Sunday 29 April 2012

How we made our music.

I was going to do this as a video post, but I've got a cold and I look like a troll so I decided against it.

When we finished editing together the first half of our coursework, we realised we needed some music to go with it. We searched for ages on creative commons to try and find a song that fit our clips, but then we couldn't find one, because we needed it to change pace at an exact moment. So, we decided to do our own, which turned out to take an absoloute age.

The first thing we needed to decide was the kind of music we wanted, and we decided that we wanted a song that felt a bit like a music-box, because they're really creepy and we wanted to make our opening creepy. So, what we did, was we went onto YouTube and typed in 'music box' and there was this really, really good song by Midnight Syndicate called Grisly Reminder and it was so good, so we decided to do something like that. Then, one day when we were all free, we went into the hall when it was empty and comandeered the spare piano that sits in the back and started putting something together. We decided just to have single, sustaining notes because it would be more atmospheric and create more tension.

Once we'd written down what we'd put together, we then had to decide what 'voice' we wanted to put it in. The keyboards have so many, and most of them were irrelevant because they didn't suit the tone (like the bassoon or the saxophone...), but we narrowed it down to either to bog standard mini-grand and two different 'voices' both called 'music box'. We then decided to go for one of the music-box ones, and the difference was only subtle, but in the end we decided to use the one that was slightly higher pitched, because it sounded creepier.

Then, we had to use GarageBand. BIG MISTAKE. The amount of cables we had to use. We had to find a midi cable for the keyboard, but then that didn't work, so we had to find an input device for the Mac, which worked a LOT better. So, after spending a good few hours trying to work that out, we finally got down to recording. This turned out to be hard, because the output decided not to work, so I couldn't hear what I was playing whilst I was playing it, but we eventually got it right. Even with that annoying metronome playing the whole time. After that was recorded, we looked at effects, but none of them seemed to work with the song, so we just left it as it was. After we saved it, iTunes decided to also break, so we had to listen to it through Final Cut Pro, so we ended up with about ten versions of the song in our sequence list.


But then it was done.


And then we had to find music for the second half. And after the hassle we went through for the first part of the opening, we decided to find some on Creative Commons. There is this song that would have been perfect called Anything by Martina Topley Bird, which was used last year in drama, but it wasn't creative commons so we had to find something like it. We found a song that was like it, called Playful Moaner by Chuck Bettis, and it was great because it progressed at the exact moment our dream sequence did. Bish bash bosh, sorted. So much easier.

 

 
 This is Anything - Martina Topley Bird. This song is so good. I love it. The distortiony sound at the beginning and the slow guitar and the instrument I can't quite pick out and the sentiment of the whole song would have worked so well and argh I just can't, it's just such a good song.

aaaaaaaaaand...


 
This is Grisly Reminder - Midnight Syndicate.

aaaaaaaand...
Playful Moaner (w/ Colleen Kinsella & Caleb Mulkerin) (Chuck Bettis & Friends) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

This is the link to say that we can use Playful Moaner.

1 comment:

  1. Add links to the music you mention, and a video embed of the Martina Topley Bird track so we can see what you had in mind.

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