First, I watch the video "How Sound Works (In Rooms)" and I felt like I learned a lot. I originally believed that to have good room acoustics you wanted it to be really dead. I didn't know that there diffusers that instead of capturing sound, it diffuses it to allow for sound to ring without interfering as much.
I next checked out "The ear training guide for audio producers" which I thought was an incredibly great website. It breaks done all the issues that can happen with recordings and gives you information on how to fix them. There is a lot of examples and break-downs on the most common recording problems that arise. This is a great website for anyone needing to record any audio.
I chose to analyse P.Y.T. as it is definetly one of my favorite Michael songs and it has some interesting sounds in here. The producer of this song is Quincy Jones and the Audio Engineer is his longtime-engineer Bruce Swedien. The begining of this song starts with some electric guitar, a drumset, and a mellow synth playing chords. At 8 seconds in we have a vocoder a little melody, which seems to be the Roland VP-330 Vocoder. When the song finally starts, we have bass being played Minimoogs. We also have some offbeats. In the chorus you can hear the Roland Jupiter 6 octaves and the Sequential Circuites Prophet-5 playing a funky lick. We also seem to hear bongons. The response we hear in the chorus is Michael's voice being processed through a Voive E-mu Emulator1. In the break, we have Roland VP-330 Vocoder again coming in. At the end, the high voice part is probably Michael's voice again through the Voice E-mu Emulator1, given that the movement between notes is pretty smooth. Apart from the very synthy Vocder sounds and the Chorus responses, all the rest of vocals from Michael and bakcup singers are normal recorded voice. The drums seemed to be all acoustic as there is slight variation. There is some claps added to the snare's rimshots.
I love this piece because it has just the right amount of funky sounds from synths and vocoders but its still a heavy acoustic-electric sound with synths just adding to the music. There a lot of funky things going on that you can always hear something new with every listen.
For the basis of this piece, I decided to work with a recording I had gotten 2 years ago of a sequence I set up on the schools Buchla. I began by finding out the general mode I was working, which was an A minor. I knew I wanted to mostly add the instruments onto the melody that I had already recorded, added some harmonies with the instruments. I decided to go with flute for my instrument since it was what I had easy access to and I felt it would fit better with the Buchla recording.
From there, I created some harmonies to the melody for the flute. Then I figured out what I wanted to do for the middle section. I had left the middle of the Buchla recording with just a long held A that I decided to extend and create a 'Section B' to my song. I went a half time melody since that rest of the piece is a little quick. Once I got finished writting and recording the flute parts I got to work on the bass and drumset.
For bass I wanted to something simple, the Buchla sequencer already had enough going on. I decided to go with a deep bass that was just solid. I did want something a little more involved with the drumpad sequencer as I felt the music was missing a little bit of spark. The Dry Chips drum machine fit really well with the overall sound, I just modified it a little. To add the last extra bit to Section B, I played Jeepers Creepers, a square synth, at really deep bass so it gave more of a rhythmic sound than anything melodic.
Overall, I think I did a pretty good job combining everything together. I will say it is much more difficult working with a secondary instrument as I felt more limited by my playing ability when recording. I do think my piece sounds good but I would have loved to be able to play something a little funky with the flute to really bring things together. I would say I was pretty succesful.