Electronic Dance Music - Contextualization, Experience with Logic Pro X Software - Essay Example

Assignment: Electronic Dance Music Electronic dance music is a music genre produced primarily for dance-based entertainment environments such as nightclubs raves and other festivals, and electronic music employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. Electronic dance music does not refer to a particular genre, but it comprises a number of modern style of music including, house music, dubstep, techno, trance, and trap Electronic Music composition is a skill of creating a new and original piece of music using composition software. It is musical work that has been created, being done in various movements. A good piece of electronic music should be technically well executed. It should be free of extraneous notes and nuances of any kind that do not contribute to the communication of the musical ideas intended in the composition of the song. According to Paradiso (2013), an electronic musical composition should also exploit a variety of elements of music, such as rhythm, harmony, and melody. A good music should impose a feeling of musicality. The piece of work has to invoke a desire for body movement that corresponds to the gestures in the sound. Besides, it should satisfy the formal organization to the way the gestures are presented and developed in the composition. The two songs were composed following all the guidelines, with the help of the producer and the director of the music. The aim of composing the two songs was to exercise creative imagination for sound by utilizing new compositional techniques. The objective of the composition is to emphasize the achievement of the highest possible level of skills in musical composition. The two songs were also composed to expand awareness of the richness and diversity of contemporary music in the society and also in the music industry by produce a substantial portfolio of compositions. The structure also helped to move toward to the acquisition of a personal musical language by developing skills in practical notation and working with specific music composition software, for this case, LOGIC PRO-X. Composing the two songs was done using LOGIC PRO-X software. Logic Pro X software is a complete professional virtual recording studio collaborating with a highly skilled beat program to perfect songs and dance tracks. When composing the songs with Logic Pro X speed and ease of capturing ideas were the key critical factors. Composing the first song (MDMA) started by programming drum beats using the connected MIDI keyboard on the software (Paradiso, 2013). Drum groove beats were first made and looped. The drum loops created helped to build the grooves. With the cool drum groove beat, it was much easier start making a bass groove on top of the track and other instruments. A Piano Roll was used to edit graphically and display any recorded MIDI played into Logic. The piano was also used to step-enter notes directly. All Notes were made to be of the Same Length to facilitate this. All Velocities were also made to be the same. Velocity was assigned to the drum’s volume, such that adjusting this will level out the sound’s overall volume. Adjusting this stabilized the MIDI recorded piano keys part. Notes were quantized to fit the songs key and scale. From the Piano Roll’s inspector, root key was selected, and a helpful list of levels chosen. Moving Notes around with Key Commands was necessary so as to adjust their pitches. Using the software, a note in a MIDI region and was selected. While first holding the Option key, Up and Down arrow keys were used to move the key pitch to different heights. Pitch Bend was ended using wheels on the keyboard, making the sounds livelier. From the MIDI Draw area that appears on the Piano Roll, the drop-down menu in the inspector was selected, choosing Pitch Bend and Modulation option. After making these signs of progress on the logic composer, EXS24 was used to program other imaginable beats of a drum set. EXS24 is a software sampler capable of playing any instrument, ranging from simple single-sampled to cut-up drum loops to deep-sampled, the software is also capable of playing intricate acoustic instruments with round-robin sample switching. These were the bell sounds in the song; the program instruments were added and looped into the track song. The interface of this song now had two strips. Drums strip and the bell strip, all programmed from the MIDI keyboard of the logic sampler. The second song (Revolving the Sickness) started by programming a stein way grand piano (Paradiso, 2013). To program a guitar melody, the track was chosen, and the base button clicked to create. The new audio track was added to the records area, and several effects that are ideal for guitar and bass were added to the channel strip. After creating the new bass (guitar) track, the Pedal board plug-in was added to the tracks channel strip. , effects pedals were dragged from the collection on the right to the pedal board on the left. Guitarists in the logic sampler have extreme cases of the gear acquisition syndrome. With Amp Designer, Bass Amp Designer, and Pedal board, the condition was eased getting back to making music. The composition of this song also involved programming drums from the MIDI keyboard. Drum groove beats were first made, looping them together. The exs24 software was also used in this song to produce the bell melody. The song track interface of the song ’revolving the sickness’ now had five instrument strips including the drums, bells, guitar, bass and the stein way piano, all programmed from the connected MIDI keyboard (Holmes & Holmes, 2012). Production of the song involved audio editing and midi editing of the songs. Logic pro x provides an excellent platform for advanced audio editing tools and features that made it easy to perform operations like broad-stroke edits and sample precisely. Strip Silence was made on the audio tracks. After observing the waveform of a drum or percussion recording, it was noticed that it features transient fast. Logics Strip Silence is a feature designed to split an audio recording into separate regions. Doing this, it removes the silence between segments of non-silence. The threshold was adjusted to the levels considered silent. The primary objective when using Strip Silence on drums was to make sure that, when regions are dragged on Logics time grid the drum sound are heard immediately. All errors were edited in the production. All the tracks that needed to be manipulated were selected. The track that contained the split regions was selected and editing done the specified track. Drum quantizing was also done on the songs. After selecting them in the arrange page and opening the Event editor from the main Window menu, the required value was set, and then the regions quantized as if they were MIDI data. On some track, quick swipe comping was done to streamline the process of chomping tracks, rather than cutting, moving, and muting regions. Flex Time features were used to manipulate the timing and tempo of audio recordings (Butler, 2011). The Flex Tool was selected and pushed an around beats by clicking and dragging anywhere in the audio region, and all the detected transients and edit points made appeared. Flex Time also made it possible to apply quantize in an audio track using the same workflow used with MIDI tracks. By using the Groove Track feature to lock the timing of one track to another. Quantization that involved the rhythmic correction of notes to a particular time grid was done. Any notes not played in time were moved to the nearest position on the grid. Region-based quantize adjusted when listen to the result. The Piano Roll and Score editors offered Scale Quantize settings that led to you snapping the featured notes to a particular key and scale. Transforming MIDI events was done based on conditions, operations, and values chosen using a tool in the MIDI processing, from the MIDI Transform window of logic prox. The arrangement of the songs made sure that it does not contain same parts each time a verse or chorus comes along. Switching chords and riffs half way through was done to the track to facilitate this (Butler, 2011). Excitements were added to strings, pads, and other musical parts during critical moments by changing with another version of the pitched part. Song tracks were arranged such that the songs had an intro. The intro was made up of a rising melody. The theme was made tie and quick to avoid monotony. A verse was also incorporated in the song formation. A verse is the first main part of the melody and story of arrangement. The verse was made to repeat a few times before moving on to the chorus. Chorus was the main part of the song. Chorus part had energy and should be no longer than the verse. The arrangement is such that it repeats: Verse, Chorus, Verse, and chorus. A solo was added and set after every two chorus. Nearly the end of the song, a riser was formulated. At the riser, there were no beat and last eight measures or 16. The next part following in it usually has a lot more energy and was set to be the climax of the piece. Mixing is an essential music production part but over compression was avoided to eliminate the possibility of producing noise instead of a vocal tune (Holmes & Holmes, 2012). Logic pro x consists of a robust mixing console that supports 255 software instrument tracks, 255 audio tracks, , 255 auxiliary channels, and almost infinite number of MIDI tracks making it easy to mix different audio and midi tracks. Additionally, there are 15 audio plug-in slots and more than eight sends in each channel. The Mixer also features a long list of innovations that make it simpler and more convenient to operate which provided plug-in delay compensation for the entire signal path, so that all tracks play back with perfect sample accuracy. Surround mixing was done, being enabled, being allowed to record, edit, and mix the songs in surround up to maximum 7.1. Electronic Music Composition as an art is attached to like learning a new language (Butler, 2011). One gets into composing music by listening to music, and they like it, they probably sing it back where sometimes it may not sound good when singing. The above initial process gets to help one understand the music theoretically, internally and practically. The computer technology advancement has become more accessible and has seen progress by emerging of this production software. Interacting with this music production technology has now become possible. These particular means no relationship to traditional musical performance practices. References Paradiso, J. A. (2013). Electronic music: new ways to play. Spectrum, IEEE, 34(12), 18-30. Butler, M. J. (2011). Turning the beat around: Reinterpretation, metrical dissonance, and asymmetry in electronic dance music. Music Theory Online, 7(6). Holmes, T. B., & Holmes, T. (2012). Electronic and experimental music: pioneers in technology and composition. Psychology Press. Read More