General ReflectioN

This project was definitely a grand finale project. I really had fun with week 2’s project so I felt like adding to that one. The key of the project was in A minor and so far I am really liking how the minor key sounds in songs. At first, when I started week 4’s project I literally was in the wrong key when I began to add on. There are bounced versions of the song in the wrong key. I was going to submit the folder and everything but once I showed it to my fiancé, I knew I had to restart and get the song to where I knew it needed to be. I really put in a ton of effort to produce with the knowledge we’ve learned during these past four weeks. I am proud of what came out of it ultimately and I hope you like it as well.

Rhythm/bass

I began adding different drum kits from the drum machine designer. I really fell in love with the Cream Soda Kit and I loved the way the drums hit. It kept up with the kick I chose for week 2 which was from Crate Digger. I love the punchiness of the drums Crate Digger and Cream Soda had to offer so in the next 16 bars I began using sounds from the Cream Soda Kit. I used the hi hat’s from the Cream Soda Kit as well. I decided to add this perc FX from a Deep Crunch Drum Kit as well and it added so much flavor to the track. I was confused about how to approach the bass but I relied on the drum pattern to help me through it; along with some notes from the scale of A minor that just sounded amazing when keyed in. There was a lot of trial and error when it came to adding the bass notes for the second half of the song. I honestly deleted some parts out because I couldn’t really figure out what I wanted there.

Harmony/melody

The melody and harmony came together so nicely after I figured out I was in the wrong key. It was really tough trying to get the first half to sound seamless with the second half because of the song being out of key. Once I restarted and figured out what chords I wanted to lay down that matched the first half it all started sounding beautiful. I literally played on the keys over the chord progression. I left room in the chord progression so that the melody could really stand out as well. There was so much space in the harmony and it felt good to just let my fingers flow over the beat.

Audio/synth/sampler

The Audio I chose to use was from Project 2. I chopped up the parts of the audio I wanted to reuse and sprinkled them throughout the second half of the song. It sounds so beautiful when it’s played with the melody + harmony. I sang the audio myself. I chose to tweak the synths I made last week for this project. I made a kick into a sub kick and I duplicated the midi pattern of the Cream Soda Kick and put that on the sub kick track. The synth adds a nice deep texture to the Cream Soda Kick. I also created a snare that sounds like it’s being brushed by tweaking another synth I made from week 3. The synths really fit smoothly into the rhythm. I dropped an audio sample from splice into the q-sampler and I sprinkled some sounds throughout the second half of the song using this sampler.

Processing

The different processing plugins I used were reverb and echo, they were both bussed on the Vocal channel. I also bussed the reverb on the melody in the second half as well to give it somefullness. There is some eq and compression on the Cream Soda Kit kick just so the listener can feel the thump. The vocals have a noise gate on it to cut out the silence as well as an eq just to bring out the best in my voice. I also added some compression to my voice as well to bring the overall levels up higher. I know there is a proper way to prioritize your noise gate, eq, and compression while all being on one channel strip. I hope I did it right by putting the noise gate first so that the eq and compression can work on the non silenced part of the audio file.