For my group performance, I explored different kinds of technologies in which I could use for the creation of our song. These technologies being, types of equipment and potential sounds or plugins that I could use for my part. Since our group song could not be performed live, I had to make sure that I explored technologies that I could use with the equipment I had in my disposal, at home.
From the start of this group project, we decided that our songs would be dark ambient with some game soundtrack influences and for this type of music I had decided to mainly play synths. For synths sounds, I thought to use something soft and dark sounding instead of something loud and funky. I thought of using some synths from Spitfire LABS that I have downloaded from spitfire Audio’s website, these are quite nice sounding and different from the one’s you get in Logic, but I did not end up using those since every single member of my group would have to download and instal them on their computer since we had to send the Logic file to each other in the process, so I just decided to use two different synths from the Logic library and to make them different I used delay effects (which was used on the one synth), different reverb effects on both of them and EQ. The equipment I used to play my parts was an Akai MPK mini midi keyboard, this is a small keyboard with a drum pad, a pitch knob and six other knobs. When playing my part, I used the drum pads to change between the two synths I was using, each drum pad was assigned to a synth and I just had to press one of them for it to change, I also used the pitch shifter knob on one of the synths in the last section of the song and the other knobs on the keyboard were assigned to the delay and reverb effects so that I could choose how much of those two effects I wanted when playing.
If this were to be played live, the technology I used would benefit not only me and my sections of the song, but it would also benefit the entire groups performance because I would be in charge of my own effects that I chose to use and I would also be in charge of switching between both my instruments, instead of my group members doing it for me or me using the laptop to change it.
Mariana Bagulho 