Connor’s

Research Paper
 Creating a song, whether it is creating a melody to writing the lyrics, is difficult.

Although some songs are easier to compose and complete, this was the hardest song I have

completed. Writing lyrics has an aspect of newness in what I have learned in the past four years

creating music. I have always created beats and melody lines without considering writing any

lyrics in my songs, which made this project much harder than all my others. Most of my

knowledge comes from YouTubers such as In The Mix (Mix), a creator that provides material

and tutorials to help you perfect your song. His channel includes lessons on all sorts of topics

regarding sound design, mixing, percussion, and a whole lot more. Using these sources, I have

learned over the years more and more how to compose music and design sound, and so I decided

to use this knowledge to my advantage in this senior project. So, how did I create this song, what

goes into writing lyrics, and what work goes into the creation of a musical piece?

It all starts with an idea. Some image or vision planted in your mind that has a certain

color or melody to it. Although it sounds strange, you can create a musical piece in your head

just from the circumstances around you. If it is a sunny day, it could be a bright piano piece, if it

is gloomy outside, a more string based song in a minor key. The image of a mountain or a

beautiful nature setting could have many major melodies to it, majestic, maybe brass based with

a variational melody with many highs and lows. Although this sounds complicated, this musical

piece that you imagine doesn’t take much thought at all, and it just appears in your mind. The

idea that I had has culminated from many years of life experience, problems I have been through,

and the mindset I have needed over the years. All of this has led me to create this song.
 However, before I started with the full song, I had actually created a melody that I was

going to use for the song. I wrote lyrics and put them into the song, before deciding to not use the

song. This was because of the circumstances I was in, the melody and tempo did not feel right

for what I was trying to write about. I decided to start over. This often comes with creating a

song too. There will be a lot of melodies created and a lot of loops made before actually

completing only a draft of the final song. It took me an extra 10+ hours to create a new melody

and a new idea of what I really wanted to be my completed project. I had already created and

scraped multiple melodies, and I didn’t want this to be another melody wasted. Luckily, it wasn’t

and the melody I had created was what was to be the final draft of a tune for my song. I used a

controller board, The AKAI Fire (Akai), to make my melodies. The Fire is a board that has a

light up MIDI keyboard and is specifically designed for FL Studio use. This controller board was

super useful, since it also comes with velocity control, panning control, and sync availability to

certain parts of the mixer track. This makes music much more enjoyable.

I love the different sounds of instruments and presets, but I don’t create many of the

presets and instruments I use. First off let me make something clear. I don’t play many

instruments, piano being the only harmonic instrument that I have learned (besides playing the

guitar for about a year or so). So how would I create a melody line or even record the song? This

is where electronic DAWs, or digital audio workstations, come into play. There are a variety of

DAWs ranging from apps like GarageBand to Ableton and Fruity Loops Studio. For the song

that I created, I used Fruity Loops Studio (Imageline), a DAW by the company Image Line. I

used many presets for this particular song, and just as much sampling. What is sampling you

might ask?
 Sampling is where you take samples that are recorded or pre-created, and implement

them into your track. Samples can be cut and different things, such as foley, melody, vocoding,

sound design like wavetables, and ambient noise. There is a lot more you can do with sampling,

but the things you can do with them depend on how creative the user is. You can take

conversations from videos and create lyrics to a song out of them. You can take certain sounds

from footsteps to thunderstorms and implement them in the song. In the song that I created, I

used a few percussion loops and a background ambient rainstorm sample, which you can hear

especially in the first verse. Some of the samples that I used in this song, including drums and

some MIDI ideas, came from the company Cymatics. They provide paid and free samples,

royalty free, which means that copyright is not an issue (Cymatics). With these samples, there is

another level of depth that is added to the song, which can immerse the listener more into the

track. Sampling is always a good thing to consider when creating music, and I have learned more

effective and efficient ways to use sampling over the years. This knowledge has led me to create

more powerful, interesting, and immersive music.

Presets are a whole other thing. Presets are settings or sounds that are premade in a

certain plugin to be used. If you have a plugin like FLEX, which is a new “preset-based

synthesizer” created by Image-line, the company that created FL Studio, you are going to have a

ton of premade instruments including but not limited to pianos, strings, basses, and arpeggios.

Those are all presets. There is another quite popular program that uses presets, and that is Nexus,

which comes from a company called ReFX (Refx). Another program I used was Serum by the

company Xfer (Serum), a software that allows you to manipulate soundwaves and wavetables to

create and design your own sounds. For example, using a simple sine wave in Serum can help

you out with creating a nice bass sound. Some things are much more complex, but fortunately in
this project it never came to that. Each instrument and preset adds a whole new element to the

song, whether it is the certain kind of sound that it makes, whether it adds a layer of melody or

harmony to the song, and whether it changes the mood or tone of the track. Presets are quite

important if not essential to the creation of electronic music.

To get dynamics in a song, you have to have changing tempo, key, intensity, or whatever

else it takes to drive a certain emotion in the song. Changing an instrument's equalization can

definitely help with this. In order to change that, I opened up a program called Parametric EQ 2,

which has not only knobs to change the equalization, but also a viewport so you can see what

you are doing. Automation clips can be used to have the instrument change the frequency by

itself in a song without the need for the composer to twist and turn the knobs as the song is

playing. I created multiple automation clips and configured them in a so that the guitar, piano,

and drums have changing frequencies throughout the song, which in turn helps the dynamics of

the song. In my opinion this is one of my favorite parts of creating a song, since it is like building

a rollercoaster, drawing ups and downs within the automation clips to control a certain sound of

the song. With automation clips, I was able to preview the sounds that my lyrics would be

matching up with.

To have a song with lyrics, you must write, record, and sync them into the song. This is

the longest process of creating a song with words. First you have to write the lyrics, which can

either be quite easy or hard depending on what you are writing about. For my project, the lyrics

of verse 1 and 2 were all written in a span of just 2 hours. The lyrics all came to mind very

quickly, and I was able to use an app on my phone to quickly jot down the words that were

coming to my mind. Since then I have had to write more, but the base of the words all came from

one thought that turned into a few lyrics, and from there the song took off. It was much easier
after that to come up with words. Whether it was thinking about it at school or in the shower, I

had a base to work with lyrically. That is essential in music; you need a base in each aspect of

the track. Recording the lyrics took even longer. This is because the process is quite tedious.

First you have to get a microphone, in this case I used the Blue Yeti USB microphone (Yeti),

with a cheap pop filter that I got along side it. I had to do research online for the best microphone

on a budget, and from what I learned and watched, this microphone was the best option for me.

After getting the microphone, you have to get recording software. This was very easy, since I

have owned a program called Audacity, an open source recording software. You can also record

your voice directly into the DAW itself, but for what I needed to do it would not have worked

inside the program itself. I needed to filter out the background noise and control the

amplification easily, and Audacity was the program for that. After recording and importing my

vocals into the track, it was time to filter the vocals to sound better with the song. I used a few

different plugins for my vocal filtering such as Fruity Convolver, Melodyne, and Soundgoodizer.

The hardest part is actually getting the vocals right when you sing them, because sometimes they

will have unwanted peaks in the audio wave which causes crackling sounds or popping sounds,

or you will just sound weird. In this case, this happened a lot to me, so even though I have

around 20 audio tracks, it took me hundreds of times to actually sing it right into Audacity first,

and then transfer over to FL Studio to filter. This was the hardest part of the entire song by far.

Even when you are done with the song, you still need to organize the project in case later

changes need to be made. The interface of FL Studio is luckily easier to understand than

programs like Ableton or Logic Pro, so that is something that was a plus to me for my project.

Changes will be made, and with years of experience, that is almost a guarantee. Every song will

have its imperfections, and as a creator one of the jobs of creating a musical masterpiece is
working out the little kinks and problems in a song to polish it up and make it sound the absolute

best it can. This is where the majority of my time was taken up. Not only did polishing the first

draft of my song end up in a failure, but the second draft was longer and so completing the entire

song and polishing it up was a very tedious task. It was a lot nicer, sounded better, and paid off

in the end, but was still not an easy task.

Matching up a song to the emotions that are presented in the lyrics is very important, and

that was another failure that occurred in the first attempt of creating a song for this senior project.

The lyrics that I wrote were good, but did not match at all with the vibe of the song, and

therefore would not have made as much sense to the listener, and would not have given the

intended feeling. So with that failure I learned, and with that knowledge I ended up creating a

much better melody and instrument choice for the second song, matching up with the intended

feeling that I would want the listener to get out of it.

At one point I rewrote the lyrics. It was during the final steps of the song and so I had

created the entire melody and everything that went with it except for the lyrics. This is where

time is needed. When creating a song you need time. That is massive. When creating electronic

music, you won’t have a finished, polished song in a single day. Instead it takes days to weeks of

creating, writing, recreating, and rewriting. I did have enough time though, and in the end I had

enough time to finish the song. I sang the lyrics, totalling an estimated 10 hours of my work,

because when putting your words into a DAW that has instruments that are all on perfect pitch,

anything out of tune in your voice will not sound good with instruments that are all perfectly on

tune. However I used a software called Melodyne from Celemony (Celemony), to help keep my

vocals on pitch, perfect pitch to be exact. This could be considered cheating for some, but
altering vocals can sometimes be what it takes to make a song sound as good as possible, and

that’s what I had to do.

With that, and after a final few touch ups, the song is finished. I had no idea in the end

how difficult it would actually be to create a song that wasn’t even nearly as long as I expected.

Starting a melody and a beat is one thing, turning it into a full-fledged song is a completely other.

Using all the knowledge I gained throughout this project, I can safely say I am an even better

music creator than when I started, and I feel like spreading this knowledge is something that is

essential when learning something. So that is what I am going to do.

 Works Cited

AKAI Professional: Advanced Production Hardware and Software. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.akaipro.com/ (Akai)

This is the official website where I bought my AKAI Fire, a controller board, from. There
are other products here that you can look at and buy, and also do some research on some
good controller boards and MIDI keyboards.

Celemony. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.celemony.com/en/start (Celemony)

This is the official website where I got Melodyne from, the voice filter that helped keep my
voice perfectly on pitch to match with the instruments.

Cymatics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqK9dqyE1ct-

hUMf5hGFsqQ (Cymatics)

This website features a ton of sampling products, many of which I have, some purchased
and some freely downloaded. This is my main site where I get my samples and audio files.

FL Studio. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ (Imageline)

This is the official website of Imageline, the company that created and distributes FL
Studio. You can buy multiple versions of the DAW on the website, as well as some deals
for controller boards and other equipment.

In The Mix. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIcCXe3iWo6lq-

iWKV40Oug/about (Mix)

A Youtube channel that gives music tutorials on a wide variety of things from basic beat-
making to sound design with Serum. This channel has been very important in what I have
learned over the years.
News. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://refx.com/ (Refx)

Although labeled as News, this site contains the product Nexus, a preset program that
contains many instruments, synths, leads, and the whole bunch. I use this program for
nearly every song that I create.

Serum. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://xferrecords.com/ (Serum)

This is the official website where I got the program Serum from, a wavetable synthesizer.
This product has been a staple in my bass sounds in my songs, including this one. This
website contains purchasable xfer products including Serum.

yeti. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.bluedesigns.com/products/yeti/ (Yeti)

The official website for Blue, a company that creates and sells microphones, one (the Blue
Yeti) which I bought for myself for this song. This site sells their products, gives deals, and
general updates of their company.