Music

The big day has finally arrived and it’s time to record my Live Loop performance of God Is Smilin’ On You. Most of the performance is spontaneous and improvised, but I had some specific ideas about the start and end of the track, and a few lyrical phrases I really wanted to include.

I’m pretty happy with the way God Is Smiling On You has come together, but there is something that I feel is missing, and it’s a sense of upper register melodic movement. The original song had a repeated 4-bar synthesiser riff in counterpoint to the 2-bar bass riff, which sounded like this:

To retain some of the grittiness of The (original) Message and make my remix more sonically interesting, my track needed some “Good Dirt”. I also wanted some continuity so I added a background texture moving through the whole piece that isn’t coupled to the Live Loop scenes.

Today it was time to add some bass to my remix of The Message and I started off by checking out the original bass riff. Here’s what it sounded like, thanks to iZotope RX 8’s Music Rebalance function:

My bespoke workflow is highly intuitive, based on whatever subconscious thoughts and ideas come to me. The next idea was to use granular synthesis in Alchemy to manipulate the sound of a female orgasm. Our lecturer had taught us granular synthesis in class, so I’m sure he’ll approve, and this seems like the ideal use for it.

I wanted to use the Logic Pro X Step Sequencer for this assignment, partly because I wanted to learn how to use it, and partly because step sequencing was one of the requirements. So today I converted my MIDI drum rhythm cells to Step Sequence cells using largely the same pattern, with two changes: