PLANNING
For the Music Tech for Live project, the musical performance group was split into three and got a production course student or two each.
The communication between the two course types was vital as the majority of the performance group know a lot less about music technology compared to the production crew.
This is leading our group to be very plan-based, focused on being as informative to each other as possible which has restricted our practice time and creativity on a few occasions. We have been writing down and scripted out a lot of our compositions and ideas so that no one should have to ask "what do I do?"
I am planning on doing independent research to then bring into the group discussions.
RESEARCH
I like the idea of creating a pleasant hybrid kind of sound between more organic instrumental sounds in electronic music/ the other way round.
Looking into the technical side of things, I have found that it is possible to make synths sound more organic in instrumentation, and you can also attack the problem from the other angle and make acoustic samples sound more synthetic. Either way works. Or we could also combine the two styles and have technology mixed with live instrument sounds (guitar, piano, vocals) etc)
This is what helped me settle on the decision to use a piano sound for the chords, it gave the composition a nice surprise as you don’t expect the bass to come in so heavy later on in contrast but it still blends because of the genre.
This project also gave me another chance to research and practice how to sing and play the piano at the same time- something I have not done often or been very good at in the past due to positioning and not knowing where to look.
While experimenting with compositional tools at home, I came up with some chords to help our group have a starting point, they were: F#, Bm69, F#m/G, F# again, back to Bm69 and then to B major. Changing the last chord from minor to major every other time around the chord progression made things a bit more interesting, creating a pattern of 6 chords which helped to pad out time without too much repetition. Each group of three chords go over 8 bars at a tempo of 175 with the last chord starting on bar 5
I was told that my chords I came up with for the piece were a good fit but was advised to try not to let the melody follow with the same notes. This lead to my suggestion of two-part vocal harmonies which did follow the chords partly but could be continued underneath the main melody and really enhance the last major chord.
I wrote this all out on pen and paper while composing to help communicate it better to my bandmates and also to explain better what I did, in terms of music theory.
Here is the basic structure of harmony. The pattern across 32 bars is A, B, A, C
THE CHORDS
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F#Maj
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Bm69
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F#Min/B
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Bmaj
The scale that we can use to compose the melody needs to change here and become F# Major. I worked and wrote this out using the circle of firths (below) and so instead of being F#, G#, A, B, C#, D, E etc.. i needed to use F#, G#, D#, B, C#, D#, E# (F) etc... The most significant notes being the different ones (D#, A# and F).
In order to make this more striking i wrote the last note of the vocal lines over that chord to follow that scale.
The F# Minor scale works over all of the chords except the B major.
The circle of fifths
Our group received feedback where the suggestion was that we could try to bring up the energy of our composition by mixing in familiar songlines and melodies just like a live DJ would.
We chose the song from “hot right now”- Dj fresh ft Rita Ora because it is a familiar song of a similar genre (Drum and bass) which has very short lyric lines and simple melodies that fit with a fast tempo.
I listened to the song and used my keyboard at home to work out the melody. I figured out that the phrase "hot right now, turn it u right now" used the notes E, G, A and B which, in order to fit into our song, would need to be modulated up a single tone to become F#, A, B and C#.
Lecturers frequently come in to hear our discussions and reminding us to PLAY instead of talk- when we finally stopped discussing and just played without a detailed plan it worked out very well.
We recorded this for help when evaluating.
eValuations
We had an issue where we did not include many tech elements at the beginning of our project- I had the idea to introduce a drum and bass type piece and also came up with static chords to go with it. It took many tries to get me and the other vocalist on the same page. I resolved this by pushing her to practice outside of rehearsals in college, sending her the notes she was struggling with.
The performance I feel went well despite some complications. The tech student in our group forgot to add the thunderclaps and rain noise during our improvisation which also did not go very well.
We lacked planning for the actual presentation side of the performance and so what we all could have done better was a being more clear about the tech elements needed and also had more practice with soundscapes.