Project: Bliss
I was inspired over the week to start working on a new music project. I haven't mentioned it to many, but I've been extraordinarily distratced.
I had decided that I wanted to include lyrics with more of my music, but as my recording equipment is awful and I'm not entirely sure I could manage to sing if I wanted to, I had to come up with a creative solution.
I struck upon an idea: I could make samples of every word I wanted to use, then mix and match to create the lyrics I needed by importing those clips into various machines in Reason. I could also then play with vocoders, which are the best things ever. I could use them to mask the horrible recording.
I had some ideas for what I wanted to accomplish, so I started by recording all the words I thought I'd need, then ran a few practices in Reason. My first few attempts were lousy as I apparently had the vocoder hooked up backwards, so everything sounded like rotten garbage. Once I figured out the wiring, I was inspired.
It didn't take long to put together the basics. I did something I had never done before and played with the recording functions of Reason. I ended up with a relatively strong 3 minutes or so of percussion on the first attempt. I will be doing this far more often in the future as it sped up the process enormously and building from there was a breeze.
Originally, I had found an instrument I liked that I had playing a large portion of the melody, but in some experimenting I discovered that a held note on the vocoder makes a perfectly fine instrument by itself. The noise it made was fantastic. Another breakthrough came when I combined the two.
I wrote the song in a little over 15 hours, I think, with some fiddling here and there. I had an accomplice (thank you Jeniflower!) assist in the final compilation, giving tips here and there as they had a better/different setup and could give me an idea of where I had missteps.
I'm quite happy with the way this turned out. It's as hard as I wanted it to be and the lyric portions came out surprisingly well. It's also a lot of good information to have as my next project will also be using the lyric library and knowing how to handle the vocoders is singularly important.
Here's a link to the mp3: Bliss.mp3 - I don't know how long it will be available.
I had decided that I wanted to include lyrics with more of my music, but as my recording equipment is awful and I'm not entirely sure I could manage to sing if I wanted to, I had to come up with a creative solution.
I struck upon an idea: I could make samples of every word I wanted to use, then mix and match to create the lyrics I needed by importing those clips into various machines in Reason. I could also then play with vocoders, which are the best things ever. I could use them to mask the horrible recording.
I had some ideas for what I wanted to accomplish, so I started by recording all the words I thought I'd need, then ran a few practices in Reason. My first few attempts were lousy as I apparently had the vocoder hooked up backwards, so everything sounded like rotten garbage. Once I figured out the wiring, I was inspired.
It didn't take long to put together the basics. I did something I had never done before and played with the recording functions of Reason. I ended up with a relatively strong 3 minutes or so of percussion on the first attempt. I will be doing this far more often in the future as it sped up the process enormously and building from there was a breeze.
Originally, I had found an instrument I liked that I had playing a large portion of the melody, but in some experimenting I discovered that a held note on the vocoder makes a perfectly fine instrument by itself. The noise it made was fantastic. Another breakthrough came when I combined the two.
I wrote the song in a little over 15 hours, I think, with some fiddling here and there. I had an accomplice (thank you Jeniflower!) assist in the final compilation, giving tips here and there as they had a better/different setup and could give me an idea of where I had missteps.
I'm quite happy with the way this turned out. It's as hard as I wanted it to be and the lyric portions came out surprisingly well. It's also a lot of good information to have as my next project will also be using the lyric library and knowing how to handle the vocoders is singularly important.
Here's a link to the mp3: Bliss.mp3 - I don't know how long it will be available.