Week 6: Adding The Other Instruments

(Linking Timothy’s Blog here for his audio uploads)

Welcome back to my blog! This week, we are going to talk about finalizing all of the other parts of the songs and start on the recording process to finalize my entire project! Let’s get started. 

Adding Other Instruments: 

First off, we wanted to add all of the other instruments that we needed to the three songs. Right now, we only have piano in each of them, so we had to add the rest of them to fully flesh out the song.  

To start, we wanted to add the parts to “lovely” first, because it was the last song that we arranged so it was still fresh in our minds to arrange. The main instrument (besides piano) is violin, so we listened to the song multiple times and jotted down all of the violin parts. We then notated those parts for this song. 

Additionally, we also needed to add the percussion into the song, which was a lot trickier than I thought it was going to be. 

Adding Percussion: 

The percussion in Finale is a little bit interesting to use. It gives you a staff to use, and each note represents a different hit on a drum set. For “lovely” we decided to go with the following configuration for the percussion, as it matched how the song played the percussion every four beats.  

Here is the music for the violin and the percussion together alongside the piano parts!

It sounds quite a bit different (and less repetitive than it was before) which ultimately is a good thing because it removed some of the awkward “silence” of having no new notes or beats introduced into the song for an extended period of time. Overall, it worked out quite well, and I am relatively happy with how the song turned out.  

Die For You: 

This song was a little bit different, as the percussion was completely different to the other song. The percussion was more varied and it was a little bit faster as well, so we incorporated that into our song as well. However, there are no other instruments that are included in this song, so we are going to leave it at this (but there will still be edits here and there we will make to the arrangement as we proceed). Here it is!

Moving Forward: 

Throughout this week, I have fallen a little behind schedule when it comes to arranging, and we have not yet finished arranging the last song. We are currently working on adding the rest of the elements to it, as it is harder than we expected. However, I did give myself some buffer time when creating the schedule, so we will have enough time to record and produce quality music once the arrangements are done. Hope to see you then!