The Art of Looping...possibly?
Short to the point: I'm performing a song with my own voice using an app called "Loopy HD" for my TME project.
Intro
To start off with, why did I not choose to connect my CME and TME task together? At first glance it seemed to be a lot more easier and less work than working on two different project. I did, of course, thought for a second of putting them together. But trying to fit my composition into a "new" technology seemed to be really difficult, as I did consider myself more on the technological-geek side. iBook was challenging, and it still is, but it's not new to me. I've fiddled around with Garageband (which I never wanted to do it again but had to in the final process of my CME composition) in Popular Music Studies...I still feel so hopeless with mastering-mix-EQ-compres whatever, but I'm used with this free software. Sibelius 7.5 is my lovely friend, even if I want to smash it sometimes. Though I do enjoy listening to electornic music ocassionally, I'd rather not work on pure house, techno, EDM music, so all those little LEGO-looking thing...um...thing wouldn't work for me.
I had all these things in my head for a while, but once I got the first piece of the puzzle, the rest came quickly.
Though my TME is not linked to my CME, it does have a connection in a very small way.
For CME, I composed a piece using my favorite Japaense composer, Hiroyuki Sawano as a model. For TME, I'm performing his song.
I've always wanted a legit reason to work on his pieces... I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. I'm not really sure what part of his works I enjoy so much, but I think my worship for his piece is pretty evident from the way I'm trying to put his name into my work. So good to be a music student.
It can be any piece... you can play the first five seconds of a song and I can name the title. But the most crucial part of this project is WHAT I will do WITH IT.
I did mention looping in my lift pitch. Since the day I saw my Senior HSC student at my Junior-Secondary prac school doing a beat-boxing live looping performance for his HSC Music, I always wanted to try it out myself.
So... performing, my favorite song, by looping it. I think it was so natural for me to go there.
Choosing
Ok, looping. But how?
Without thinking, the first song that came in my mind was 'Release My Soul' one my TOP 3 fav songs, but as it is a through-composed song, at least from what I thought of, it seemed not to be a great choice for looping.
So based on James' advice, I googled "Katie Wardrobe pinterest", and there were BUNCH of ipad for music ed resources. Obviously this lady had the Art of Live Looping page, and according to Katie, looping works best when you choose a song with cyclic chordal progression. Like, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. But she also said, that there are still many ways that you can loop a song that has different chordal structure. If the song is in two section (like verse and chorus), simply record the loop for the chorus part first, and then start building up the first (verse) section.
Going through bunch of Sawao's songs, I chose 'EGO'.
EGO is in two sections basically - verse and chorus. The second chorus tranposes up high, but I decided to ignore and keep it in the key.
Soundcloud link to EGO ( there are two versions)
Arranging
This was a short and long process.
Since this is an all-voice performance, I had to replace the instrumental parts with my voice, therefore arrange some of the parts to make it doable for human voice. But at the same time, I wanted to keep the atmosphere and the taste of the song close to the original as possible.
So I went through a process like this:
Putting down some of the notes...
Making sure that it comes back...
Once I had 9 different tracks with different lenghts, and had 12... and 15...
In the
Practicing
I first tried looping using HEAD RUSH E2 by AKAI, a hardware that lets you record and loop and so on. But it turned out that I need bunch of different leads, and after playing around with it for couple of hours, the only thing I mnaged to do was to light the power on.
So I decided to use the app Loopy HD.
In the end I had papers looking like this for practicing...
and a white board as a visual guide to what sounds I have in each tracks.
At first I practiced "looping" itself by performing
"The Lion Sleeps Tonight" simultaneously. I practiced by timing, experimented what I can do, what I can't do and so on. Once I was comfortable with looping, I started practicing my arrangement.
I didn't realize how hard it is to pitch based on your own voice. I don't want to do it again at least for another three months.
Recording
Of course this was the most difficult part of the all, because no matter how many times I practice, it seemd like there is no goal to a perfectly done loop performance. There is not once a loop(?) that I can get it right at a go, whether in pitch or rhythm or timing.
But other then that, there were two problems that I faced at the point of this process.
First of all, the imput gain level.
This was a fairly simple problem to solve, but for at least couple of minutes it almost made me cry.
For the whole time I've been connecting a dynamic microphone to my ipad so that I can get the most possibly high quality sound for the recording. But once I got all the loop tracks going and started to sing over it, the volume was too small. When I controlled the input gain level, my voice cracked and the recording sounded like I used my phone to record it. For a while I struggled through all the tracks and tried to find the best balance of the track volumes and my singing voice. Still not solved, but hopefully it's not TOO small for people to listen to. I guess this is another future task for me if do something similar.
I think this whole sound balance thing (including mastering and EQ and sound tech stuff) is what I need to work on the most in the future.
Secondly, my initinal plan was to connect my ipad to my computer, and record the screen using ScreenFlow or QuickTimePlayer, and film myself at the same time so that I can create a video with myself and the ipad screen recording shown at the same time. But for some reason, all the sound that came out from the computer (the sound went through from mic-ipad-software), were buzzing. With a delay. I tried couple of different ways, but none worked. I reckoned somewhere in the process of transferring the sound from the ipad and the computer there is an issue where there is not enough power or capacity to deliver the same sound quality.
So change of the plan, I very regretfully gave up on filming myself, and decided to film the ipad screen in a very old-fashioned (?) way by using a camera and film the ipad itself from high above.
I combined the sound from the Loopy HD recording and the film from the camera together.
So that's it!
I enjoyed it but next time I'll do it without having "assessments" getting involved.
I learnt that trying to do a live looping performance is just too stressful when you know it's going to be assessed.
Ta!