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After looking over the assignment, I'm initially drawn to the idea I begun last semester of blending folk and hiphop. I haven't seen people explore the possibilities of fusing these two genres together to make something new and innovative before. Furthermore, these are the two genres I love the most and draw the most personal inspiration from. My initial plan is to have people sing and maybe play instruments for me, then use these as samples in my tracks.

Recently, I have become better equipped with the Ableton Push and the Roland SP404 Mk2. I believe these will help me massively when sampling and restructuring songs. I also enjoy playing piano, and rearranging what I've played within Ableton, I'm going to explore this within my tracks as well.

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As a test of innovation, we were set a task of making a short piece of music from sampling our voices and using them as instruments. Everything other than the flute loop is made from my voice.

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You can see here how much I chopped various vocal recordings to create the different stems.

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Nujabes

J Dilla

Laura Marling

Jonny Flynn

Skream

Lana Del Rey

Everything but the girl

Emapea

DJ Premier

Adrianne Lenker

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This is the original recording of the bass stem. To reach my desired sound, I sliced it slightly so it was on beat, gained it up by 2db and pitched the whole thing down by 14 semitones

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To further my ideas for the proposal and tracks in this assignment, I'm thinking about things such as:

Who am I musically?

I'm a producer/pianist whose aims are to blend genres to create music that is innovative and enjoyable

My favoured style/genres of music to make is a broad spectrum containing HipHop, Folk, Piano, EDM, Rap

Where do I aim to show innovation and push my boundaries?

As previously stated, my main goal is to blend the genres of HipHop and Folk to create something new

Who will i draw inspiration from? What have they done?

Laura Marling, She clearly took elements of traditional folk, corporate american folk and her own storytelling skills to create catchy, yet emotionally intelligent music

J Dilla, respected in the community for his skill and uniqueness, but made hiphop beats more beautiful than they'd ever been before

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After some more research into J dilla as a producer, I have noticed he often used session musicians to play in live sounds for his tracks. Even though the concept of the song may have started from a simple sampled loop, The tracks are heavily elevated by this, this leads me to try this in my own tracks.

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After this research, I asked a classmate to play some electric guitar over some of my songs to see how much they improved.

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This is a short snippet of one of the songs i asked my classmate to play guitar on without the guitar.

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And this is the same snippet with the added electric guitar. as you can hear the live instrumentation gives the song so much more body and personality. It gives it a sense of being live when in fact all of the other stems are samples and MIDI. (I'm aware some of the guitar is wrong key and timing but this was just to give me an idea if live instruments would work on a drum-heavy sample track). This has definitely informed my decision to have at least one live instrument on at least one of my final tracks.

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This week we have been given the task of combining two genres to make a new product. each of us drew genres out of a hat and had to blend them together in our chosen DAW. Luckily for me i got Funk and HipHop. This led me to create a funky Big L remix which I'm very happy with and I think shows elements of both genres well considering it was done in an hour and a half.

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Here is a short snippet of said track. Padlet doesn't allow any more MB uploaded so it's just the start of the song. Please see the screenshot of Ableton above to see that it is a full song with many different funky and hiphoppy elements ! I think the funk bassline works particularly well. This has definitely affirmed my choice of blending elements of different genres as my innovation proposal.

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This week we have mainly been finishing work in-class, but we have also been listening to famous songs and judging them on how innovative we think they sound which may then inform our own tracks. For example, we heard the song AmEN by Bring me The Horizon ft. Lil Uzi Vert. And, while I may personally hate this song, I rated it highly in terms of innovation. This also made me decide to have someone rap on one of my tracks, just to emphasize the genre smashing.

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Bring Me The Horizon - AmEN! (Official Video) ft. Lil Uzi Vert, Daryl Palumbo, Glassjaw