I finally decided that I wanted to actually put a new track out again since my last one which was two months ago. I started piecing together some ideas between church services this morning and I ended up getting some really great sounds. I went straight home after church where I spent like.. five hours straight just playing ideas and editing. I created all the sounds and synths on this track. I really pushed myself to make a long song as well, which I managed to do. The hard part was making it interesting throughout the entire song. Hope you enjoy it!
David Gurr Music
Until the whole world hears
Category Archives: Loops and Synth
Remix Band : Sing A New Song
As you may remember from last year, I have been a part of what we call “Electro-Worship”. If kids listen to the radio and like Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Deadmau5, why can’t worship sound like that too? So this has been a long process of development and creating. Doug has had this vision before I even came to the school, but it all started coming into fruition last year. The testing phase was last year and we learned a lot. During this second half of the year, we actually put a band together called Remix Band. We do exactly what the name says, which is remixing worship music. I guess we are still in the testing stage but we are moving along now.
It has been a massive undertaking. Every time we play, we get great feedback and we also get a lot of puzzled looks from people. I think that when electric guitar was first introduced in worship music, they probably experienced the same puzzled faces and feedback. Some people think that electronic music and worship can not be put together, but I disagree. I know that one day you will walk into a church where the worship team is playing nothing but electronic instruments.
Our band currently has: two vocalist – Cortney and Cassidy || loop master, music director, synth – Myles || lead synth, synth bass, vocals – Justin || electric guitar, lead synth – David. We run loops trough Ableton Live that have programmed drums as well as whatever else we may need such as pad, bass, or rhythmic synths. One of our biggest struggles has been not having click at the venues we have been playing at. We need to get an in-ear setup that we can bring to venues so that we can all hear the click.
In other news, we will be having a Remix Band section in The Show which is exciting. We are still brainstorming on exactly what that will entail.
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- Access Virus // MicroKorg
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- Stage setup for chapel
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- Myles the mad scientist in his music laboratory
No Magic – Galaxy Dreamer
So I have been writing experimental electronic music both cooperatively and privately for a year or so now. In that time I have made many tracks, most of them only shared between close friends of mine. This is the first track that I am releasing publicly that I created by myself. I am going under the name Galaxy Dreamer. This style of music is very chill and relaxing. I wanted a name that went along with the vibe but was also fun. I will hopefully be releasing more and more tracks in the future. This is something I love doing but it is hard to find the time to get it done. Be sure to follow my account on SoundCloud and to share this song with your friends. Thanks so much for listening, I hope you enjoy it.
Creating an 80′s Snare
Part of this week’s homework in Audio Production class was to learn a new trick in recording and explain it. I watched this video above and decided that I would try my best to recreate what he did with Ableton rather than Pro Tools. The first difficulty was getting that huge bottom end which he did not explain how to achieve. I ended up doubling the snare and drastically EQ’ing one of them so that it was all bottom end. The next part was figuring out which way I would trigger the white noise every time the snare hit. I am sure there is another way but I ended up creating an operator track receiving midi from the snare track. I then added reverb to the operator track and programed the gate to close it off slightly. Here is an audio example of the dry snare, then with the bottom end added, and then with the white noise and reverb. At the very end I threw in a kick pattern just for fun.
Sampling Drums
This week in Audio Production class we focused on creating sampled drums in Ableton since none of us have the resources to record a real drum set. The other great thing about sampled drums is the fact that you can program them anywhere which is great for demos. Doug gave us all about 20 sample sounds including kick, snare, hi-hat, toms, and some cymbals. He had sampled each sound a good 20 times each at different velocities. All we had to do now was to make a brand new drum rack. We then input a sampler into a section of the drum rack where we then dragged in our sampled drum sound. You can see one of the audio files above. As you can see there are many takes of that one sound. So we had to crop the clip we wanted and then we had to mess around with a few setting within sampler which included:
Decay: 60 s
Release: 60 s
Voices: off
Vol<Vel: I stayed between 50-70%
We then needed to adjust an LFO so that we could change sample sounds with each hit to give it a more realistic sound. Since we had multiple takes of the same sound we could have 4 cropped hits and cycle between those instead of the same exact hit over and over again. To do that we needed to turn on LFO #2 and adjust these settings:
Wave type: random
Freq.: 20Hz
Retrig: off
Dest. A: Sample Selector
Amount A: 100
Now all we had to do for each hit that we cropped was to divided the sample selector evenly among the different hits. Here are a few clips from my experimenting with creating my own sampled drum rack.
You Are King (Demo 2)
You Are King
- Written by David Gurr & Nora West
- Recorded and produced by David Gurr
Our maker, king of angels (7)
Lord over all (4)
Mighty fortress (4)
One day the world will sing your praise (8)
One day the world will shout your name (8)
Every creature of the earth (7)
Will bow before your feet (6)
You command the raging seas (7)
Every nation every tongue(7)
Declares that you are king (6)
You control the galaxies (7)
Creator lord and savior (7)
All-powerful (4)
Everlasting (4)
Holding On (Demo 3)
This is the third demo of my song Holding On. I have made lyrical changes as well as melody and chord switches since the last update. This version was very produced because Doug and I were imagining this track following in the foot steps of some current hits such as “Trouble” by Taylor Swift. With that set as the general idea, I looked further to songs from Justin Bieber, Owl City, Hillsong, and of course, my usual “underground” music. This was my first time experimenting with a lot of those ideas such as bass wobble, vocal cuts, and switching back and forth between a halftime beat. I had a particularly hard time getting my voice to be as clean as possible. Many takes and editing went into this vocal track which still needs a lot of work. I am still learning the process of pitch editing and vocal equalizing. I am very pleased with how it turned out so far and I already am hearing things I want to change or edit in the next version. Hope you enjoy it!
Allies (MuteMath) Remix
This past week in Ableton class we talked about creating new arrangements with MP3s. We were allowed to use any song we wanted so I thought this would be a fun one to do and It was. I hope you enjoy my arrangement. It definitely is not better than the original, but this one is pretty fun with some humorous hits.
You Are King (Demo 1)
This week in Create we studied common chord progressions found in worship music. We were then required to write a song with a chorus that used one of the commonly used chord progressions. I chose a 1 4 6 5 progression for my chorus. I have been wanting to make an electronic worship song for a while now, so I had a little fun with this one. I changed the key a million times, switched from female to male vocals, and changed the melody a bunch as well. This is where I ended up at and I look forward to editing it further.
Written by David Gurr, Cortney Leigh, & Nora West
Produced by David Gurr
Every creature of the earth (7)
Will bow before your feet (6)
You command the raging seas (7)
Every nation and tongue (6)
Declares that you are king (6)
You control the galaxies (7)
Using Session View
This was a video I made for an Ableton assignment last week. You will not enjoy this unless you are a nerd. This was my first time videotaping my screen which ended up being kind of fun. I was really just explaining stuff for class, next time I would like to make it more educational so that people can actually use it and learn from it. Word.
