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You are asked to:
- Compose a short piece for horn band
- Use MIDI to enter your piece into a DAW
- Employ MIDI Instruments corresponding to the instruments of the band
- Use keyswitching to change articulations in at least two instruments
- Use MIDI automation to change dynamics within indivudal tracks
- Render individual tracks (or track groups) to audio
- Mix the audio employing at least one overall ambience plug-in (e.g. reverb)
- Submit your mixed audio track to soundcloud and post to the class data base
- Review the work of 3 colleagues in D2L discussion
s1
•Using various resources, research the horn band as a music form.
Your piece can be any style that includes rhythm section and horns, including funk, small jazz, big band, hip hop, rock with horns, and so forth.
•Compose a short (1-2 minute) piece for horn band.
Your ensemble should include the following--
- Drum set
- Bass (acoustic or electric)
- Piano or other keyboard
- Guitar
- A horn section
Your horn section should include at least three instruments, including both brass (e.g. trumpet, trombone) and woodwind (e.g. sax, clarinet). Your section can certainly be larger.
You are not required to record a guitar player, you may use some sort of MIDI guitar.
You may augment your group with additional instuments if you like.
Make sure that your composition includes at least two articulation changes. These can be broad (e.g. trumpet muted,/unmuted or bass arco/pizz) or subtle (e.g. trumpet staccato/falloff).
s2
At this point, it is assumed you are working with Studio One as your DAW. However, the generic instructions would apply to any DAW.
•In your DAW, create MIDI tracks that correspond to the instruments of your band.
You may have done this already if you were working in MIDI to begin with.
If you were composing in notation software, you could export your work as either a Standard MIDI file (.mid) or a Music XML fiile (.smf), then import into your DAW.
•Using data entry that works for you, create MIDI data for the instruments in their corresponding tracks.
If you are a good keyboard player, you may want to enter the notes in "real time." If not, you may want to "step" or "type" them in.
At this point, I recommend quantizing all entries. See notes regarding humanizing below.
Don't worry about instrument sounds at this point. You can just use a placeholder of some kind; best would be a General MIDI instrument in a template.
s3
For this task it's assumed you have East West Creative Cloud installed, along with the PLAY instrument.
•In your DAW, create an instance of the PLAY app.
•In the PLAY app, set up a palette of instruments that correspond to your band's instrumentation.
See the String Quartet project for additional detail on this step.
•In Studio One, assign MIDI tracks that correspond to your PLAY palette.
Do a quick play and make sure you are triggering the right sounds.
s4
In the String Quartet project, we used CONTROL tracks for keyswitching. This allows the tracks with MIDI notes to be easily edited or transposed without altered control data.
For this project, let's create control tracks where needed...
•For the tracks where you plan to change articulations, create tracks named CONTROL, assigned to the same MIDI channel as the MIDI note track you intend to change.
So if Trumpet 1 is on MIDI channel 5, and you want to change its articulation to a muted sound, you would create a CONTROL track assigned to MIDI channel 5, and put the keyswitch notes there.
I'd probably put the CONTROL track just below the Trumpet 1 track. I might also name the CONTROL track CONTROL Trumpet 1 if I had a lot of control tracks.
Old school MIDI programmers would put automation (MIDI control) data on the CONTROL track, too. Some DAWS (including Studio One) have special tracks to facilitate automation, you may choose to do this differently.
•Apply automation changes (e.g. Control 7: Channel Volume) to at least two MIDI parts using the methods described above.
Note that for this project we aren't mixing MIDI, so this type of automation would apply, for example, to a crescendo or descrescendo on an individual part.
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SHOULD THE SAME INSTRUMENTS BE ASSIGNED TO THE SAME MIDI CHANNEL?
Let's says your piece has parts for 3 trumpets. Your sofware instrument has a nice solo trumpet sound with lots of articulations, and the parts always play in a rhythmic block with the same articulation. Wouldn't it make sense to put the three MIDI parts on the same MIDI channel assigned to the same sound?
Maybe. Bear in mind that any control data sent to a MIDI channel applies to all tracks assigned to that channel. Let's say all 3 trumpets are assigned to MIDI channel 5. If you have a CONTROL track for keyswitching and automation assigne to MIDI channel 5, all three parts will react in the same way.
That might work for, say volume control. But what if you want to pan the three parts differently? Any pan control (MIDI control 10) will apply to to everything on MIDI channel 5--even if you have differently settings on the individual MIDI tracks!
If all your MIDI parts have exactly the same volume, pan, articulations, and any other control, a single channel assignment makes sense. Otherwise, consider loading in 3 of the same sound and assigning them to different MIDI channels.
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s5
There are basically two ways to mix a MIDI project down to audio--
--One way is to employ MIDI automation to created a finished MIDI mix, then render that mix into audio. This is the method we used for the string quartet project.
--One way is to render each individual MIDI track (or small groups of tracks) to audio, then mix as if it were a regular recording project. This is my preference, and the way we will approach this project.
DAWs will sometimes provide some shortcuts to "bounce" or "freeze" MIDI tracks into audio. I prefer to record tracks in real time, checking things as I go, replacing MIDI with audio one track at a time.
•In your song, choose a MIDI track to record, check its levels, then record its audio to a mono or stereo audio track.
Setting auto-record "punch-in/punch-outs" will facilitate this.
if the track only plays in certain spots, just record audio in those spots. You don't need to make stems unless you are sending the project off to get mixed elsewhere.
Your record levels don't need to be anything in particular because you will set the balance of the audio tracks later. Generally just record at a fairly hot level. Make sure you are emplying any MIDI automation set into your track via the CONTROL track.
Use SOLO and MUTE to make sure you are only recording what you want to record. Check the recorded track afterwards both by itself and in the band mix.
Make sure to name the audio track you are recording to before you record. The audio file you make will have the same name as the track name.
Give some thought to recording a stereo track. Do you want that particular stereo spread in your final mix? If not, record mono, and pan the track later.
Does your instrument have ambience (e.g. reverb) included in the sound? Do you want that, or do you want to mute the reverb and add general reverb in later to the overall mix?
When the recording is complete, make sure to mute the MIDI track you just recorded.
s6
So now we have a group of audio tracks that appear as if they had been recorded by players. And if we have recorded some players along with the MIDI tracks, it's all the same format. I'm confortable mixing this way because it's familiar going all the way back to, ahem, multi-track tape.
Now we want to create an overall group ambience.
There are as many ways to approach adding reverb to a mix as there are engineers, but the most basic is to imagine that the "band" is playing together in a reverberant room, with some players closer and some farther away.
Before we do this, though, balance and panning matters, so let's get that started.
•In your DAW, pan and balance your tracks.
This is a big step, of course. When ready, let's add the reverb.
•In your DAW, create an auxiliary track. Add a reverb effect to it, mixed 100% wet. Assign its input to a bus (e.g. bus 1-2).
If you can name your busses, you might name this stereo bus REVERB.
•Set the Reverb aux level to Unity.
The reverb aux level is arbitrary. If your send levels end up being too low you can lowever the aux level--balancing act.
•In your DAW mixer, assign a post-fader send to the reverb bus.
Why post-fader?
•Using each audio track's mixer send, set a reverb level for each track.
Remember that the more reverb, the more the track recedes into the back of the mix.
Conversely, the more reverb, the louder the track is in the mix.
Give some thought as to how the reverb send is panned. Equally left and right? Same as dry signal? Opposite dry signal?
You might experiment a bit with applying EQ to the reverb? Brighter? Less bright? Roll off low end?
•When your overall mix is done, create a pre-master audio mix file.
Wait a day.
•Return your pre-master file to your DAW (or mastering software) and apply mastering tools.
•Create a full format file and a data-compressed (e.g. MP3) file.
s7
•Submit an audio file to soundcloud, and post the link on the Student Work data base.
What, no notation file? Not for this project, partly because drum notation is especially tricky and not really standardized. I do encourage you to tackle notation for this type of group at some point however.
s8
•Choose the projects for three colleagues. Listen to their audio file while examining their sheet music. Using D2L discussion tool, write a short, helpful review on the project. See discussion tool for more parameters.
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