Final Project

For my final project I proposed that I would improvise on the cello and pull some loops from the improvisation to put together with some beats and if I had time some vocals.

The first time I attempted to record my improvisation I had technical difficulties, but didn’t know until after playing for 20 min. A day or so later, after I stopped being angry with my computer, I tried again. I then spent some time listening through the improvisation and picking out loops. I had done some slow playing, chords, fast playing, extended techniques with the bow and the instrument and played part of a piece. I picked out a lot of different loops to try to use, and deleted probably twice as much as I saved.

As I began arranging the pieces I first tried to create a beat out of some of the extended technique loops, but it didn’t work out in a way that I loved, so I removed that. I next tried layering several of the melodic lines, mostly the slower ones, and put together a cello sound scape. Some of it I liked, but much of it sounded incohesive. I then tried to put a premade beat/drums under the cello, but again couldn’t find anything that I really liked and so removed that. I played more with the melodic pieces and tried to create some repetition to make the song more cohesive.

In the end I ran out of time to create something that I really loved, as opposed to something finished enough to turn in. I really wanted to scrap the whole thing and begin again, but there wasn’t enough time.

If there had been enough time I would I recorded new cello tracks creating one loop at a time. I probably would have played to a metronome instead of free improvising and I would have built the loops on one another instead of just playing a bunch of ideas consecutively and then trying to fit them together. I also think that part of my problem was that I had too many loops that I wanted to try to use, in addition to them not really all fitting well together.