Week 3: The Grind Continues
March 25, 2023
Hey everyone! Welcome back to my Senior Project blog. This week, I will continue talking about our musical progression and what we have been up to in the past couple of days! Let’s go.
The Start Of Something Great
As you know, I have been working with Finale in the past couple of weeks, trying to transcribe the three songs that we set out to play in the beginning. However, we decided to restart the way we arranged the songs, and scrapped what we currently had in order to end up with a better product. We would first just translate the song exactly how it was, note by note, until we finished the parts for the particular instrument. Then, we would add our own twist once we finished the translation, in order to make it our own and an original piece.
In order to do this, we would take the chords, which we either found by ear or looked them up, and used that as a base to find the rest of the bass/melody. The melodies are usually found within the chords, so it wasn’t too difficult to transcribe the rest of the song once we had the chords.
The First Song: Die For You (Remix)
We started with Die For You (Remix) first, and with some quick research and listening to the song a bunch of times, we decided to arrange the song in the key of E Major. We found the chords for the song, and we kept on listening to it until we eventually found the melody and rhythm for the song. I jotted down the notes for the bass on the song in the software.
We continued the translation of the song until we came across our first problem: our tempo was too fast.
The Changing Of Tempo
With Finale, we didn’t know that for Macs, the tempo change would be such a cumbersome task. It was extremely difficult to slow the tempo down, and I ended up having to restart the work I had already done for Die For You (Remix). Afterwards, we got back to where we were before, but this time with the correct tempo as well!
The First Song: Die For You (Remix) (Cont).
As we continued with the song, we slowly finished up the rest of the melody and bass, improving the sheet music with little adjustments and tiny changes in pitch. We slowly finished the song, and after we did, we started adding our own changes to make the arrangement more unique in style. However, we are currently still working on that for the arrangement, so we will continue talking about it in the following week!
The Second Song: Closer
While we worked on the first song, we also slightly dabbled in the second song and started translating the melodies for this song as well. We decided to write this song in A flat Major, and we are currently translating this song as well!
Conclusion:
It is difficult to post images of the songs on the Senior Project blog, so after we finish the arrangements, we will post them publicly for people to view them as an extension of this project so people can see what they sound like and try to play it for themselves!
Anyways, that’s all for today’s blog. We will continue updating you guys in the following weeks with our arrangement and see how we will play them as well! See you then!