Aug 26, 2012
Here my piece has been converted to score by Logic.
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Here my piece has been converted to score by Logic.
After finishing my piece as part of the standard i had to convert it in to score. I did this by importing all the Reason tracks in to Logic on a Mac computer. This meant I had each instrument as a separate track in Logic as showen here.
Here is my final piece for the standard 23730 40 Bar Hip Hop Remix.
23730 40 Bar Evaluation
Our third and last assignment under the 23730 standard was the 40 bar piece. Again we would be using Reason for this piece and we would also be using Reaper. The task was to make a remix of the song Marian. We had two versions of it to choose from but terry recommended using both to get a high mark. One of the versions was a Goth genre version and one was a Bossanova version. So these were going to be interesting to mix together. As well using sample‘s from these song we also had to use about 8 different instruments to get excellence not including the samples. This was going to provide a good challenge and I was ready to get going.
Because I was away for the first week of term in Austria I was a little behind when I got back so I had to get cracking. Terry recommended that we pick a genre we want to remix the song to and try and stick to that. I decided to do Hip Hop and after doing a bit of research I was ready to get going. After listening to some Hip Hop songs I decided I wanted my piece to start with the sample fading in from muffled. First I had to upload the songs in Reaper and listen through them to find which parts I wanted to sample. I decided to start with the Goth version by Sisters of Mercy because this one at the time seemed easier to remix over because it was more bland. I decided I wanted to use the start of this one and so cut it out using reaper and then put it in to Reason and played it through the NN-XT. After doing this with no trouble I decided I wanted to make a Hip Hop beat using the Kong machine. After jamming for a bit I started to realise this was a much more difficult assignment than the previous ones under this standard and this was going to be very hard to start. I decide that I had no real direction at that moment and needed to scrap what I had done so far, look back at my research and re-think and start again.
After doing this I decided to start again but this time with the Nouvelle Vogue Bossanova version of Marian. I found a really good part of the song to sample that would work well as a beginning and throughout the song and which also had the words Marian in it which defined and showed to people that this was a remix. I used Reaper again to cut it out and then put it in to ReCycle to turn it in to a loop so it could be played on the Dr Octo Rex Loop Player. The transition from ReCycle to the Rex Player was where I first encountered a problem. When I saved the loop in ReCycle I had to specify how many bars the loop was. At first I made it 4 cause I thought that was right but then when I played it in Reason it played well for the first part but then jumped and repeated cause I had specified too many bars. This problem was easily fixed. All I had to do was change the number of bars to 3 and then adjust the loop length manually using the left and right locators in ReCylcle and then this problem was fixed.
I then needed to add stuff over this sample to make the remix my own. At first I was stuck for ideas and it took me a little while to get something going. Finding good sounds for Hip Hop was one of the hard things. Once I had looked around and experimented a bit I managed to find that synth sound on the NN-XT and this kind of kicked off my work. Everything ran pretty smoothly from here but there were riths I made that were quite complicated and so when I first tried to record them I would stuff up too often and have to do retakes. To get around this I recorded these bits in smaller parts so that I had more room for error and it wasn’t as frustrating that way. This became a familiar technique through the rest of my project especially adding to the drum beats. I really wanted to make the drum beats as cool as possible because through my research this was a big part of Hip Hop and would define the remix as Hip Hop. So I spent a lot of time on getting the drum beats right and in time which took a little while because I was making them manually using a midi keyboard and the Kong machine in Reason.
The rest of the piece ran pretty smoothly. One part that I had to stop and think for a bit was where I was going to include a sample from the Sisters of Mercy Marian version. I listened through the song a bit and soon found a part that I could use as a bridge from the verse to the chorus. The only thing I had to modify with this was to make it the same tempo as the Nouvelle Vougue version. This just took a bit of trial and error and all I had to do was type in the right speed in the Item settings in Reaper.
In order to finish my piece I had to go a bit over 40 bars (48 bars) I tried to shorten it a bit but it just didn’t work so I have left it at 48 bars. I really enjoyed this project and found it the most challenging of the 23730 standard projects. Making a remix isn’t easy especially when you can’t take instruments out easily from the samples of the songs you are remixing. I am pretty satisfied with my final piece but don’t think it is quite as good as my Ska piece. I did further extend my knowledge and skills in Reason and Reaper during this project which is always good.
And here is the final track sequencer.
Here is the Final rack in Reason for my 40 Bar piece.
To end the piece I have the sample just playing by itself and then I used the pitch bender to make the sample slow down and warp. I thought this was a good way to end the song and also is used in Hip Hop often. I also automated the voluime at the end to make a cleaner cut off.
I also used the Toy Piano patch on the NN-XT advanced sampler underneath the Thor synth. This added that nice piano sound that is often in Hip Hop song and also added more depth to the chorus/outro.