K404/504 – Final Project

The final project is a 5-7 minute electronic composition made using Digital Performer or Pro Tools. We will listen to the compositions during the last class of the semester (4/24), so you must have an audio CD of your piece ready to play at that time.

Program Note

You must submit a program note, which should describe the basic musical ideas of the piece, the custom sounds you made (samples, synth patches, processed sound files), and any techniques you’d especially like us to notice. You must provide a complete list of any sound sources borrowed from others (or from yourself, in the case of a recording of your own music).

You must print out your program note and distribute it to the class and instructors during the final playback day (4/24).

Project Materials

The project materials should be left in your folder on the MAC 304 computer, in a folder named “spring final project,” or some such. A portion of the grading for the project will depend on you making regular progress, as demonstrated during tutorials. Begining with week 7 (2/20), I’ll give you a letter grade each week based on your progress.

Excuses, Excuses. . .

Late projects will be accepted only with a valid medical excuse from a doctor, stating that you were incapable of completing the work. Loss of materials is not an acceptable excuse, so back up your data (to CD/DVD, and/or flash drive and the CECM Server)!

Requirements

•There are no style constraints for the project.

•Your piece must be about 5 minutes in length, certainly no longer than 7 minutes. The message is: we’d rather hear something of modest length that you’ve wrestled with and thought deeply about than something very long that seems thrown together casually. Plus, we have to be able to play back all these pieces on the final day.

•Your sequence (in Digital Performer or Pro Tools) must use an aux track with a plug-in, and at least one send from an audio track to the aux track.

•You must make use of some sounds that you have designed yourself. These can be Absynth patches, Mach V patches, or sound files that have received extensive processing with RiverRun, Spektral Delay, the SoundHack phase vocoder, etc.

•Your piece must be an original composition, not an arrangement of other music, or even an arrangement of an earlier piece of yours. Avoid using sound made by others if you have not received permission to use it. Even if you have received permission, be careful that you’re not using their sound as a crutch. This applies also if you incorporate a recording of one of your acoustic pieces. If you try to use this as a quick way out, it will show.

•Your piece must be thoroughly and thoughtfully mixed. It’s unlikely that panning all sounds to the center and setting the faders to the same volume will work. This does not mean that every track must constantly move around the stereo field. Your piece should sound like you worked it over and tweaked things until it seemed just right to you. That doesn’t mean that your piece has to sound smooth — it can sound noisy and rough, as long as these qualities aren’t the result of negligence. But listen for clicks at the edges of soundbites or regions. These happen because of discontinuities in the waveform that can arise when a soundbite starts or ends abruptly. They can be very distracting. You can eliminate clicks by using fades, available in both Digital Performer and Pro Tools.

Suggestions

•Use the subwoofer to evaluate the low frequency content of your mix. If you listen all the time without the subwoofer, you may have lots of low frequency energy in your piece that you’re never hearing. When we play it in 302, you’ll be surprised.

If you are using the K2600:

•Make sure to record the output of the K2600 digitally into the computer before making your audio CD, so that you avoid any hum and noise contributed by the mixer and other analog circuitry.

•The K2600 has its own (very complicated) internal effects unit. Don’t bother doing anything fancy with this unless you really want to, but do learn how to configure the K2600 so that you get the same effect each time you play your sequence. (Hint: (revised) Effects---> Effects CNTL---> FX Mode = Master, then choose a Studio and stick with it.)

•Recording K2600 MIDI tracks into the computer as audio, and then mixing these down, along with your audio tracks, to a two-track stereo master, suitable for burning onto an audio CD — this can be a time-consuming process. Don’t leave it for the last minute!