Joseph Chase aka JOE PRO

    I did not want this project to sound like some karaoke knock-off, although they make for fun nights.  I approached this with the intent to utilize all the skills acquired since the beginning of my program. I chose to use Track 2 as my base 16 bars, even though I received no reviews and responses during week 3, I felt like there was potential to expand upon.  

    From the start the beat worked in a 4/4 time signature and drove a 85 bpm.  Comfortable with acoustic sounds, I honed on the electronic set. This was also to prove a point to another classmate that had become frustrated. The goal was to create drum tracks that were lively, in other words dynamically brilliant with the illusion that some musician is actually playing the kit.  I was able to find something that knocks and has pop, the bass wasn’t far behind walking on the kick drum pattern. That bass also shifts in pitch along the Em scale.

    Ahhh! the perfect opportunity to tell you about the Harmony.  As stated before the bass shifts along the Em scale which is the exact scale that was used to construct the chord progression.  Mind you these were the most basic of chords but how they were all implemented together with the help of Sus2 and Sus4 chords.  What are those?  Sustained chords and they’ve been around forever. The use of the sustained chords, I feel gave the composition texture and color.  Overall immersing the listener into the music.

    Some other interesting and dope ideas I had were to record the salt in my  sea salt container shaking using the microphone in my lab.  Which led me to another funky idea, there is a glass bowl on one of my desk and in that bowl are tootsie pops, I just picked up the pops and dropped them in the bowl.  Boom, magic and that’s that clanky iron sound. Oh yeah and do you hear that classic “Ahhh yeah!” sample?  Eeezee PeeZee when you use the Q-Sampler in Logic to import audio loops and one shots. “If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat forever.”  The greatest skill I could’ve used to pull all this off is Synthesis. It is the ultimate alchemy.  By just equipping a bare bones synth plug-in, I was able to twist and turn knobs, slide faders to morph new sounds into existence. For instance the harmony and melody are both products of synthesis using the Sculpture synth instrument and the ES2 instrument.

    All these sounds had been really working well throughout the process but there were elements in the mix that required emphasis.  In this phase I began creating Auxiliary (Aux) Tracks.  This intention creates atmospheric elements that wouldn’t be normally present.  An Anomaly if you will.  To achieve the desired affect reverb was added to instances of drums, Stereo delay add to percussive and harmony motifs, echo to drums and samples.  

    This was a fun project for me to work through and I love the result.  Given everything that I know now there are projects that I wish I could’ve have submitted that I was working on parallel to this project.  I really do hope you have enjoyed the project and possibly learn something from all this.  I look forward to bring you more dope pieces of art.  

♣️