Day 2: Autumn

This morning we started with a Producer Of The Day presentation from Ira about MF Doom! We learned that MF stands for Metal Face/Metal Fingers (two names he produced under previously), and about some of his other aliases. Interestingly enough, DOOM has a habit of creating new artists titles for any album he collaborates on, usually a combination of names around his theme and the other artists’. Ira played his most popular song, One Beer, and favorite song, Meat Grinder.

Next, Matt gave us a tutorial on how major and minor scales work, and how to make chords out of them on FL Studio, which is the digital audio studio we are using during this term. He explained how there are 12 notes we use in music, and 7 in scales that will sound good together. After that we all worked on chord progressions, which are a set of chords played in a sequence that are usually put into songs. It was kind of hard to understand at the beginning, but Matt gave us some extra help in making the scales and we created some really pretty chord progressions!

After lunch Matt showed us how to sample different songs and beats on the internet and put them into FL Studio so we could use them in our songs. Since songs have different tempos and are in different keys, a couple of us struggled to make them blend together until he showed us the versatility of FL and taught us how to speed up or slow down the songs and change the pitch. For the rest of the day we worked on our songs that we will continue to work out throughout the term. Today we all learned a lot of very valuable skills in this workspace and Matt also showed us a lot of different shortcuts to make using FL a lot easier!! -Autumn Blanton

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