My aim over Easter is to continue my work. Since I have time, I want to continue to push and get work done. So this week I’ll be continuing my topic research.
PROBLEM SOLVING
At the moment I have found that I don’t have the motivation to do much practical work. This may be due to the fact that I am not in a college environment and surrounded by distractions. Also, it doesn't help that we are renovating rooms in our house that are causing loud noise making it hard for me to record anything.
So for now I am going to focus on my topic research until the end of this month and then focus on recording ‘Sad Steph’ and mixing ‘Happy Steph’.
WEEK 7
This week I finished the Scales and Intervals section of my topic research, writing about the devil’s interval and briefly mentioning Pythagoras.
After I completed that section, I started the next section of my topic research, Instruments and Audio Effects.
I started with instruments and talked about/did research on:
The different instrument families
Timbre
Playing techniques - Wanted to include how different playing techniques can change the tone of an instrument, even if it’s slight. Incorporated my different playing techniques experiment.
All things that should be taken into consideration when producing a song.
PRACTICAL SKILL
To help explain the sound of a devil’s interval I recorded a video of me playing guitar, playing an example in a small riff and also chords. I just hooked up my guitar to my amp and recorded through my phone.
When talking about different playing techniques I had the idea of using my own experiment that I did earlier this year. However, reviewing the video showed me that the listener didn’t have time to compare each technique as the sections for each were short.
So I decided to re-do the experiment and had the same results. This time I played my ‘Sad Steph’ melody for each technique, playing the melody and the chords. This was an improvement to my previous attempt as each technique was played longer and you have more of a chance to analyse each technique.
WEEK 8
After finishing research and writing about instruments. I moved on to talk about Audio Effects. I talked about:
The different forms of audio effects(pedals, rack unit and VSTs) and showing pictures of each.
The different types of effects (distortion, compression, chorus etc). I gave detail on how they sounded and where they might be used.
I also included links to websites showcasing free VSTs
At the end of the Instruments and Audio Effects topic page I gave some IRL examples to explain my choice in instruments and effects whilst trying to explain my thought process and explain my choices. I used two examples: my foley project and ‘Emotional Thing’. I thought this would be a good way to tie up the section.
RESEARCH
Throughout both weeks I was doing constant research, looking through my old notes, finding example videos and linking useful videos I used. I also incorporated pictures, my own knowledge and used my old projects as examples.