Skills 1: Templates and strategies for composition using sequencers/DAWs

Cool things from week 1 workshop:

• Audio data is recorded stuff. MIDI data is computer information of notes. It’s much easier to edit individual notes in MIDI than audio.
• Looping – is it ‘real’ composition?
  No: Loops themselves are not made from scratch
  Yes: Musical decisions and organising sound are happening. Manipulation of structure and texture especially are clearly visible.

Observations:

• Soundtrap is very similar to Garageband (which I became somewhat familiar with after Popular Music Studies last semester).
• I didn’t know split region was a thing! When I made my pop song on Garageband, I found it really annoying when I wanted to vary a loop (e.g change the drum loop by adding a fill to hype up the chorus). I found that I constantly had to remove looped bars and then copy and paste the original loop before I could edit.

Pedagogical Things

• Using loops is good for students to actually learn how to use the DAW and experiment with possibilities of manipulating sound e.g. using the ‘muffled’ option in Sweep really helped my drums blend with the rest of my instruments.
• However, this experimenting stage should be followed by making music from scratch.
• Step sequencing is awesome. Students can’t really go wrong and making a drum beat that is unique is also very easy. If students had to write a drum beat with traditional notation, they’d be limited by their theory knowledge (likely sticking to crotchets, quavers and not going much further), while in step sequencing, syncopation is easily accessible. Bonus: students can see how important silence is because it is literally diagram of sounds and silences.