The Kingdom

[kingkoppola]

Blasting Off Again Process Video

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Pop Song Process Video #2 (Music Tech 2)

[kingkoppola]

This piece I originally put together with the intention of adding MIDI melodies on top, but after reflection I realized that it was way too busy for that, so I abandoned that plan in favor of just finishing it using loops. I have to say I'm very happy with this decision, it freed me up to focus on mixing and editing the parts I already had, which ended up really enhancing the song. The biggest thing I did was add reverb to the main guitar/sitar/whatever it is part, which opened up the space and made the whole piece sound more natural. I'm pretty proud of it, hope everyone likes listening to it!

[kingkoppola]

What's up everybody? So this one is a slower, more low-key song than most of my others. I wrote this one because I wanted a song where I wrote my own bass line, which I've done here. Listen for the end of the bass loop, I keep it on the leading tone for a while and it sounds badass. This is my first successful foray into writing my own parts using MIDI's on Garageband, which I found to be way easier than I expected. This particular "instrument" I really liked because it had that kind of pulse behind it already, allowing me to use a really mellow drumbeat that wouldn't be too busy and take away from the awesome lines in the vibes and bells. I also played around with editing the beat here, you can hear towards the end I take out everything but the snaps, then add in what I think it some sort of high-hat, before taking out the beat entirely. I used the snap sample again at the end, as well as the starting tonic chord played on the vibes. Add a good amount of reverb to that and you've got a pretty solid ending, I think. Enjoy!

[kingkoppola]

Hey guys, so here's another one of my songs. Here, I took some samples of Team Rocket and some of Pikachu from the Pokemon TV show, put tons of reverb on them, and made it awesome. My idea here was more a soundtrack than a song, trying to emulate a battle between Team Rocket and Ash and Pikachu. As a general rule, the strings loops represent Team Rocket while the electronic loops are for Pikachu. I also changed the ending from what I originally had. I started with a fade-out on Team Rocket, as if they truly were blasting off. But instead I replaced that with that sample of Pikachu laughing, which I think sounds so awesome and mildly creepy with all that reverb on it and makes an awesome way to end the piece. Hope you enjoy it!

[kingkoppola]

Heyy there internet. So this is a song I put together using entirely garageband loops. Personally, I think it's pretty awesome. This one was actually a lot of fun to make. I love how the different kinds of voices fit together (I used loops from piano, southern rock organ, and electronic bass, beats, and synth). The piano and bass lines in the verses are probably my favorite, the way their rhythms and melodies come together and apart sounds really cool. I didn't even realize that happened until I played them together, I was just picking loops at random that I enjoyed. Which, with something like Garageband, is kind of the coolest and most fun way of doing it, right? Well hope you enjoy, there'll be more where this came from!

[kingkoppola]

What's up everybody? So these are a couple of chart/diagram things I put together showing some structural stuff about one of my favorite holiday songs, "Merry Christmas, Kiss My Ass" by All Time Low. In the top one you can see where instruments lie in the soundscape of the recording, with vocals being most prominent in the front and quieter more subtle parts like glock in the back. The guitar and chimes are doubled on both sides because the recording uses some stereo effects, with voices moving from one speaker to the other.

The second is a flow-chart of A) song structure and B) where instruments come in and out. A black box indicates that the instrument is heard during this section of the song, white means it's absent. The audio sample at the end is my favorite part, some recording of a man just saying "Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Kiss my ass. Kiss his ass. Happy Hanukah." Perfect.

[kingkoppola]

Here's the soundcloud of just the audio. Take a listen, it definitely sounds better (I think) than the video's audio.

[kingkoppola]

Vlog-Type-Thing #1: Audio Recording

What's up everybody? This is my first vlog-type-thing for my Music Tech Practicum here at NYU. This is a documentation of my audio recording of a little mashup I put together last semester of Cups from Pitch Perfect and A Capella by Karmin. Hope you like it!

I thought it went pretty awesomely, to be honest. The recording came out pretty cool, with the vibrations from the cup on the table coming through the microphone, it made it more percussive I think. I have a great love for iPhone microphones.