This is my first attempt at making a dirty south style rap beat. So far, I've found that the keys to making a good pitched snare roll, are to pick the right drum sound, and to transpose the drums by the proper interval. I think a splashy, hissy, fairly broadband snare sound works well. Of course, you could also use a tom or a combination of drum sounds. The transposition I used for these drums was 3 semi-tones between each sound. I spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect synth bass. The bass is a combination of two synths, one for a punchy attack sound, and the other for the thick sustain.

I was planning on rapping over this, but I need some more time, since I have never rapped in my life. For Part 2, I will improve this song by possibly sampling some "hey's" and "ohhhhs" from some real a capella tracks. I tried to fake it on this track by saying "hey" with a different voice, and pitch shifting, and panning different takes to create a thicker sound. I think part of the key is to have recordings of people who have a different timbre to their voice, since you can definitely hear that the "heys" are all me. Once I write the rap I will also improve the song structure, and mix it better.

For now, please enjoy the first part of this experiment and stay tuned for the updated version in part 2.

Dirty South Beat

chiprun

I wanted to make the most 8bit sounding song I could and this is what I came up with. I used all the classic free VSTs that make creating video game music so easy: Toad, Peach, Syntendo.  The drums are a simple bass and snare sound, with high hats every so often. I didn't use 8bit drums because I wanted to see if I could make it danceable. The rest of the tracks are itterations of the 3 VSTs I used. I paid special attention to the drums for this track, although they are very simple I spent a lot of time putting variations and fills where I thought they were needed. Enjoy!

believerse

This is something that me and a friend have started working on for a new project. It's just the part with my verse. We're still working on it. Thanks for listening!

-Donny Jarko

download mp3

I did this sitting in the Georgia Tech Library (pic) over the past few hours. This is more in the "poodleface" vein than the "erf" vein, though really it goes back even further to a group I was/s in with my friend Joe (he of "Six Hands" fame) called Social Security. Any poodleface mashup video ideas I've had have likely been possible due to my participation in this project, which was highly influenced by the collage artistry of Negativland, among other artists.

I wanted to do something simple, so I made a simple additive composition in Live 8, starting first with the drumbeat, then the keyboard part, then the bassline. After this I decided I wanted to have a tremolo post-rock sort of part, so I used one of the Guitar presets from Tension and filtered it through NI Guitar Rig, using the MIDI plugin Arpeggiation ahead of the instrument set to 1/32 to give an approximation of what I was looking for. Lastly, I used a strings preset from Tension, running it also though a Guitar Rig amp, then panned them left and right. (pic)

I was not satisfied with the mix, so I went hunting for resignation speeches of a certain length to match the sort of tone I had stumbled upon. Eventually I turned to Spiro T. Agnew's, who is someone I've used before as far as sampling. There is another speech where he criticizes the Yippie movement that I had used in a short piece back in 1999, so I knew the timbre of his voice would fit in. I didn't do any warping to the voice as I've done before, though I would have been tempted if I wanted to spend more time on this piece. The very last thing I threw on was some crowd noise in an attempt to make the crescendo and subsequent ending feel a bit more... anticlimactic I guess.

The title "God Reigns" is intoned several times within the speech. I had no particularly reason to emphasize one thing over another, so feel free to interpret and feel however you wish to. Though my mixing skills are still lacking, I'm mostly happy with this, especially since I played all these parts on the QWERTY on this laptop with no velocity.

Samples used:
Crowd Noise
Agnew Resignation Speech

For the "cover image" above, I traced over a portrait of Agnew with my Tablet PC and grabbed a random image labelled "Our God Reigns!!" on Google Image Search.

swimming_in_the_air

I made this song a few years ago. I heard this song again after forgetting about it and thought it was worth sharing. I'd like to get some feedback on it. I'm posting this song as a kick off to more songs with lyrics coming from me. This song doesn't have much lyrics, which is a problem of mine, so I may actually take some time to finish it up by developing the lyrics more, or I'll just start fresh.  So now that I'm sharing this with you guys the pressure is on, next hellagem will have to live up to this one. Let me know what you think.