TMS

This is seriously an awesome blag, like seriously awesome. Thanks to Jon I now have access to a blog with a lot of good music. Not only does it display countless incredible songs by many disco-esque, and electro music, but you can download almost all of it as well.

http://toomanysebastians.net/

Building up, bringin' it down

So after some initial playing around with the software, I discovered several techniques to better emulate techno. I realized that many things were missing from some past songs including white noise and better beats. I tried to make my drums sound like the one's in my favorite songs but it just wasn't happening. So I found some youtube videos which were very helpful:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ff0AcOsH3E&feature=related (beats)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI5IDZw8G88 (white noise)

The first was an easy alternative to making my beats sound as good. It basically tells you how to take a beat and extract its sounds. 

The second is a very quick tutorial on making white noise build up commonly found in techno.

This song was made very quickly thanks to these videos. Its essentially me just playing around with these things, and a kickin' bassline. Although I got the drum sounds from One Last Ride by John Dahlbäck, the beat pattern is my own.

The First of Many

The first of many. I played around a bit with some software (Ableton Live) and came up with this. It's simple and unedited so some work needs to be done, especially with effects. I think the genre would be experimental but I have no idea.

Classmates Blogs

From looking at other blogs, I can easily say my classmates are gonna make some awesome projects: a documentary on racial problems in our educational system and a blacksmithing project to name two. I really liked the idea of the documentary. They are quite entertaining and in conjunction with a topic as interesting as that one I can say it sounds splendid. I've thought about racial problems in my school in the past, but what interests me is how kids in other schools would deal with it. After all, we take African American History Month pretty seriously compared to other schools in our area.

This got me thinking on my final project. I could almost forget about a concert if I make a video of me and Jon making the music. Another idea I got from someone else DJing for WISE is to make an album of songs composed by us, but maybe not a music video like he's thinking of. I have to wait and see.

The Next 2 Weeks

Let the project (almost) begin.

To start off this project, I plan to spend the next two weeks collaborating with my partner in crime, Jon, on what our absolute main goals should be. We've discussed with out mentor recently about some things and thats one thing he said was a good idea; to have our goals set early and more specific. So we'll start with that over the next few days. We'll also try to experiment with the copy of Ableton Live I have and listen to a lot of music to find sounds we might want to incorporate in to our future songs.

Dear Reader,

The mystical flashing turntable welcomes you!

As do I.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed in my past is music. I’ve always enjoyed listening to music and playing around with music making software like Garageband. I've wanted to be some sort of musical artist for a while now, despite rejecting violin lessons when I was younger. I listen to a lot of electronic music and so, for a project for school, I've decided to learn how to become a DJ and produce electronic music. The point of this blog is to document my journey to become a DJ. My goals are to learn how to use a Digital Audio Workstation and incorporate some synthesizers both on and off the computer into that learning. The DAW I will be using will be my copy of Ableton Live. I will also be using a midi controller with drum pads, a keyboard, and some knobs (which I also have to learn to use). At the end of this semester, I hope to have several songs recorded from Ableton Live, and I hope to perform these songs and songs by well known artists in a concert which I will host with my friend Jon. Of course to do this I will also need to learn about audio interfaces, speakers, amps, etc.