Tranquil To Turmoil

For our turmoil to tranquil soundscape piece I consider myself very fortunate to be in the group I was. I thought we all got along well and cooperated well as a team. We had a shared idea for what would be beneficial to the piece, yet at the same time it was pleasing to see how; whilst still keeping the core idea of the track, we were each able to demonstrate our musical strengths and background. For example I like how Luke’s 30 second build up was EDM influenced which made sense as a build up to Joey’s electronic heavy dubstep part. We agreed that if we kept some core ideas and sounds a constant throughout, especially the tempo, that we could hopefully pull off separating this track between us without making it sound like 3 different songs. This piece after all was designed to be in sections.. Tranquil build up, Turmoil, then Tranquil calming.

My particular part was the ending tranquil section, I was happy with the end sound. I am vastly less experienced than the rest of the group but I enjoyed the satisfaction and pride you feel when building something up yourself. But listening to the other parts which I was very happy with, I am definitely eager to learn more and discover what more you can do with sound.

I have no past experience in something like this so my self evaluation may be slightly, well wrong. There’s a lot I know I can do better which I will address after, but I can’t help but be happy because it’s something new for me and I’ve managed to complete it to a standard that myself and my group appear to be happy with. I listen to a lot of trip hop ish bands such as Massive Attack or Flying Lotus and I guess the part I worked on has a chilled experimental trip hop influence. I expect a lot of feedback on where I could improve but I look forward to it because doing something like this is fun, it allows you to be creative and so any way I can improve and learn more doing something I thoroughly enjoy I look forward to. I also feel I understand how you can use EQ and inserts both for something that NEEDS to be done in the audio, but also you can use them with a lot of creative freedom for the sound that you want.

I definitely had things I could have posted on the blog along the way, but didn’t. This is something I will definitely need to improve upon in any future projects similar to this. Time management was a key factor in this and I think I will have to improve how I manage all the modules and the different deadlines, to ensure I deliver the best possible final product. I also feel I worked slowly on the pro-tools software, but this pace did increase each week and with further practice I will hopefully be able to be smoother in this software and similar ones that have the same principles.

For this module I was tasked to make a soundscape within a group of 3-4. I ended up working with Luke Scott and Charlie Thorne and we decided to make a Musical Concrète soundscape called Tranquil to Turmoil which focused on the contrast between tranquil sounds and turmoil; calm and chaotic. The first assignment for this task was to make a powerpoint presentation to pitch our initial idea for our soundscape, Tranquil to Turmoil. This gave me an insight into what it was going to be like to work as a group, organising group meetings to work on the work, preparation, research etc.

Once we had completed assignment one we then had to actually go about and create the soundscape. This meant more organising time together as a group to discuss the sounds we wanted to capture, where we were going to record and when we were to record. Once this was all done, again, it was all about finding a time to meet to work on our soundscape together. The majority of the time we worked individually and then met to show each what we had which actually worked incredibly well.

Over the course of this module we were taught how to use Pro-Tools which was great because at the beginning I knew nothing about Pro-Tools and now I can safely safe that I would be more than comfortable working within Pro-Tools. Another great thing about being Pro-Tools is that it meant everyone in our group could use Pro-Tools so that meant integrating individual different sections of the soundscape could be done much easier.

As well as making the actual soundscape we also had to manage a blog and post to it every time we worked on something for the final piece. I did the majority of the posting to the blog, however I never posted on the same day in which I worked on something. I would rather begin the post with the actual date I did work on something, this was easier for me as it meant I could spend a few days reflecting on what I had done and I could form it into words focusing on mentioning the more important aspects and ignoring the irrelevant. Looking back at the blog I wish I posted every time I learnt something knew in a workshop when working with Pro-Tools as this would have been a great indication for my learning over the course of the past few weeks.

I feel like my weakness in this project was not knowing Pro-Tools which was very quickly solved with the workshops. Another weakness is the fact that I am not the biggest of fans when it comes to working in a group and would much prefer to work as an individual. However I feel like I overcame this struggle and managed to come together with my group, taking in ideas and giving feedback to them to produce a piece at the very end that we were all happy with.

-Joseph Cooper

Friday 15th December

This was our last group meeting. We spent a couple of hours together working on our individual pieces, mine being from 30 seconds to 1 min 30. Once we all were nearly finished we listened to everyone’s individual piece and gave feedback to each other. Once we finalised each individual piece we exported them and pieced them together into one final Pro-Tools project. In this project we used different sounds from each others work to make risers and sweeps to make transitioning between the pieces sounds more coherent. When everything was finished the final piece was exported as a stereo MP3 at 320 kbps.

Once that was done we decided to go away and write a timing script for the part we individually worked on because that made the most sense. When everyone had finished their script it was sent to me and I compiled all the documents into one word document, which contained the blog link as well. I then put this document and the finished soundscape MP3 into a zipped folder and correctly named it.

-Joseph Cooper

Firstly in this unit we have had the task to create a Soundscape piece along with pitching our initial ideas for this unit. Our group chosen the title Tranquil to Turmoil which is a music concrete, meaning that we will be creating a piece of music out of sounds which we will find in public. As a couple of us already produce Electronic Music we thought when we process it through Pro Tools (software) we’ll create a Electronic type of track.

I was given the introducing 30 seconds of Tranquil to come up with a piece for. In this I used a lot of sounds coming from water sources and as it was going to lead into a heavy drop with dubstep type of sounds my piece ventured towards a long fast buildup containing Tranquil sounds. All of our group contributed when walking out into the public and recording sounds, this was done by meeting up for 2 hours and recording the whole of the route which we walked and from there edited the audio and kept the sounds which we liked for our piece.

In this task I feel that my strengths was mainly based on the producing side rather than the pitch, recordings and blog. My producing contained water droplets sampled to the keyboard with different effects, one to create the melody and the other to create the chords. Then the rushing water was used as ambience to have a background sound constantly going. Also we had given a sample drum beat which I added some claps to so that I could manipulate this even more and create more of a buildup. Along with this I found a truck going past and a drill sample which I edited to create a couple of risers. Finally I found a vocal from the elevator so like any electronic track before the drop there is a pre drop phrase which I added “lift going down”.

My weaknesses on this task was my knowledge of Pro Tools and the blog. I am use to Cubase 8 and Logic Pro X but I didn’t find Pro Tools as easy. Some softwares you enjoy for different reasons but I did not like Pro Tools sampling system so I did find producing this on Pro Tools quite hard but I still enjoyed it. Also I wished that I wrote some posts on the blog as this has been my only contribution on the blogs. Although Joey has been keeping up a weekly up to date blog I haven’t contributed to it so this is something which I will improve upon in the future.

To conclude I have very much enjoyed this module as although I said I did not like Pro Tools this task is still based on production and thats where my specialties in music and Audio Production lies. I feel that our end product has been a great success because everyone has had a task on the producing side and we have all worked really well together.

Tuesday 12th December

Our group met up to share out the audio files that had been recorded previously. Once this had been done the project was then divided up between the three of us. Before the meeting I had worked out that if we were to make our soundscape at 152BPM and it be 76 bars long then it would be exactly 2 minutes. This is good because our soundscape features two main concepts, Turmoil and Tranquil. This way each concept could have exactly one minute each, exactly 38 bars each, meaning because we chose to do a music concrète piece then the rhythm could stick to 4/4 without there being any weird timing issues.

The way that we split up our project is that I would work on creating the turmoil section and Charlie and Luke would work on the Tranquil section. The Tranquil section would then be split up into two 30 second sections, an intro and an outro. When this was all decided we all started to work on our own individual sections.

I managed to create a small 2 bar drumbeat for the Turmoil section using a kick of a bin as a kick drum, a metal pole being struck in a large open space for a reverberated snare and then a beep from a lift as percussion.