For as long as I can remember, the Luvstep remixes were always the door to new sounds and new perspectives in electronic music. The Luvstep remixes always come out during Valentine's Day but this year it came out on the 29th of February. The remixes incorporate a number of soft bass and luv bass sounds. The reason why this is super unique to me is because of all the quotes that are inserted within the set. Dirty South Joe and Flufftronix always pull the most romantic quotes and insert them between songs. When learning to remix on a live set and on my computer, my inspiration is Dirty South Joe and Flufftronix because of the unique sounds they provide. All of their remixes open my eyes to the different types of EDM music out in the world and how each song effects me differently.
When creating lyrics, there are two major components that must be incorporated in order to provide a successful and meaningful song. When first creating the lyrics, I think of something in which I can pour in my emotions and have the audience feel the pain, happiness, or sadness that I am feeling. Honestly, the best time to write lyrics is when I'm feeling upset about something, especially after a break up. When creating the lyrics, I think of words that rhyme after every other line in the verse. For each song, I will include a short verse, the bridge, verse 2, the bridge, and the concluding lyrics. I tend to come up with a random tune when writing lyrics. I sing the lines in my head and based on the current melody, I add the second line of the lyric in which I believe fits to the previous one above. The best lyrics are produced when I am experiencing a rush of emotions. After creating the lyrics to a song and coming up with a basic melody off of the lyrics, I will start to enter chords into my computer and create the basic melody with the computer software instruments.
Another effect that is very essential during the course of the song is having white noise sweeps. These sweeps are good transition tools that are included during the buildup, the end of an introduction, the beginning of vocals, and the introduction of the main melody. The white noise sweeps incorporate a lot of single sound waves and require no sin or cosine waves in the process. On the setting, it must also be put at the rating of noise only. After having a general idea of the sweeps, I use stereo delay effect to give depth to the sweeps and to alter when and where the sweeps come in and how powerful their role should be.
Chandra and I have been working separately recently and I have been using the new Logic Pro X plugins to perfect certain sound waves for a song. All of these plugins were used for perfecting the pitch of the sound during the chorus, vocals, and the beat. Each different layer of the sound needed to be run through by the plugins to determine which settings and changes could be used in order to provide a unique, but not overpowering sound. For the main rhythm of the song, I adjusted the sin wave levels and the EQ levels of the song, allowing the main rhythm to stand out. The chords that support the main rhythm, I used a lower EQ and some white noise along with a softer overdrive plugin to not only echo the sound, but to also add depth in support of the main rhythm. Based on the sound waves that your rhythm is playing, I am able to adjust the plugins and create a unique sound.
On Friday, November 13th, 2015, Chandra and I played our first live performance. Not only did this opportunity allowed us to observe the audience's reaction to the different songs we played, we also got to practice a lot on our mixing and the different transitions between the songs. When we played familiar, popular songs and their remixes, the audience started to sing along and jump up and down. Due to some songs that are not known in the pop culture elements, people were enjoying the music but were not as excited as when they knew the songs playing. Because of the audience's reaction towards certain types of genres and music, we were able to incorporate the energy of the audience and feed upon that. We mixed many known songs they enjoyed and kept the energy high up and kept it going. We really enjoyed playing and this has helped us understand different crowds and how to react to the different situations and energy.
Throughout the month of October, we have been trying to add vocals to the song. When creating vocals, we would first sing into a microphone and then autotune and pitch our voices to follow the keys of the song. Once we fixed our pitch tones, we focused on slicing up the vocals and moving around the little sliced up notes to create a stuttering effect or a Skrillex vocals effect. After moving the notes around, we focused on creating the legato (smooth transition) of the vocals hitting one note to the other. We used a plugin called Pitch to fix and adjust the vocal transitions within the song. After listening to the produced product of our vocals, we then would place the sliced up segments into the intro and the beginning of the song and right before the buildup. Because we don't want the chords and melody we use throughout the song to get boring, we add in the vocals in areas before the buildup and after the drop. The cut up vocals add an element of emphasis on the main melody more using something different. The vocals also create an eerie feeling towards the song as well.
Serato DJ is the software that is linked up to the Numark NV DJ controller. Serato is the perfect software to mix your songs and to determine where to transition from one song to another while reading the waveforms of the different song tracks. When Serato links up to the controller, all the songs on our computers will automatically sync into the program and determine the BPM (beats per minute) for each song. Each knob on the controller links to a part of the software, whether it's cutting up the waveforms into four beats, eight beats, or sixteen beats per measure. Also in Serato, there is a CUE button that allows you to determine the next transition or effects point of the song.
This is a Numark NV controller. The controller has four decks to load songs and different FX channels. The main software linked to the Numark controller is Serato DJ.
The next step after creating a beat, is to create a melody. Some artists like to start off with some chords on a piano and then switch the sound effects. However, we first created the main melody and how we wanted our song to sound like. We went to the music room to record notes and then we entered the notes into the computer. If you want to produce a sound, you would need to right click on the blank spread sheet and click on "create new midi clip". A midi clip is for recording and synthesizing back music on digital synthesizers and can be used during live performances during loops. After forming a melody that we liked, we created chords around the melody. After forming the melody and chords, we got a generalized idea of our song and how it was going to go. We decided not to place the effects in yet until playing around more with the melody.
Starting off to learn how to produce, my partner, Chandra and I bought Logic Pro X and played around with the different effects along with becoming familiar to the production application. Our first main goal was to create a beat like those in the dance music industry. The application provided many useful tools to start off with a simple beat. When we found a beat we liked, we started adding effects. Within the application, there are over a hundred ways to distort the sound of music. We used drum compression, which added a drive into our notes, allowing the sound to feel heavier and greasier. We also altered the attack of the sound which affected the peak of when the maximum noise was produced. While playing around with the drive compressor and the attack compressor, we also changed the ratio knob. With the change of the ratio knob, there was a change in how much sound was inputed vs how much sound was played output into the master volume.
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"Music is our religion"
-Blasterjaxx |