Podcast: “March Upon The Black”

[Originally posted at RamblingLibrarian]

My first attempt at an “orchestrated” piece, something along the lines of Pachelbel’s Canon:

March Upon The Black
4mins 59 secs

Didn’t quite turn out that way though, but not a total disaster either. There are 17 layers for this, with the major ones being the orchestral strings.

The String section at the top (those indicated as “locked”, i.e. with the green lock icon turned on) are the basic melody for the entire song. At certain sections, I shifted the pitch (up or down 12) for variation. I had to lock those 7 tracks; if not GarageBand kept prompting me that some tracks could not be played (lack of RAM). I guess simply too much complexity to handle. Either that or I need to add another 1GB of RAM…

The last 4 tracks are also the orchestral strings, but they played a different melody. To the astute observer, you’ll notice that near the end part, the tracks are layered and stacked together and actually they are the same track that’s copied and shifted in pitch. End effect was that I had something close to the “canon” technique, with the same tune but different tones.

In the middle you’ll see a “Rock Kit” track. That’s the track for the marching drums, which I created from scratch. There was extensive editing to have the drum beats inline with everything else.

One difficult aspect to this track was the tempo. The overall tempo was set at 110 but the strings didn’t really follow that tempo strictly (I was improvising at the beginning). So I had to extensively edit the subsequent drums and other strings to try and match the tempo. I did this by splitting the track, adjusting it to match the underlying track tempo… hard work.

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Podcast: Original soundtrack for my “I Am Singaporean” podcast

I created this original piece for the “I Am Singaporean” meme. It’s a background track to which I added the vocals later. This track has no vocals and has minor extras (like the bells, chimes) compared to the spoken version:

I Am Singaporean (SoundTrack) Ivan Chew 2006
3mins 35 secs

There are 10 tracks in total, mostly the orchestral string pieces:

I started by playing around with the software track (using the “Musical Typing” option, i.e. play using the keyboard) and once I was happy with a basic underlying tune for the strings, I created other String tracks to match that underlying track. I guess you have to hear it but I’m too lazy to upload the individual pieces, so try to imagine : )

In short, I composed the piece by mucking around. Heh.

[Also posted at RamblingLibrarian]

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