Week 11 - Posted on 2015-05-01 by Jeremy Martin

Week 11 was my midterm. Didn't have much trouble with it. The sine wave project on the other hand is giving me some grief! The project gives you a single cycle, 1000kHz sine wave and you can only use plugins and pro tools effects to turn it into a song. I'd like to break down my approach to it-

First you have to duplicate the cycle many times until its audible. 

The main plugin I had to abuse is the pitch plugin. That allows me to lower the pitch from 1000Hz to more palatable frequencys, or even lower in the case that I need to make a drum sound. 

Next, I take a nice middle C tone, and add some effects to it until I have a decent sounding synth note.

Then I bounce that synth note to a .wav file and load it into a sampler. The sampler gives me a "keyboard" of the sample to work with. I worked out a nice chord progression and entered it as midi into the sampler. 

I am going for some nice, simple 2005-ish house here, so my chord progression is all 8th notes with some reverb and delay. 

Next I duplicated the sampler, lengthened the reverb and delay, and used some fundamental notes to make a pad.

Here arises the most challenging part - getting a nice, clean, kick drum sound out of a sine wave. This is much more difficult because a sine wave has the same "shape" as a synth note, but nothing close to the shape of a percussive hit. 

Essentially what you have to do is add reverb with audiosuite, consolidate the clip, and then cut off most of the actual, original "note" so the end of the note becomes a "hit" with the reverb part forming the tail. 

I could not recount the convoluted process by which I got a *good* kick sound though. Add reverb. Resample. Add eq. Resample. Add distortion. Resample. The kick sound I wanted had no transients, other than a little bit of click right at the beginning, so I essentially cut all the high end artifacts out. 

To get a snare/clap sound, I reused my "kick" waveform and treated it to different eq and a much shorter reverb. 

Finally, I put everything together in a simple progression (the song is supposed to be under 60 seconds), and sidechained everything to the kick (force of habit) to accentuate the rhythm.