Final Project: "What Is a Logic Youth?"

It was a lot of fun actually creating my final project once I was able to get things going and ideas flowing in Logic. I didn't really have any idea of what I wanted to do aside from wanting to make something that had at least a House feel to it even it if it wasn't a straight House song, and also something that had a little guitar flare to it in the spirit of Ratatat.

Before I had even started work in the Music Lab, I had planned on making good use of ReCycle in creating samples that I would add to my project just like I had done for the Drum and Bass assignment. While doing so, I had managed to speed up the drumbeat to "Tomorrow Comes Today" by Gorillaz, which made me start thinking that I might want to take the style of Drum and Bass. However, this didn't last long when I remembered how difficult it was to find a rhythm and keep it a the appropriate tempo while adding and subtracting elements and instruments throughout the track. Keeping the same style I was able to create the arpeggiated drumbeat in Reason that i eventually used for the final project.

I experimented a lot more with the keyboard in creating my own melodies and rhythms during this project, especially once I had laid down the beat and bass and decided that there was something missing. I also needed a way of incorporating the electric guitar as I had intended to in my proposal. But trying to figure out what form the melody would take was the most difficult part and I was stuck it the lab for quite a while trying to figure this out.

If you are not familiar with the 1968 film version of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet watch this video. This is where I magically discovered a melody to use in my project. I spent a good deal of time actually trying to learn the melody on the piano since I have absolutely zero piano training. The technique I ended up using was to break it down into 3-4 note pieces and record them over and over again until i got it right before splicing them together in the appropriate meter using the piano roll in Logic. I tried to make the whole song a buildup to the finale in the last minute by gradually adding the pieces of that melody in the first third and then subtracting the beat in the middle third and then combining it all in the end.

Another sample that I created using my minimal piano skills was taken from the movie Intolerable Cruelty, which I had recently seen and decided would be a good fit in the song in the softer, middle section as the intensity build towards the finale.

I chose not to go heavy on the effects or filtering because I didnt't like how it was sounding after programming the MIDI keyboard and the software instruments that I was using to play the pianoing and samples from Reason and ReCycle were sounding better than the manual effects that I was applying to each track.

I wish we had learned Logic earlier because it would make experimenting with other programs easier since it already has a ton of loops that you can use and makes mixing and mastering so much easier.