Friday 17th december

Sweet child synth pop btw..

Today was more of a "tweaking" lesson, where i just changed certain areas of the song and sounds. I completely re-did what i originally had for bass, which was to slowly increase the filter frequency and then i thought it sounded too modern so instead of increasing the filter frequency, i did away with the filter and simply increased the volume from teh master mixer. I also re did what the bass plays, in the first 4 bars or so, i have the bass playing single, long held notes and the more rapid bass comes in after the master volume has increased.

I got rid of what i called a trance pluck and instead used a lead that i later used in a breakdown section, i used a ddl digital delay line to make the "pluck" fill more space and it sounds effective.

I also changed a few drums for build ups but nothing OTT.

i have the main riff of oh sweet child playing on its own after my own intro and then the other sounds build up around it using master volume, not filters. Filters are not a part of synth pop.

Next lesson i plan on creating a new synth and trying to incorperate the "verse" but completely "remix" it and try to make it fit into my into, i've now realised that i've given myself extra homework. Great.

Mondays lessonn... the 5th maybe?

Okay, to start off with i shall explain the main lead and other random synths i have made for my piece.

It all starts with thor, initialising the patch, i then add 3 analogue oscillatorz and depending on whether i want it to be a main lead, i shall detune the oscillators against each other to widen the sound up and make it sound "phatter" and give it a nice lead-like feel. I don't detune the oscillators if i want the sound to be bassy, instead i turn the attack up to give it a few milliseconds before the sound starts to give it a "pumping" effect.
The other sounds are too complicated to explain but i have their ...whatever file type they are, they are saved in combinators so i can just load them up and take a look on the final write up.

Coming up with ideas for the piece: i started by writing in the actual notes for the riff of o sweet child of mine, then noticing a nice pattern, i deleted where appropriate and replaced the notes, creating a small riff which i used after my intro. To build the sound up, i played around with the notes and literally cut the riff that i had done in half so that i could double it in the next section to feel like the piece is building, if that sounded complicated, here are screen shots:

This is the "cut" part, to build tension for the next part to come
Then here is the "full part" with a nice drum beat with the bass drum whacked up on full bass on the eq to block out most other low end frequencies and thus making the beat "bounce" anyway here's the picture:

This is a nice riff using a musical technique called retro grade at the end, retrograde simply means inverting the pattern or whatever.

For things like the delay lead which i call my trance pluck, i simply repeated my pattern above but a third higher and with some variation so that the notes do not always appear on the same beat, to distinguish between them.