Matt Woodside
My name is Matt Woodside. I am from Merritt Island, Florida. I graduated in 2000, and am single as a 99 cent cheeseburger from Wendy's. I play basketball, and am going to try out for the UCF team. I have 2 parents, 2 brothers (younger), a dog named Nikkee, and two cats (I just call them "cat"). I play the guitar, piano, french horn, and trumpet. I go to Baptist Collegiate Ministries here at UCF, and don't know what I'm majoring in. Nice to meet you.
Edgar Varese is called the “father of electronic music", and for good reason. He was a big promoter of electronic music in America and Paris. After composing “Ameriques” and some other pieces of music in the U.S., he moved to Paris from New York and wrote “Ionisation”, a piece that was written only for percussion. After he wrote this piece, he wrote a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bell Laboratories to ask for the money to start an electronic music studio.
He then wrote a piece called “Ecuatorial” which featured parts for an electronic instrument called the theramin. The theramin was invented by Leon Theramin in 1919. It generated sound by two high frequency radio signals and the player would alter the pitch of the sound by moving his arms around the antennas. Confident that he would receive the grant, he moved back to New York. “Ecuatorial” premiered in 1934 and was conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky.
He then moved to Sante Fe, San Francisco, and Las Angeles. But he was disappointed because he learned that Leon Theramin moved to Russia and Varese had planned on working with him to refine the theramin. He promoted the theramin in the west and did demonstrations with it at various locations including New Mexico University.
With the development of the tape recorder, he was able to compose electronic pieces such as “Deserts” for wind instruments, percussion and tape, and “Poem Electronique” which was premiered at Brussels Exposition in 1958. Near the end of his life, he worked on many pieces that were themed around night and death, including his unfinished “Nocturnal”.
PROJECT
As a producer, I want a theme song for a new action/adventure movie coming out. I want it to sound something like Indiana Jones/Jarassic Park/Lord of the Rings. It should have a John Williams brassy type sound.
The project that I am doing as a composer is for Travis. I am doing the new digital THX sound that is seen at the movies before the movie starts.
I used Emerson Saw, Distance, and Final Dawn as my sounds.
SYNTHESIZER HOMEWORK
The JoMox SunSyn is an analog, mutlitimbral and programmable synthesizer. It is one of the newest ones on the market and will cost you a big chunk of change if you want to buy it - $3,300 to be exact. It is a very exciting machine to use.
The SunSyn is an 8 voice synthesizer. There are also 4 voice and 6 voice models available. It has many features. There are two analog oscillators (VCO's) per voice. And just because this machine is all analog doesn't mean that it has the same typical sound found in other analog synthesizers. This is because of the Ramp Controlled Oscillators (RCO's). The RCO's make SunSyn the first synthesizer to be able to play complex digital waveforms with the anazlog VCO timbre. There are two RCO's for each voice as well. The RCO and the VCO are are identical in the fine tunings used for each voice, which makes for a truly unique sound not found on any other synthesizer. But it is also possible to give the RCO's their own pitch, which means there are two RCO's for each voice as well, which makes four oscillators for each voice.
There is also a filter section, which features a fully configurable 4 pole analog filter. One can adjust the lowpass, highpass, and bandpass. Crossfading is also possible from a Moog 4-pole to an 18 dB/octave 303 lowpass to an Oberheim 2-pole filter without steps.
There are two envelopes that are very fast and one can be inverted.
The SunSyn also features two LFO's per voice. The waveforms represented are triangle, saw, rectangle, and sample/hold. The LFO rate will go as high as 1 kHz, and as low as 0.2 Hz.
The SunSyn is a beast at modulation. It has a new system called The Routing System. The Routing System makes for an incredible number of possible modulations. There are four Routing Elements per voice, which makes for 4,096 possible modulations per voice.
The SunSyn also has an LCD display screen. It has four soft controllers to select the waveforms and for master editing.
The SunSyn also has a knob for each of the 40 most important MIDI parameters. It also has a PCMCIA card slot to store waveforms and sounds. It holds up to 16 MB.
It has a sterio-in that can control voltages and be used for external audio. Each voice has its own output. The SunSyn uses 110/230 volts.
As you can see, the JoMox SunSyn is a very innovative and powerful machine.
FRUITYLOOPS
FruityLoops is a looping software synthesizer specializing in producing techno and hip-hop beats. Most refer to it as a drum machine. It is the number one looping and song creation software on the net. When starting out on FruityLoops, the software interface will appear. When starting a song, first you must decide on which drum kit you want. There are 18 drum kits available on the scrolling menu on the left of the screen. They include such drum kits as Rebirth, Acoustic, 808, Electro, and CR78. Each one supplies different default percussion instruments into the step sequencer. Once you have picked your drum kit, you can change the amount of bars in the sequencer and the beat length. Click under Options, and go down to Song Settings and choose the desired lengths. The bar length is how long the sequencer plays until it loops. There is a tempo changer near the top under volume knob. Here you can change how fast or slow you want your piece to move. If you want more instruments than are given to you in the drum kit, scroll down on the instrument menu on the left and find one. Once you have found one, right click it. It will then appear in on the bottom of the step sequencer. If you want to replace an instrument that’s on the sequencer already, the highlight it by clicking the circle to the right of the instrument (channel) tab, making it green. Then right click on the instrument from the scroll menu. It will replace that instrument on the sequencer. To deselect the channel, just right click on it once it’s green. If none are selected and you right click on an instrument from the menu, it will go to the bottom of the sequence channels.
Once all that is taken care of, you are ready to start sequencing. The sequencer is designed by having squares in rows, one row for each instrument. If your song is 8 bars with 4 beats, there will be 32 squares. After each 4 beats, the squares alternate colors from gray to maroon to help you see where the new bars begin. Wherever you want the sequencer to play notes for a certain instrument, click on those boxes. The boxes will turn a light version of the color they originally were. For example, if you wanted to have your 808 BD (bass drum) play all quarter notes, then you would click on every fourth box. If you wanted the 808 SD (snare drum) to play off the beat, then you would skip two squares in the beginning of the sequence and click the next box, then every fourth box after that. Then when you play the pattern, you will have the bass drum playing a note, then the snare, then the bass, and so on.
There are things called patterns. Patterns are the different sequences you write, and you put the patterns together to make a song in the Playlist. The pattern selector is under the tempo changer. Once you are done making the first pattern, click on “2” on the pattern selector, and write what you want on that pattern. You can copy different parts of one pattern and bring them to another. Just highlight the instruments that have the line(s) of sequencing you want to duplicate. If you want to copy more than one channel, right click on the circles to the right of the channel tab. Click Edit, then Copy. Click on the pattern number where you want to paste it, then hit Paste.
You can change the settings for each instrument and for each note in your sequence. To change the settings of the channel, click on that instrument tab in the sequence. A settings box will come up, and you can change things like the overall volume of the channel, pitch, pan, effects, envelope, filter, LFO, and effects delay. You can formulate the channel to sound how you want it. Once you have written your pattern, you can change the settings of each note you write. At the top right hand of the sequencer, there are two icons. One looks like an equalizer, and one looks like a piano. The equalizer icon allows you to change the pan, volume, filter cut, filter res, pitch, and shift of each note. The piano icon brings up a piano that spans 11 octaves where you can change the pitch of each note very accurately.
Once you have made patterns that you are satisfied with, you are now ready to put them into a progressive sequence. Click on View, then Playlist. The Playlist is where you direct your piece of music by delegating where each pattern will play and how long it will repeat. On the left of the Playlist is the list of patterns, and at the top are the bar numbers. The bars represent time. Each row represents a pattern. It makes a grid, and you fill in the boxes next to the corresponding patterns at the time you want them to play. You can layer different patterns on top of each other. For example, if you have an underlining bass drum for a techno piece, you would want to make one pattern of just the bass drum beat so you can fill it in continuously across the Playlist. Then you would layer different patterns on top of it. There is a Loop Indicator which is right above the first pattern’s row. If you have not indicated where you want the song to loop, it will loop at the last bar used. This shows were the song will loop. The Play Position Marker shows where the song is in the progression. You can move it to start at different parts of your song.
Once you have done this, you have successfully made a song. You can save the song in different formats: MIDI, MP3, and WAV. Click on Save, then change it to the format you want it to be saved in. It will then bring up the converter, and you can change the settings to what you want them to be. The WAV settings go from 16Bit to 32Bit. The MP3 settings go from 32Kbit to 320Kbit. Once you have saved it as one of those preferably two formats, you are now ready to burn the track onto a CD. And that’s the process on how to make a song and produce it onto a CD using FruityLoops.
Edgar Varese-The Father of Electronic Music
Edgar Varese- From Wikipedia
VINTAGE SYNTH
JOMOX
EARTHLINK
Send E-Mail to: woodcyde45@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 Matt Woodside. All Rights Reserved