed on how to create digital music, since he’ll have to know how to on his own since we can’t see each other – so this means teaching him the basics of Logic Pro X, including how to make drum patterns, mix using compression, eq, etc… A lot of little things, but mainly we’ve been messing around with how to create drums from our computer. The pre-covid plan was for Dominic to play drums that I had set up at my house, but since we can’t see each other, and Dominic doesn’t have a drum kit, we’ve moved to digital drums instead.

Beyond what’s written above, we’ve been sending projects back and forth to each other and seeing what sounds good to our ears, what we want our music to sound like, etc. We plan on starting the actual music-making within the week, and then we’ll actually have some to post here for you all. Till next post,

Gus

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