{"id":48504,"date":"2019-11-19T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2019-11-19T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48504"},"modified":"2019-11-19T03:51:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T08:51:23","slug":"music-class-part-2-my-tracks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=48504","title":{"rendered":"Music Class Part 2: My Tracks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like I said in the previous entry, this 30-day course involved doing 3 different projects. Each project taught a few ideas and required students to create a track that incorporated those ideas. So now it’s time for me to show my work.<\/p>\n

Actually<\/b>, it’s time for me to go on a series of meandering digressions about creativity and music, but I’ll post my work somewhere in the middle of it all.<\/p>\n

Extreme Introspection<\/h3>\n

I used to share my music tracks on a regular basis. This was fun at the start of my musical adventure. I’d post something, and get a pat on the head from the public because I was doing okay for a beginner. But as time went on, two things happened:<\/p>\n

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  1. As I spent more time with it, I could no longer justify amateurish work with the excuse that I was new.<\/li>\n
  2. I raised my expectations and thus became increasingly critical of my work.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’ve had several fits of frustration over the last couple of years where I very nearly purged my Soundcloud account<\/a> to delete all of my early tracks. My inability to improve has created this perverse hatred for my early stuff, as if the only way to get better is to bring up the overall average quality by destroying the worst bits. Yes, I realize this impulse is horribly vain.<\/p>\n

    (Strangely enough, Soundcloud seems to have solved this problem for me. Their shifting pricing plans led me to drop my subscription, which means my account reverted to a free account, which means I’m over budget in terms of upload time, which means that a lot of my early tracks are disabled.)<\/p>\n

    I have this terrible self-indulgent cycle I go through where I get frustrated with my work because I don’t sound like Armin Van Buuren<\/a> or Deadmau5<\/a>. Then I realize it’s completely unreasonable<\/b> to expect to be able to create on the level of superstar artists, and even more unreasonable – bordering on delusional – to expect to be able to work on that level when you’ve only been composing for five years. And only part time. And you don’t even play an instrument. And your musical diet is fairly narrow. So then I give up for a few months. Then I hear something that tickles my brain<\/a> and makes me want to try again. I’ve got sky-high expectations and rock-bottom skills, which isn’t really a good recipe for a healthy and rewarding hobby.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    Track 1: What’s So Funny?<\/h3>\n

    This project was a sort of catch-all introduction to the course. It started with the basic theory surrounding chords and chord progressions and then dove into sampling.<\/p>\n

    The project had two stages: The first was to just come up with a chord progression and pick out some instruments to make a basic loop. The second stage was to round up random audio samples and incorporate them into your song. It seems to be a pretty big jump to go from “here is what a chord is” to “take disparate audio samples and make them fit within the framework of a full track.” But whatever. It seemed to work out.<\/p>\n

    This course was taught by Andrew Huang. He’s a master at using audio samples and it’s a big part of his YouTube channel<\/a>. He spends a lot of time making music<\/a> with non-musical sounds<\/a>.\u00a0 As part of the lectures for this first project, he produced a track. I wish the track was available in public so I can show you what he was doing, but right now it’s stuck behind the Monthly paywall. He took a ton of completely random samples and packed them together around the more musical parts of the song. He calls these sorts of injected samples “ear candy”, although I don’t know if that’s an accepted musical term. It seems like it would be a recipe for chaos and dissonance, but he knows how to make these random sounds make rhythmic and melodic sense. Pop Culture by Madeon<\/a> is the most well known(?) example of this technique that I can think of, except Huang’s track used random non-musical samples rather than iconic bursts from popular music. An older and more obscure example might be Lesson 6 – The Lecture by Jurassic 5<\/a>, which is a really interesting track if you’re not into the whole dance-ability thing.<\/p>\n

    I got to the second half of the project and I realized I have no idea how to do this. I watched Huang do it, in real time, over the course of two hour-long lectures. You can teach the technique, but you can’t teach the intuition that guides the process. That comes with experience. (Talent doesn’t hurt either.)<\/p>\n

    While Huang is fascinated by sampling, I’m obsessed with oscillators. My favorite part of producing a track is building my own sounds out of various filters and sine wave generators. My favorite OSC these days is Helm<\/a>, which looks like this:<\/p>\n

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    <\/div><\/p>\n

    I’d already constructed most of the oscillator-based track when we got to the “adding random samples” stage. I really struggled with making this work and I couldn’t figure out why mine sounded so terrible. It was pretty late in the project when I realized that adding samples is easier when you’ve left some room in the mix. Like usual, I had managed to fill up the track with notes and I didn’t have any breathing room where you could drop in extra bits. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it in frustration. I eventually ran out of time and was forced to post what I had. If not for the class, this track would have been abandoned in some sub-folder of my hard drive and never heard again.<\/p>\n

    In the end, I just had some random laugh sounds sprinkled around without any sense of purpose. It… doesn’t work:<\/p>\n