Acadia's Music

Brian Wilson is best known as the genius behind The Beach Boys.  Brian began his musical career in high school, singing, playing piano, and arranging songs for his brothers, Dennis and Carl, to sing with him.  He worked obsessively to refine his ear and learn to create harmonies.  Unfortunately, a major part of Brian’s high school life was his abusive father, Murry.

Despite physical violence, Murry was very supportive of his sons’ musical endeavors, and he helped their band The Pendletones to obtain its first contract with Candix Records.  After this deal, the record company officially changed the band’s name to The Beach Boys.  The Beach Boys had one hit with Candix Records, “Surfin,” but soon switched to Capitol Records.  From here, they skyrocketed to fame.

Brian’s influence on The Beach Boys’ success is undeniable.  He wrote or co-wrote many of their hit songs, including “Surfin’ Safari,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “In My Room,” “Help Me Rhonda,” and “Good Vibrations.”  He is also given production credits for several Beach Boys albums, and he is known for his meticulous work in the studio.

Although Brian’s career was at its peak, in the early 70s he slipped into a state of depression and stayed in bed for several years, taking drugs and overeating.  His condition became serious, and in 1975 his family sought help with Eugene Landy, a psychiatrist.  Landy’s methods were controversial, but he managed to pull Brian back to life.

In 1966, Brian began work on an album called Smile, but it was shortly abandoned due to conflict within the band and Brian’s mental illness.  The album was not forgotten, however, and by 2004 Brian had resurrected, recorded, and released it.  It is among the most anticipated records in history and one of Brian’s greatest accomplishments.

Brian is still an active artist.  He has released several albums since Smile and continues to perform often.

This piece is the soundtrack to a video game called Collections.  In each of the three levels of the game, the player collects a different set of items.

Level 1: Comic Books

Level 2: Marbles

Level 3: Stuffed Animals

I created the music with these level themes in mind.  The first segment of the piece is a heroic chord progression that suggests comic book superheroes.  The second section features an endless, breathless bassline to represent rolling marbles. The third section is built around a playful melody that reflects the character of stuffed animals.

I made the piece in Pro Tools, creating the melodies by recording through a MIDI keyboard and altering the sound with a Pro Tools plug-in called Xpand.  For the drumbeats, I used a plug-in called Boom.  I altered panning, volume, EQ, and compression for each voice within the whole sound.  Enjoy!

This tune features only two instruments: drums and bass.  The format is ABAB; a drumset and bass play the A section, and a second pair plays each B section.  This project is our first in Pro Tools with full use of MIDI.  I chose drum loops from those available in Xpand, a Pro Tools plug-in, and then played the drum beats into the computer through a MIDI keyboard.  The bassline was much harder.  Pro Tools offers at least 100 different bass sounds, and I sorted through almost all of them.  Eventually, I chose two and layered them on top of each other for each of the two basses, A and B.  Then, I tried countless licks and finally settled on these two basslines, which I played on a MIDI keyboard.

After creating the basic structure, I started in on effects.  I panned the two bass and drums pairs to opposite sides to give the effect of trading back and forth in a real space.  I added EQ and compression to make the instruments more realistic.  I know very little about what drumsets and basses are supposed to sound like, so choosing how to set the EQ was a challenge.  I think they ended up fairly close to the real thing.  At the end of the song, the instruments fade out, as if they are traveling into the distance.  As I decreased volume, I increased reverb to mimic what happens in a real hall.

Enjoy!

We’re spending the two weeks before break getting accustomed to the Pro Tools interface and the options it affords.  We were given loops, similar to those used in GarageBand, and we’ve been using them not only to create songs, but to play around with Pro Tools.  This track features guitar and sax loops that I thought went well together.  I added EQ, compression, panning, and reverb to improve the sound quality of the instruments.  This was a particularly fun track, and I hope you enjoy it!

This project is our first using Pro Tools, a program far more advanced than GarageBand.  We were given a song with six different instrument tracks, but no mixing.  Every instrument sounded flat and dead, so I added panning, compression and EQ to help the instruments sound more real.  In this song, there is a lot of interaction between the instruments.  I brought out lines in each part that were important or responded to another player.  Pro Tools is much more complicated than Garage Band (there are too many buttons I don’t understand yet!), but I had fun exploring what it can do.

Tom Dowd was born in New York City to musical parents.  His mother was an opera singer and his father was a violinist.  Dowd was involved in music throughout high school, playing tuba, piano, bass, and violin.  He even became conductor of a band at Columbia University.

However, at the age of 16 Dowd began employment at a physics lab at Columbia.  When he was 18 he was drafted into the military, but stayed at work in the physics lab.  The work that Dowd did during those years contributed to Manhattan Project, ultimately creating the atomic bomb.  After the project was finished, Dowd planned to attend Columbia and earn a degree in nuclear physics.  However, the physics taught at Coumbia were lightyears behind the physics he had learned for the Manhattan Project.  He decided that going back to school would be useless to him, and instead began to pursue a career in recording.

He worked at small classical studios until getting a job at Atlantic Records.  He was unknown to artists and engineers at the time but quickly proved his worth.  Dowd’s strength was in his unique combination of abilities; he was both a scientist and a musician.  He understood where to place microphones in a room to capture the best sound, but he also knew how to coach musicians and improve their performance.  He contributed musical ideas to the artists he recorded.

At Atlantic Records, Dowd worked with artists like Ray Charles, The Drifters, The Coasters, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers Band, Chicago, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, and The Eagles.  The groups entered the studio knowing nothing about Tom Dowd, but left feeling supreme confidence in Dowd’s abilities.

Dowd’s contributions to music lie not only in his recordings; he made hugely important innovations to the technology.  When he first started work, sound boards had round knobs that had to be rotated to change the volume.  Tom Dowd instead put the volume control into linear tracks so that all that was necessary was a single finger.  This way, a single person could use his fingers to alter the volume of eight tracks at once.  Tom Dowd also began to use eight-track recording, making it easier to record larger groups.  More microphones could now be used and the engineer could have more control over these microphones.

Tom Dowd helped to put countless artists’ best work out, because he knew how to record the music at a tremendously high quality.  His work at Atlantic Records catapulted innumerable artists into successful careers.  Dowd’s improvements to the technology used in the studio helped to push the recording industry forward.  He is one of the greatest contributors to music technology history.

This project is our first involving video.  We were given a stop motion video of lego people breakdancing, but the track was silent.  Our task was to create all of the sound for the video.  I added a different beat for each dancer, crowd noise, and sound effects.  I used loops from GarageBand for the music.  For the other sounds, like a dancer spinning his hat and the cheering crowd, I recorded the sounds with MIDI.  I added music at the beginning and end to tie the video together.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a wonderful, essential tool for all music technology enthusiasts.  Developed in the 1980s, it is a way for musicians to record music.  However, it doesn’t use audio signal; instead, it records three pieces of data about the notes played: pitch, duration, and intensity.  It then sends the data to the computer, where all three of these aspects can be modified.  In class, we can play notes on a keyboard, then send the information to GarageBand to adjust it.

This system allows all musicians tremendous flexibility.  Notes recorded with MIDI are not subject to the restrictions of audio recording; their timbre can be changed to imitate a vast number of instruments, from piano, organ, and bass to saxophone, flute, and even drumset.  Anyone can play notes on a keyboard and produce the sound of an entire rock band or symphony orchestra.

Keyboardists are not the only ones able to take advantage of this technology.  New recording devices are constantly being invented.  Now drummers, guitarists, and wind players have unique electronic instruments that allow them to record MIDI data.  Anyone can use it to create countless sound combinations.