For this week, I gave myself what I consider to be a pretty simple task: to make a dance mix using the loops on Garageband, a MIDI keyboard, and perhaps even my microphone, but NO other instruments.
To delve into the techno genre, I gave myself another limitation: no using Garageband loops that sound like acoustic instruments. Sure, the Tabla loop sounds awesome, but using it would go against my morals. I deeply believe that if you're given a tool, you must use it for its purpose, and not pretend that it's something else. For example, when people use vintage effects on their photos, I think it looks awful. If you want an old-fashioned photo, take it on film. It's better to use digital for what it does best: crystal clear imagery and color distortion. Why pretend to make digital what it's not? This is my opinion, feel free to disagree.
And so, I immediately started off listening to the club dance beats. Garageband actually has some good quality beats to offer. Browsing through some loops, I found this eerie little piano riff. I set the piano riff as the intro to the song right before the dance beat, and the transition worked so well I almost gave myself chills.
As I continued though, I encountered some difficulties. Techno music can become very dull, very fast, unless you change things up and keep them interesting. However, some of the charm of techno music comes from its repetivity (is that a word?), so you need to have a balance.
I am no fool. I knew if I was going to the make music, I would have to listen to how other people have done it. For a while during class, I was listening to LCD Soundsystem. I only started listening to them recently, but quickly they've become one of my favorite groups. Every song they create is excellent.
A strategy I could hear in their songs was a gradual rise in intensity, in addition to the very tactful changes from one section to the next. It'd start with a drum beat, and then you'd hear a bass line, and then a chord line was added. The drum beat would change slightly, and then the bass line, and then the drum beat would change even more, and the chord line would get louder, and all of a sudden BAM! Symphony!
I tried to do that. At this point, I'm not sure if it succeeded, but I'm hoping so.
When I got home, I thought, why not try to add some vocals on this track? Instead of singing, I decided I would just tell a story instead, slam poetry style. I started googling ghost stories (for some reason the game ghosts in the graveyard was on my mind), and I found one I quite liked.
The premise is, a middle-aged widow moves to town. She always wears gloves, even indoors. Under her gloves she had a gold hand. A man asks her about it, and she explains that she lost her hand a few years ago. He decides to seduce her, and once they are married, he swiftly kills her, takes her hand, and keeps it under his pillow. Then, she comes back from the dead, possesses the hand, and chokes him to death.
Revising the diction so that it would sound more poetic, I added this upon the mix I made.
It sounds creepy.
And I kind of like it.
Tomorrow, I plan on working with mixing; playing around with panning and the other tools Luke showed me when he was mixing my album, in addition to making some of the transitions flow better. At this rate, I might be done by the end of tomorrow. And you know what that means?
I'm gonna make another one!
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