Blog 5 – Politics in Music Production (Workshop Reflection)

This week in class, we explored activism in music through a composition task inspired by Moor Mother. In this exercise, we were asked to create a track that incorporated a meaningful speech. I paired up with Axel.

We decided to create a jungle-inspired track on Logic using JF Kennedy’s inaugural speech as vocal material. We chose a section of JFK’s inaugural speech where he talks about freedom and responsibility.

We used a YouTube to MP3 converter to download it, then we cut the specific bits of speech that we wanted and left it raw and unedited.

Once we had selected and edited the speech, we moved on to creating the music.

Axel suggested the idea of making a jungle beat. At first, I was unsure because I was unfamiliar with the genre, but I thought it was a great opportunity to try something new.

We started by downloading a jungle drum loop from a sample library, then layered additional kicks and snares to give the rhythm more impact. This worked really well, and the beat started to come alive. Once the percussion was done, we focused on harmonies and bass. We chose all native plug-ins from Logic’s library, looking for the common sounds of the genre.

First, we created the harmonies by playing the chords with an edited version of the electric piano where it had chorus and slight distortion already in the audio effects section of the inspector. After that, we layered it with a pad and a gliding bass under the chords to achieve a richer and fuller sound. Lastly, we added the bass to enhance the rhythm. We went for an 80’s synth type of bass.

Because we spent time focusing on sound selection we didn’t have time to mix, we also didn’t plan it to be honest, so next time we should take into account the time given for the task in the lesson and allocate the last 15 minutes to balance the volume, control dynamics and quickly make a very rough mix

Overall, the collaboration went well, I had the opportunity to learn a new genre of music I was unfamiliar with and also to work collaboratively with others.

I also learned the importance of purposefully choosing the message of my songs as it’s not possible to avoid that given that people will always have an interpretation for the lyrics so it’s better to have a direction when it comes to political messages in music.