Blog 3

Since we are on the topic of techno and house, I thought I would talk about some of the instrumentation that is used in those styles.

The first one is simply a drum machine with a built in sequencer. On a previous post I showed a similar drum pad, but that was simply a midi controller. This drum machine has all the sound built into it. You can assign sounds to each pad and then play them as demonstrated in the video below. You can even upload your own sounds into the drum machine so that you can access them. These are the essentially what the DJs in the 80's used to make beats for house music.



After watching the Kraftwerk video for Robots I started looking into vocoders and talk boxes. I also realized I didn't really know the difference between the two. A talk box is generally used for a guitar an involves a tube that is placed on your mouth. When you play a note of the guitar you can create vocal sound with the pitch that was played on the guitar. Here is a good example of this. Although he is not makes words, he is changing the tonality of the pitch with his mouth. (There is a tube connected to the microphone)




Talk boxes can also be used with synthesizer. This is a microkorg which is an awesome synth for the price.



A vocoder uses a microphone in order to make the given sounds as seen in Kraftwerk's video of The Robots This could be played in real time where you speak into the microphone and the words are the pitch you play on the keyboard. Another way to do this is to record a given sound as a sample. When you play the keyboard, the sample is then played back at the pitch of the given key, as seen in the video below.

Project 2: Clicks and Radial

For Project 2 we were asked to make three 20 second clips using a click track and Radial. At first this was a very daunting task since we were new to radial and our provided material was very small. It did take some time, but I stumbled on some interesting results.

We also had the ability to use Midi controls on the keyboards to control different parameters in the program. By assigning different knobs and sliders to change different options in the program we could change multiple parameters at a time, rather than limiting ourselvers on what we can do with a single mouse click.

On all the track I used high pass and low pass filters along with band passes in order to creates the basic sounds such as a lower bass sound or a higher sounds to emulate what cymbals on a drum kit would be used for.

Click 1 is based on the use of 2 effects on different track. One is a ring modulator, which you hear initially with a strong bass beat. About half way through I start playing with a sin wave effect. I was bouncing around the frequency that would be accented. After the sin function, I use the ring modulator in a similar fashion by changing the accentuated frequency.

Click 2 has the use of effects and and rhythm changes. The clip start off with weird swells in the lower frequencies. Then two higher pitched track come in, one with 8th notes and one with 16th notes. At one point I alternate the speed of the 8th notes to line up with 16th notes and then change it back to 8th. This creates a cool effect.

Click 3 is a pretty simple clip showing the uses of the tempo and pitch tool. I only have 2 tracks, one which is a bass line and then a higher pitched part. For one effect I slowly increase the speed of the higher pitched track until it maxes out. Secondly I return the tempo to normal and do a similar effect with the pitch. I slowly move it upwards until I max it out.

The effects were very cool to use. I really would have like to move on more rhythmic ideas, with weird syncopation. I was having a hard time with the time shift and phasing of the clips though. I am really looking forward to seeing other people's material because I am sure there will be a wide variety of results.

Click1 - Sean

Click2 - Sean

Click3 - Sean

Midi Instruments

Over the summer I bought Pro Tools and a drum sampler called Battery. Unfortunately Pro Tools has a horrendous sequencer and so I was planning on getting a midi pad in order make sequencing drums easier. This is the midi controller I was looking at. It is the Akai MPD24. It has 16 touch sensitive pads with 'aftertouch' with 6 sliders and 8 knobs.



As we saw today in class, you can assign any function to the pads, sliders, and knobs that is available within a software program. The pad are velocity sensitive so when it accesses a drum sound, you can make it sound like you are hitting the drum harder.

I am also big into guitar and all the related gear involved with it, including amps and effects. Midi can be used with many of the higher end amps and effects. Using a midi controller such as the Roland FC-300 you can change channels on your amplifier and change patches in your effect unit.

Ringtone Project

I just uploaded my files for the ringtone project. It was pretty fun recording different sound. I definitely began to appreciate music concrete a lot more. It made you think about the sounds around you that are always present but you may usually ignore.

I also became familiar with Logic and Spear. I really enjoyed play with speeding up and slowing down the clips so the pitches were dramatically changed.

My continuous clip was of a bathroom sink running. I mainly used Spear to cut out certain frequencies so that it was a constantly changing sound

For the repeat ringtone, I used coins rattlign in a cup. A did a lot more editing for this. I used a slowed clip, then the normal speed clip, then a sped up clip. I used fade in and outs as well to transition between the sections.

One thing I found particularly useful was silencing and normalizing. I would slightly silence the loud parts of the clip and then normalize so everything would be louder and there would be no clipping.

My clips are posted below:

Ringtone1
Ringtone2


You just need to put in a code and then wait a few second for it to download