Blogging With Cyrus

This week, I was able to gain a better understanding on synths and how to make my own sounds. So for a synth, the oscillator is essentially the source, the filter acts as a modifier and lastly the amplifier is what makes it louder. Getting Right Into the Tweaking: To start off, I decided to play around with the Radio Transistor Piano a little bit. I decided to increase the Cutoff as well as the attack, decay, sustain and release in the envelope generator. It sounded something like this: For the 'Elsewhere' preset in Alchemy, I decided to increase the cutoff and the drive in the filter as well as ADSR in the envelope generator.  Going Up a Notch and Adding an Outro:  I still thought that the song was way too short so I extended it by adding an outro with a guitar solo. For the last chorus, I decided to spice things up a little bit by adding some small guitar solos. I also decided to adjust the volume pan to make it m...

Photo by Grace Oh This week, I finally got the chance to begin recording vocals for my song as well as Grace's song. For Grace's song, I decided to invite Jin Wei to sing for me as I think that he has a really soothing voice. Whereas for my song, Janice and I decided that to choose Harini for the vocals as we needed someone with a relatively soothing voice. Before Recording: To avoid the risk of overloading in Logic, I decided to bounce my project into one audio file under the 'File' section. After that, I opened a new project in the recording studio and imported the bounced audio. Before recording, I need to turn on low latency mode. I did that by right clicking on the control bar and selecting 'Customise Control Bar and Display'. From there, I just ticked on 'Low Latency Mode' and made sure it's turned on. Let The Recording Commence: Recording live vocals is a lot harder than it looks. There's lot of trial a...

This week, I've learnt that there are many elements in a song that we may not noticed, especially for the vocals. It is really common these days for vocal tracks to be doubled in order to give out a 'bigger' sound, often to attract the attention of the listener. The duplicated track will usually have different settings compared to the original track and sometimes we may not noticed this unless we take away the duplicated track and feel that something is missing. Basic Doubling:  There are a few ways to this but I'll usually just make an exact copy of the track I want to double up. For this instance, I wanted to double up the acoustic guitar. Then I started searching for sounds and effects that could be added to the duplicated track. As you can see, I've added some delay (Echo) and reverb (Chroma). I've also adjusted the EQ of the duplicated track as I want this track to be softer than the original and not clash with it. In this next clip...