First Riff
March 26th, 2006 - 10:26 pm
Some of you know, i’ve been trying to learn about various aspects of music for some time. An accomplished musician friend of mine has graciously volunteered to help me work through the creation of a song. This file is the result of his first instruction: to pick any five notes and write a simple looping melody using only those notes. Originally he only asked for the score, but I decided to use the tools at hand to learn a little bit about track automation. The result is a guitar-ish sounding riff that is run through a low-pass filter to change the dynamics. It needs work to smooth it out, but it’s something to post. Check it out over at my music page.
Bravo! Bravo!
I like that…its very catchy.
*turns all red in the face* Well it’s just a start, let’s see where it goes..
don’t you use that technical jargon with me! explain what a low-pass filter does!
A low pass filter filters out high frequencies, but “passes” low frequencies. You can set a threshold based on the lowest Hz you want to cut. Likewise, a high pass filter passes high, but cuts low. A bandpass filter cuts high and low, and only passes frequencies in a given range. When you mess with EQ settings in iTunes, WinAmp, your stereo, etc, you are essentially adjusting a series of bandpass filters at set frequencies to boost or cut the bass, mids, and highs. Pretty cool stuff.. The way it’s done is a translation from the time domain to the frequency domain (remember the Fourier transform from school? (Or LaPlace, but that isn’t used as often)) which basically takes your signal and breaks it up into its frequency components (This is what you see in the visualization software that shows the specrtum bouncing around with bass on the left and high on the right), You can then cut out parts of the spectrum you don’t want, and translate it back. It’s really amazing how it works and it’s kind of cool to see how boring math can be applied in the real world.
So how’s that for less technical jargon?