Unit 8: Week 4 (Day 1)

Progress Report

I've continued working on my project from last week (the ambient, semi-orchestral piece). This week, I've made the following developments:

Here is the piano roll for the trombone. It plays different inversions of the chords with some variations.

Here is the piano roll for the piano. It's pretty repetitive and plays over and over to add a layer of simple rhythm to the track.

I added a low pass filter on top of the piano to remove some of the unnecessary high frequencies, increased the release time on the envelope for more ambience and assigned LFO 1 to the pitch - this makes it slowly wobble over time to create a sort-of atmospheric, uneasy feeling.

This is the piano roll for the new synth I added in (despite its name).

I messed around with the preset a bit, and added reverb/EQ as you can see below:

I just cranked up the length and size on the reverb and increased the wet parameter to make the synth seem further in the background.

Here's the EQ I added to that synth. It removes any low frequencies that could interfere with the bass and removes some high frequencies to make it sound less sharp and cutting.

This is the piano roll for the drums. To be honest, I just got this straight from logic loops since I have no idea how to write a solid orchestral drum loop.

Track 5 is just a recurring china sound, which fades in with automation (seen below)
and decays naturally.

This is an atmospheric flute sound I found to fill out the space. I just filled out some notes on there and didn't quantise it as to make it sound more natural.

This is a Wurli piano heavily in the background. It does a slight pitch bend at the start of each bar, which I programmed with the MIDI keyboard.

This is the first real 'melody of the song'. The synth sounds similar to strings but has a wider, bassier sound. I also didn't need to quantise this one since it has a lengthened attack anyways.

In automation view, you can see I have a gradual frequency sweep upwards to allow the new instruments to fade in naturally.

New keyboard part I added.

New bass part I added for new piano part.

New drums part I made for the new section.

New viola part.

New synth part.

Another new synth, I call this one the 'fire alarm' because it basically sounds like a fire alarm. It essentially ends the piece on a very strange but interesting note.