The three of us began our musical journey together in 10th Grade Rock Band class. Each of us was still coming into our own musical identities, but we found kinship in covering our favorite artists—everything from Guns N’ Roses to the Revivalists.
While covering songs was fun, we always yearned for more. As we grew more comfortable as a group, we set our sights on a new goal: to write our own music.
“Underwater” is the culmination of that dream and almost two years of hard work. Our very first musical ideas originated in August of 2019. The song has evolved so much since then, and we have evolved along with it. With every recording session and late-night Zoom band meeting, we each became more communicative, creative, and determined.
In the end, “Underwater” turned out exactly as it should have: as a monument to our musical growth up to this moment. We hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed creating it.
Credits:
Co-composed by Jack T, Zander and Luc
Album artwork by Lia
Jack T (guitars, vocals, production)
Zander (keyboards, vocals)
Luc (drums)
We wanted to highlight our separate strengths; Miles’s piano, Leilani’s vocals, and Sophie’s vocals, bass, and guitar. We all play more than one instrument, so we had multiple layers of us playing different instruments. Sophie also added a bassline and vocal harmonies. Our biggest challenge was trying to put together a complete song with all the instruments when we couldn’t all play and sing in a room together. Every single instrument had to be recorded separately, and even though this is something some of us were semi-used to, it was not normal practice for us. When trying to finalize our recordings, almost every single vocal track had some sort of noise bleed in the background (the echo of some other instrument). So all the way to the end of the process was re-recording all the messed-up tracks and having to fix the errors that arose when we tried to use Soundtrap. One of our main challenges was with only being in person once a week. We could practice at home, but we did most of our recording at school, so we didn’t have much time. We were also sharing the space with other groups so we had to take turns recording, and there was often a lot of background noise.
Credits:
Femme Fetale was originally composed by The Velvet Underground
Sophie (vocals, guitars, bass)
Miles (keyboards)
Leilani (vocals)
Jack T & Charlton St. Studio (engineering & production)
We wanted to create music that we enjoy. We loved making these two songs because we love the original music and we wanted to see if we could replicate it with our own twist on it. For High and Dry we did a couple takes of us running through the entire song all together. Then we went home and overdubbed our parts individually.
Then for telephones we recorded our parts individually and tracked them out. We then re-recorded and cleaned up the parts, and added a chorus pad in the background for space and similarity to the original song. Then we mixed the instrumental and Armant recorded vocals, added effects, some ad-libs and oohh’s. Then… it was done.
Credits:
High and Dry was originally composed by Radiohead
Armant (vocals)
Will (acoustic guitar)
Levi (bass, production)
Spencer (electric guitar)
Charlton St. Studio (drums)
Telephones was originally composed by The Vacations
These two songs are called Text Me Back and Snow Montreal, two songs that demonstrate our ability to mix vocals and sing. Text Me Back is about a story of two teenagers who can’t seem to reach out to their loved ones. This song’s intense reverb reflects our thoughts and feelings bouncing around our head, similar to vocals bouncing across a big room. Snow Montreal is about a breakup during the wintertime our sound and lyrics represent our feelings being frozen in time, like snow on a cold winter day. The instrumentals we chose encapture emotional stories that we wanted to share through music. At the beginning of the projects, we wrote lyrics and recorded our vocals. This process was the easiest part of making the songs as we had experience writing lyrics and singing in the past. All we did was play the beat on a loop as we both took turns freestyling.
Once we both freestyle melodies and lyrics, we listened back to our vocals to pick and chose the melodies and words we wanted to keep. However, mixing the songs took us out of our comfort zone. We were forced to learn how to add effects that complimented each other while continuing to try and tell our stories. We used Youtube, as well as the help of our teacher, to learn and grow during this process. Throughout the pandemic, recording and sending tracks back and forth was difficult. We used facetime and zoom to collaborate and share ideas. We also used the ability to share each other’s screens on Zoom when mixing the song, allowing us both to have equal say in what went into the final product.
Credits:
Co-written and produced by Julien and Marlowe using Pro Tools
Welcome! This is a cover of the unreleased song by Clairo called Lying Has to Stop. I took inspiration from the cover she chose for this song, Monet’s water lilies. I wanted to make my project sound like what this painting looked like through weird synths, fun riffs, and playing around with the key that the song is in. Throughout my own process, trial and error was the main source of production and flow of it all. Trying out new instrument sounds on Logic (a recording app), whether it be adding in certain harmonies and seeing if those work, or just pushing random buttons to see what they do. Overall this journey helped me discover a whole new layer of what mainstream artists go through when putting together a song and how it’s really not as easy as it seems. Especially with deadlines since my peers and I didn’t always have access to the school’s recording studio and instruments whenever we needed. So our projects required major planning and organization if we wanted to make sure we got everything done. Also, I’d like to add that making music on its own is a challenge, but adding a pandemic on top of everything else adds a whole new level of conflicts. I really hope you enjoy this cover, stay safe and healthy!
Credits:
Originally composed by Clairo
Instruments, vocals, MIDI programming and production by Anonymous (10th grade)
Over Winter break I found myself completely immersed in the works of Danny Elfman, starting with his band from the 80s, Oingo Boingo, and then moving to watching many of the movies he scored. These movies were some of my favorites when I was younger. The music from the movies have always captured me. As I started playing music, I gained an even greater appreciation for scores. Whether it be the hauntingly beautiful scores of Corpse Bride (2005), or the whimsicle world of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), I found that I couldn’t stop listening to them. This led me down a rabbit hole of the question “what is it like to write scores for films?” I watched interviews, stared at the $180 price tag on Elfman’s Masterclass, and ultimately decided to just try out composing by myself.
I hadn’t composed anything since my 6th grade music class, so I wasn’t going in with experience or knowledge. I downloaded Musescore and jumped right in. Musescore is a program where you can write sheet music and listen back to it using MIDI files for different instruments generated by the program. I worked for a few hours over break just composing a random piece, and I was pretty satisfied with it (considering my lack of experience and time spent on it). I really enjoyed the process, so I knew that I wanted to try composing something in music class where I would have more help and time.
For this project, I wanted to try choosing a film scene and composing over it so that my inspiration could come from somewhere more grounded. I decided to go with the opening scene from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). It’s one of my favorite movies, and I know the score forwards and backwards, so I thought it would be interesting to see what I would compose on my own. There were a few aspects of the original score that I wanted to keep consistent with mine. I knew that I wanted to keep the orchestral tone, and I wanted the bulk of the instruments to come in when the character Suzy looks directly at the camera. With those ideas in mind, I wrote out a small shot breakdown and I watched the scene without sound over and over, writing down ideas that I had.
sketch outline of initial ideas
In the end, I didn’t use a lot of these initial ideas, but they really helped me start somewhere. Throughout the next week, I spent some time laying ideas down, but I ended up scrapping most of them. They just didn’t seem to fit the scene. In the last week of January, I ended coming up with a melody that I liked. I actually wrote the ending first, since that was where the main melody really came in. I added some instruments like guitar, violin, clarinet, flute, and oboe to get my main melody and background parts down. During the following week, I had a lack of ideas, and I didn’t enjoy anything I was writing. I watched some interviews with film composers to try and get some inspiration. There was a video by the Hollywood Reporter where Hans Zimmer, Terence Blanchard & Ludwig Göransson sat down and talked about each other’s work, and I found it really interesting and informative.
When I came in the next week, I was ready to get to work on the introduction. I spent some time choosing my instruments here. I wanted to make sure that the instruments and structure of the piece really related to the movie. The scene I was writing for only had a few characters — Suzy Bishop and her younger brothers. I wanted the intro to build up as more characters entered the rooms. The scene starts with one of the brothers sitting by himself. Because of this, I decided to start with a single xylophone to get a child-like tone. Next, I wanted to add a part to the intro that would represent Suzy as a character. For this, I really looked at the plot of the movie. In the most basic terms, the movie is about Suzy’s defiance of her family. Because of this, I decided to have an acoustic guitar play the same melody as the xylophone, but a few measures later, creating a round. I chose the guitar because I feel like the acoustic guitar still has a child-like sound, but more mature than a xylophone.
I spent some time syncing my score with the video so I could map out exactly how many measures I would have to fill, and where I wanted to add some notes/parts that matched up with the visuals.
filmscore editing & syncing session
After I mapped out all of the measures, I started filling the rest in, continuing the round and making slight variations to the intro melody that would eventually build up to the main melody. I added another xylophone playing along with the first one to match up with the part of the scene where all of the brothers are in a room together. In the movie, we never get much of a distinction between the brothers, so I thought it would be fitting for them to play the same part together. After I lined up the measures, it was easy for me to find out where I wanted to add small details. For example, I added a triangle when one of the brothers poked his head out of the door frame, and I could line up Suzy’s guitar melody.
The next weeks were spent adding instruments, taking instruments away, filling in parts, and re-writing parts that I didn’t feel fit too well. At this point, I also had my sister listen to the playback to get some fresh ears. She pointed out which instruments she thought fit, and which parts she thought I could add.
Once I had the structure of the score done, I moved on to playing around with dynamics and articulations. The dynamics took me a while to work out, partly because of my indecision, and partly because I was still learning how to use Musescore. After a lot of listening and tweaking, I finally finished the writing of the score. I exported the parts, and Nick put them into Logic to give the audio files a little more spice. Since I don’t have violins and oboes, I was using the MIDI files through Musescore to get a final product, so Nick played around with them a bit to give them some more life and depth. Once it was done, I lined up the video and audio, and I was done!
It was interesting being able to work with each other during the covid situation. Sometimes we were not able to pay all together, but practicing alone allowed us to improve our skills over time. Before being able to jam out together, we had to practice and work on our individual parts corresponding to the rest of the song so that we would be able to keep up with one another while playing live. For this song it was interesting for Johnny, as lots of the piano was very repetitive, but the timing of transitioning to the chorus, and the riff that was played after the transitions were challenging. As the guitarist, Henry had to learn his part while simultaneously teaching himself the guitar. This was challenging at first but as time progressed, the song helped accentuate his playing abilities.
The main verse was easiest to understand, while the chorus offered some difficulty as it was more fast paced and had more movement on the guitar. For this song, Sam took on the vocals and learned the bass part. This was not Sam’s first time dabbling with the bass but he was not a very skilled player. For the vocals Sam learned the lyrics and had to work on his diction in addition how to sound similar to how Ian Curtis sings the record. On the drums, Charlie found success playing in a new style that he was not accustomed to. The drums are a very important part of the band, keeping rhythm and holding the band together, but it was very interesting to work on a song that didn’t have such a clear arrangement. Because of this we all had to work together, signaling when the beat or melody would change and we learned a lot from that collaboration. When choosing our song, we went through multiple different options, all in similar Genres, but landed on Disorder by Joy Division because there was almost some type of spark in the air, and we knew this was the right choice for us.
Credits:
Originally composed by Joy Division
Henry B (guitar)
Sam S (vocals)
Johnny (keyboards)
Charlie (drums)
Jack T & Charlton St. Studio (engineering & production)
Henry recording guitar parts, Jack T engineering the session
In the beginning of quarantine I began studying with a new drum teacher named Nick Baglio over zoom, something I had never done before. At first the process of lessons was slow and full of technical problems but eventually once we figured out the setbacks with sound quality and connection, they became way more enjoyable. It was with Nick that I embarked on making this cover. We began by transcribing the tune, trying to recreate the fills we could and improvising some as well. The song in and of itself wasn’t an extremely difficult one but it pushed me to improve when it came to my transcribing skills, something I am still relatively inexperienced in. I recorded the track electronically, which was somewhat of a bummer as I wanted to do an acoustic take but it saved us the time of micing a drum kit and doing too much production. With a little editing we had our final product which I think turned out pretty well. Overall studying online has been a great experience, and I’m so glad it allowed me to meet such a talented artist that has pushed my skills to another level and inspired me to continue improving and expanding into other genres I hadn’t before. Overall quarantine has somewhat opened my eyes to the possibility that zoom lessons have when it comes to getting wisdom from people too far to reach and I hope that even after Covid is finished, I am still able to continue taking online lessons from people all across the country and possibly the world.
Credits:
Originally composed by Jared Leto (30 Seconds to Mars)
We decided to pick the song Put Your Head On My Shoulder by Paul Anka. We had heard this song a lot on social media (ex: Tiktok), and liked the sound of it. I, Farin, personally hadn’t played a song in this genre before, so it was a nice challenge (as well as playing two instruments on one song). I also think that it was abnormally hard because of COVID. It made it harder to coordinate with our group, and less time to practice in person. Motivation is also hard during COVID times as days seem to blend together. However, we managed to make it happen, and created something we are happy with.
Finn played piano, and ended up doing two different piano parts. There was the piano backing that was in the original song, and added a piano part to substitute for the backing vocals. Miles played the drums, and added a tambourine part as well. Farin played both saxophone and electric guitar. The saxophone part was to replace the vocals, and the saxophone has a unique sound which added an original twist onto the song. Electric guitar was also an interesting choice as the original song used acoustic guitar. These changes added a personal touch to the piece.
Recording instead of playing live gave an interesting experience where we got to learn more about the recording process. There are pros and cons to both recording and playing live (ex: recording gives more leeway for mistakes, but is a lot more time consuming). Overall, it still ended up being a fun experience despite the challenges of a new situation.
Since our group consisted of online students, we decided that using instruments and recording a part of a song may have been a bit too difficult to manage. We were all at different places trying to sound in sync using software. Instead, we decided to make a produced beat using a loop or two and then branching our own sounds and melodies. We used Soundtrap which made it easy for the three of us to work at the same time.
We started the beat with a simple bassline and dragged in a few drum loops. Seeing that the beat didn’t have many characteristics, we decided to make our own drum beats which was pretty easy using sound trap’s integrated drum machine. Our next challenge was to make the actual melodies and beats flow together like a real song; we didn’t want the beat to just sound like a bunch of random loops forced together.
After adding our own melodies, making our own drum beats, and making it flow together, the last part was to equalize the tracks in order for the beat to sound well made. Adding sound effects here and there, the beat represents collaboration from three separate locations and how we were still able to collaborate and make a song.
Credits:
Co-composed by Marco, Luca, Harrison (production, Soundtrap)
