My First Experiment

So this week I decided to experiment with electronic music and try and create a song using MIDI on Ableton. To my surprise, it came pretty quickly to me. As I’ve mentioned before, my first music choice was always music that requires real instruments, so the thought of electronic music actually scared me. However, creating it is actually pretty fun and I’m looking forward to creating and experimenting more! I think I still have a fair way to go, however, for my first time, I created something that I thought I'd never be able to do.

Over the past few weeks, I've made an effort to research and listen to different electronic music and artists to expand my knowledge and understanding of what exactly goes into creating electronic music. I also watched a bunch of different Youtube tutorials on how different people interpret and create electronic music.

When I was playing around on Ableton this week, I was trying to see what kind of sound I liked. I took an instant liking to the synths and using different pads and synths to create a nice melody and harmony. I find adding in the correct bass line and a drum beat a bit more difficult (and is something I am going to work on this week and add to the track that I have started).

Take a listen to what I have done so far...

You can hear straight up that a drum beat is definitely missing. But putting that aside for now, this track consists of 4 different MIDI tracks. The first track I used 'Mod Amp Sine Bleep 2' for the main melody, for the second track I used 'Pizza Go-Round 1' to layer the melody, the third track I used 'Suburban 1' as the Chord harmony and for the forth track I used 'Piano Bass 2' as the lower end instrument.

My biggest struggles in creating this basic MIDI was trying to find the right synths that complimented each other but can also stand out on their own. I also found it challenging to physically adjust the octave with in the MIDI.

While playing around on Ableton, listening to the different samples that come along with the software, I thought I'd like to try and incorporate acoustic sounding instruments like piano into electronic music. while I am still learning and experimenting, this will of course take some time to master. I think it might be a cool and different sound to what I have previously done before and I can challenge myself with creating electronic music as well as having that musical background to fall back on.

This coming week I'd like to try and learn more about bass lines and drum beats so that I can start adding it into the music that I create. I'd also like to try and learn to create the drop you hear in electronic music. I think that would be a pretty cool and exciting thing to learn how to do. I obviously still have a long way to go and a lot more to learn, but I'm looking forward to it all!