Newsgroups: rec.music.synth
Date:         Tue, 7 Apr 1992 08:12:02 PDT
From:         Peter Uchytil <kentrox!ktxs8!peter@UUNET.UU.NET>
Subject:      A little writing, a little mixing
Comments: To: uunet!auvm.american.edu!synth-l@uunet.UU.NET

It has come time for another of my mom's music programs.  Just in case you
don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain.  My mom is an elementary
music teacher who is into MIDI.  Mom's MIDI setup is not as extensive as mine,
however, so she has me do some work for her.  If you remember your grade school
days, you will probably recall having to go stand in the gym and sing one or
two songs, usually accompanied by the piano.  Well, with the advent of
affordable (as long as you can sweet talk the bank :-)  synthesizers, Mom has
really gotten into doing entire accompaniments.  The kids like it better, it
lets her get away from the piano, and the parents are kind of impressed.  What
follows now is a sharing of my experiences in this process of writing/arranging.

My mom's biggest drawback is that she doesn't believe she can write very well,
so she asked me to do the accompaniment for a song called "Hand to Hand".
This song was performed at the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Olympics.  The
class she is working with right now is studying Korea, so she picked this
song to sing.  Mom came and gave me the sheet music she had, which was basically
just a fake arrangement.  She didn't have a recording of the song, but she
said she wanted a soft rock ballad sound.  Since all I had to go on was the
melody and the chord progressions, this proved to be a challenge.  I know that
some of you out there could probably whip out something good in an evening,
but I'm still a wee beginner.

For the longest time I couldn't think of anything to do with it.  I had the
chords, and I had the melody, but nothing was coming.  I tried out a few drum
patterns, but nothing clicked.  I decided that maybe the sounds I was using
were causing me problems, so I started tweaking presets.  Ok, ok, before
people jump all over me, yes, I use presets.  Why?  Well, I don't usually
have the time to dig into programming because I'm not that good at it yet.
I realize the limitations of this, but facts are facts.  I only had so much
time.  That said, I actually ended up doing a lot of *minor* changes that
really improved things.  The first of which was softening the backing chords.

Ok, now I have some chords I can live with and a melody.  Oh, it seems
important to say that the melody is actually the singing part.  The kids aren't
sophisticated enough to be able to carry the tune by themselves (hell, *I* can't
do it either!), so the singing melody always needs to be in the mix, and
fairly up front.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, melody and chords.  Next I added a
bass part.  Good fretless bass sound.  I wanted to get the low end taken care
of, so I just did a real simple bass line.  We're talking about one note per
chord change.  Sometimes there would be a little more motion, but not much.
I was all worried that this bass part was too simplistic and would be quite
boring, but I left it to work on later.

Next came the chorus.  Here I changed the sound for the chords to a pad+piano.
That was ok, but something was really missing.  I decided to go into unknown
territory and try and program a sound on my borrowed Ensoniq ESQ-M.  I was
surprised that I actually got it to work!  It was a real basic patch - a couple
sawtooths with the filter modulated by the MOD wheel.  I even figured out
how to get all this to work using the SQ2 as a master keyboard.  Ok, again,
this is the first time I've done this so I was pretty excited.  Now I was able
to give the chorus much more motion by sweeping the filter on the ESQ from
about 1/3 open to all the way open.  Made a really nice "swelling" sound.

Hmmm, this is getting rather long, isn't it?  Let's pick it up.  Next were
some tries at drum patterns again which failed.  For a couple days I just
put it all away and listened to other stuff.  When I cam back things were
easier.  Now this part I'm kind of proud of, so I'll explain it.  The song
form is basically ABABC, where A is the verse, B is the chorus, and C is the
coda (mom always cuts songs up a little, like eliminating solos and some
other things.  For example, the sheet music said A B1 A B2 A C). For A1, there
are no drums. B1's drums (big rock reverb from hell drums) are kick on 1
followed by snare on the next 1.  A quarter note closed hat pattern is
continuous.  There's some obligitory tom fills in there, too.  A2 has a new
high hat pattern.  This was neat, I put strong clicks on quarter notes, and
light hits on the upbeats.  I usually alternate between 7 and 8 (the SR-16
only has 8 volume levels) when doing high hats, but for this I used like 3
and 7.  Of course there were some other random values to keep a better feel.
Then there's a little shaker part that comes in on the last two eigths of a
measure.  So, this has the effect of pushing the song a little.  When B2
rolls around, I take the rhythm for B1 and A2 and combine them.  This kept
the continuity going and really sounded neat.  At C the rhythm picks up
more because the melody slows down and the song had a tendency to drag.  Until
I found the trick of B1 & A2 for B2, the change at C was too abrupt, but now
it sounds smooth.

Geez, this *is* getting long.  Ok, quickly: the song is almost complete, but
I started worrying about the bass (oh, I forgot, I did add some bells to the
verses to give some variety of sound).  It fit ok, but it seemed simple.  I
wanted it to *do* something.  Then, I read an article in Bass Player magazine
where they had this roundtable discussion between studio players and someone
made the comment: "80% of the time I'm playing BASS.  That's my job."  It
really made me think and remember that what I'm creating is a _song_.  The
bass did it's supporting role very well, so I left it alone.

The last thing I added was another new area for me: guitar.  Yeah, I know,
this is rec.music.*synth*, but the way I look at it is, I like the sound of
guitar and rather than spend forever synthesizing it, just learn to play
guitar.  I once saw Howard Jones do and incredible guitar solo on a keyboard
and all I could think was: what a waste.  I mean yeah, it's neat to be able
to do it, but I mean this was *perfect* and the time it must have taken... just
hire a guitarist!  Anyways, I thought the ending needed something extra, so
I played around and found that I could double the melody for the last two
bars and it sounded really neat.  I did a slide up, played like 5 notes, and
slid down (this is a major accomplishment for me since this is the first
"real" thing I've ever done with guitar).  I then doubled the guitar part and
panned the two a little bit apart and wound up with a very full sounding part.
It really makes the end of the song :-)

Most of the music for this program is pre-recorded, so I had time to spend
doing all this.  One last comment: I did most (not all yet) of the parts in
real-time into the sequencer.  I found that step-entry was just too sterile.
BUT, I found out that it takes work to get the rhythm right.  With the guitar,
when I did a quick demo, I was just a little late on one note and people's
reaction was that the whole guitar part sounded awful.  When I corrected it,
they liked it.  People never remember it if it's done right, but will always
remember it if it's wrong.

Now for yet another venture into uncharted territory.  At the performance, I'm
going to try and record it through my tape deck/mixer (one of those bizarre
Sansui 6 tracks).  That should be interesting, but it would be great to have
a recording :-)  If you've made it this far, I hope it wasn't too boring.
Thanks for listening....

Pete
--
Peter Uchytil       | Kentrox Industries | "Don't give up on desire
uunet!kentrox!peter | Portland, Oregon   |  And you will have your day"
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth