A Little Song
A Little Song

Thursday • January 14th 2021 • 11:06:46 pm

A Little Song

Thursday • January 14th 2021 • 11:06:46 pm

To show you how easy it is to learn when you are having fun

in _this_ strange poem, we will be making a minimalist song together.

It won't be the most beautiful song as that would take a couple of days not hours,

but it will be a good start.


We will be using some unusual strategies,

to smooth out the learning curve, so that our experience is fun.

We will be using a special effects tool that has a sound generator feature,

each time we press a generator button, it will change a sound we are using to something else.

The program that does this is really smart,

it has categories of sounds that the generator is good at.

Those categories are straight from old computer games, and they are:

pick up/coin, laser/shoot, explosion, power up, hit/hurt, jump, and blip/select.

To save our ears from beeps and blips we are going to apply a hall effect with some echo and blending of sounds,

to modernize the sound synthesizer a bit.


Let us start,

with the drum kick.

Dance songs usually have a 130 beats per minute,

so let us start with that, just in case the song will turn out nice.

Because we are using a random sound generator we can use lots of things to generate that drum kick sound,

laser/shoot, explosion, hit/hurt, and even jump.

But there is a trick here, it is also the reason why pianists don't just use one or two fingers,

pianists press multiple keys at the same time, to create a richer sound, called a CHORD.

We are going to do the same thing, we are going to mix laser/shoot and explosion, and hit/hurt, and jump,

until we have a good sounding umph.


Now a kick by it self is extremely boring,

so let as add a clapping sound to it.

A clapping sound, is still a kind of a drum sound,

it is a little bit higher pitched, so it won't really blend with the boom of the drums.

And to introduce complexity,

we are only going to put it every other kick.

And I will use hit/hurt generator

and still stack up a couple for them to get a chord, and to make sure it is not as deeply sounding as the kick.


Now with the clapping sound breaking up the monotony of our drum,

we will add a hat sound, hats are those strange copper hats that drummers have next to drums.

Unlike the clapping sound, which is every other beat,

we will add the high pitched hat sound, ON BEAT, AND BETWEEN BEAT, it is going to be all over the place.

Hats give our song energy,

you can't dance to hats, most of the time, but you can feel them in your body.

Your feet maybe returning to the ground, and you may need to blend that motion by speeding up your feet,

or you maybe doing the backwards t-step which requires two taps for every beat, sometimes matching the hats even.

The high frequency sound that is most frequent throughout the song,

gives the song energy.


But a song has to live, it cannot just clone it self all the time,

so now that we have the kick, the clapping, and the hat.

We have to alter, modify, warp the kick,

now the song will begin moving, the kick will be out of line, but also catch our ear.


Our selection of instruments and that little variation,

gives our song energy, life, and a soul.

But that is not yet enough,

because the song has to breathe, it has to inhale and exhale.

That means we have to simplify something,

that we have to open the window to let the air in.

And then we can resume,

and then before the outtro we have to open the window again.

From our perspective that just means,

simplifying and modifying the beat.


Finally, a song needs a melody,

where the back-beat that we just created is something that you tap your foot to, while the song is playing.

A melody, is something you would whistle,

after the song got done playing.

Lets us call it the whistle rule,

and that means the melody has to be short.

And it also means that the instrument can't be a drum,

it has to be something that is long and winding, a sustained sound.

*song plays*