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Kushagr

Introduction to Experimental Electronic Music Daily Journal

Day 1

For the first day of the workshop, I had gone to the lab just for an introductory session with Rahul. After the initial chat, he introduced me to the world of electronically produced sound through synthesizers. In front of me at the table, there was an Arturia analog synth and multiple blocks of modular synths. And now I had many questions. In the discussion that followed, I learned about oscillators (voltage-controlled) that produce multiple kinds of waves that then go through various filters and then to an amplifier for us to hear that sound. I also had a brief discussion with him on how we can incorporate experimental sound to my design practice. We talked about the application of psychoacoustics in cars and in voice assistants. To conclude this session Rahul explained to us the multiple uses of a mixer in live sessions and while recording. This part was a bit intimidating for me as there were a lot of technical sound-recording terms that I was hearing for the first time.

I also discussed my focus goals for this workshop with Rahul. I told him about the kind of music that I like to create - writing lyrical melodies and singing them along with an acoustic guitar. One of my goals from this workshop is to be able to compose these written tracks on Ableton and add multiple arrangements to them to convert them from raw-acoustic sounding tracks to well-produced songs.

Day 2

The second day was the first proper session we had as a class. Here, we all set up our Ableton Sessions workflow to make an arrangement out of four MIDI and Audio tracks. It took me some time to fully understand the sessions view and why we are using it as I was used to working in the Arrangement view which works in the order of left to right for each track. In the Sessions view, it is ideal for jamming and creating stuff as you can store multiple tracks in each midi or audio panel and play with the order in a horizontal top to bottom manner. While choosing the sounds we as a group also learnt about ADSR i.e attack - decay - sustain - release. These four terms are basically the multiple parts of a sound envelope. These parameters are measured in seconds (or milliseconds). Attack is the time taken to reach the peak from zero, decay is the time taken to reach a sort of average level from the peak. This average level is the sustain and further down from there to zero is the release. The magical thing about this information is that through this I can replicate any sound if I can take a look at its envelope. I had always heard this term ADSR but now I had a better idea of how it works. This led me to my second goal that I want to achieve from this workshop - I want to compose purely electronic tracks on Ableton using samples, loops and creating a unique sound. The way I see it, I want to create the whole layered instrumental track with chords, bass, percussion first (digitally) and then add vocal melodies and lyrics to it after.

Day 3

This day we didn’t have a group session, it was a more informal and individual learning session where we discussed how we can layer our tracks and add more melodies in each midi track to have a solid base to create from. While I was working on my tracks, I observed the melodies being played and looped by Rahul on his midi. The notes were all scattered over multiple octaves - there were very low notes suddenly followed by higher ones and this gave a very interesting sound. It reminded me of Owl City’s firefly and so over the chords I had created, I also tried mapping notes with the same effect. After a few tries, I mapped the notes which sound decent and then I discussed this with Rahul. He told me that there is this effect in the software that does all this for us. So then I used this effect Random which picks some notes based on Chance and puts them to a higher/lower octave. This gave me a very happy and bouncy kind of melody that went very well with the other instruments in the arrangement.

Day 4

This was the week’s last group session and we were going deeper into the multiple uses of sessions view. For this, we were looking at the multiple properties of any selected clip and discussing the various uses of all the options provided by Ableton. The most interesting out of these was the Launch mode. Basically what it does is that it has various ways to launch a track - trigger, repeat, gate and toggle. All these methods give out different effects while playing out live almost as a dj performance. The main part of this mode is the Follow Action button, through which you can automate in which manner all the created tracks will play out of that selected midi/audio channel. You can even randomize the order of tracks and this gives out very interesting and fun arrangements. I recorded the random tracks that were playing out using another midi channel and got a new melody that had even more scattered notes which exaggerated my desired effect. I also used to wonder about the two "send" knobs then I was explained what those are. It reminded me of the series and parallel circuits in school physics where the send/return signals should be put in so that you can add delay or whatever fx you want separately to the track and to the master.