Individual Special Study Composing- Critical Evaluation

For my final performance, I wrote, composed and produced an original song on Garage Band. An inspiration of mine, Ed Sheeran said

 "The public has heard the stereotypical love songs a million times and they've heard the stereotypical life-or-death songs millions of times. It's good to mix it up a little bit." (Kaplan:2012)

This quote inspired me to break away for popular music stereotype and my intention was to surprise the audience and keep them engaged. I did this by taking inspiration from comedian Kinne, who wrote a song called No Rhyme Rap which deliberately doesn’t rhyme. I implied swear words and then diverted the audience away by using a word that did not rhyme at all. This was effective as I seemed to make the audience laugh.

For the production of my final piece I used Garage Band. It is said that Garage Band can turn “your Mac into a fully equipped recording studio” (LeVitus, 2004:4) so I wanted to explore how I could do this as my knowledge of the software was limited. I used a tool in the application called ‘keyboard typing’ which turns your qwerty keyboard into a midi keyboard, which I was unaware of until now.  In order to input the piano part of my piece, this allowed me to play the score and for it to be inputted straight into the track. A problem I encountered with this tool, was that I could not sustain chords easily on the piano so my notes were cut short, resulting in the piece sounding not as professional. In order to use musical typing, I first thought I would have to play the chords for the duration of the piece. The problem with doing this is that, if I got one chord incorrect it would ruin the whole piece. The way I solved this was by using a tool called looping. This may have made the piece sound quantised and rigid, however it allowed the chords to play perfectly throughout which was what I was struggling to do.

 As I do not play an instrument, I feel that when I added the pre-set drums in on musical typing, it sounded mechanical and not authentic. In light of this, I could have had somebody play the drum beat and recorded it into my track; this would have helped the beat be more complex and realistic. Leonard discusses that when repeating a sequence, “Sustaining listeners interest depends on variation and development” (Leonard, 2003:5) I tried to sustain the audience by using my vocal skills to full advantage by adding vocal layers such as harmonies, augmentation and trills.

I am happy with the way my final piece went and I feel I have progressed in my song writing and also certainly improved on Garage Band. However, if I did the piece again, I could still have inputted all of the vocal layers that are included in my final piece but instead perform the main melodic line of my track live rather than have it recorded. This would allow me to add an element of live performance and like singer Gloria Rusch said, I would have the ability to “take the audience on an emotional journey and they will have a great time and never forget you.” (Rusch, 1998:59)

Bibliography

Hal Leonard Corporation (2003). Loops and Grooves: The Musician's Guide to Groove Machines and Loop Sequencers. First. ed. United States of America: Hal Leonard Corporation

Kaplan, I (2012). Redhead Redemption: Ed Sheeran. d. Interview [online]. [Accessed 10/01/2015]. Available from: <http://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/ed-sheeran/>.


Kinne, T (2014). KINNE - THE NO RHYME RAP. [online]. Available from: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TL1LGH7nwQ>. [Accessed 13/12/2014].


LeVitus, B (2004). Garage Band For Dummies. First. ed. Canada: Wiley Publishing

Rusch, G (1998). The Professional Singer's Handbook. First. ed. United States of America: Hal Leonard Corporation.

Piano Improvement

The skills I have on piano are quite basic. I can play all chords and have knowledge of music theory; however I really struggle with playing a chord and a melodic line at the same time. I have been using exercises from the book The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises in order to improve this. The book states,

“If all five finger’s of the hand were absolutely equally well trained, they would be read to execute anything written for the instrument, and the only question remaining would be that of fingering, which could be readily solved” (Hanon,1990)

The first exercise is for the acquirement of agility, independence, strength and perfect evenness in the fingers and tells you to stretch between fifth and fourth fingers of the left hand in ascending and the fifth and fourth fingers of the right hand in descending. I repeated this exercise until it was natural for me to repeat the pattern.  This was actually easy than I expected and instantly helped me with using two hands, although both hands are moving at the same pace it did help me to get used to having two hands on the piano.

The exercises proceed to get harder as you go on and you play different notes with each hand. It was hard to grasp at first but I have definitely improved by doing these exercises.  I have been trying to practice them as much as I can so that I can get better at using two hands.

Bibliograghy

CL Hanon (1900 ). In The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises. Trans. by Theodore Baker. New York : Hal Leonard Corporatio

Ed Sheeran

I can take a lot of ispiration from Ed Sheerans song writing techniques. He has not just written stereotypical songs about how much he loves someone, but he has also written songs about being angry at someone for leaving you. He has even tackled the subject of losing a child in his song "Small Bump" (Sheeran E,2012)

Ed Says that

"The public has heard the stereotypical love songs a million times and they've heard the stereotypical life-or-death songs millions of times. It's good to mix it up a little bit." (interview:2013)

I agree with what he is saying here and I think when I write my song I will steer away from too many cliche love song lyrics and possibly explore the idea of writing about a breakup. I want to maybe add some humour in my song so it is not too serious. I want to write about what you would actually say to someone if you broke up with them rather than having emotional lyrics.

Another technique I like that Ed Sheeran uses is how he sets a scene. While listening to Ed Sheeran's new album X, I noticed that he almost tells a story. For example;

"It's late in the evening
Glass on the side
I've been sat with you
For most of the night"

This allows the audience to follow along with the song and they can take what they like from it.

Bibliography
Sheeran E (2012) Small Bump Jake Gosling/Warner Music Group

Ilana Kaplan (2012). Redhead Redemption: Ed Sheeran. .. Interview [online]. [Accessed 01/01/2015]. Available from: <http://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/ed-sheeran#_>.





Garage Band

I have always seen Garage Band on the family computer and been tempted to use it. When I have tried (as seen in previous blog named ‘Song Writing’) I have only really been able to input vocals into a track and have been able to also put input a backing track from iTunes.

Seeing as my knowledge was basic to none, I decided to do some reading on garage band and the first thing I thought would help was Garage Band for Dummies! The book states that

“Garage Band is the fifth and newest iLife application: it turns your Mac into a fully equipped recording studio, complete with hundreds of realistic sounding musical instruments and audio effects, all preconfigured by experience recording engineers” (Levitus: 10)

This is suggesting that of course you can do all sorts of things with the software. Because I can’t play an instrument I thought it was would be interesting to see how you can put instrumental noises such as drums in, and this is how I started to create my track. I found basic pop drum kit noises such as a bass drum and a high hat. I put together a simple four beat’s, and the next thing I needed to know how to do was loop them. I found that to do this you simply drag the top corner of the section you wish to loop. This gave me a solid beat throughout the whole piece. For my base line I decided that I would have variation and use my own voice to create a base line, this would allow me to later use a harmony to make it sound fuller. Again with the base line, I used the looping technique that I had learnt to have this repeating throughout the piece. 

I actually decided to write my melody after I had a base and time signature created by the beat. At first I had planned on singing my piece on top of the backing track I had created on garage band but I then decided as now I am confident with layering tracks and that my goal was to get better with garage band, I would give myself the challenge of recording the whole thing on Garage Band.  This allowed me to add adlibs and harmonies on the track similar to a normal studio recorded track.

Bibliography

Bob LeVitus (2004). Garage Band For Dummies. First. ed. Canada: Wiley Publishing.