Project B; Composition using Logic

I decided to compose a piece of music for the film we made in our IM2030 class. Our project was to produce a five minute film depicting what we believe 'Hidden London' is. Our story line is that of a 'nice guy' who borrows money from a loan shark and can't pay him back, so it ends with the main character being brutally murdered. However, we decided to begin the film with the main guy dying. This is to create intrigue, and engage the audience.


I decided to compose the music to this film to replace speaking and diagetic sounds whilst portraying the characters. I also want to create a dramatic and tense feel to the piece. When composing the piece I 


... I imported the film into Logic and set the tempo to 120bpm. I then began composing a simple piano riff using a logic piano plug-in, with my midi keyboard. I recorded myself playing the chords C and D arpeggiated. Any mistakes I made, I manually corrected using the piano roll. With a simple riff I was able to create a rhythm, using a Logic jazz piano plug-in. Once I had created a drum beat, I separated the drums into six separate tracks. I panned the drums to fill the stereo field and imitate what you would hear if you were listening to drums live. I also created an auxilary channel which I used as a reverb and sent the drum tracks individually so I could control the level of reverb on each track.


I then tweaked the E.Q. of each individual drum part; I heightened the bass in the kick drum. Snare, I slightly increased the mid range. Hi-Hat, I E.Q'ed out a considerable amount of bass and heightened the high end. The toms I increased the bass slightly and cut out a bit of the mid range frequencies and cymbals I cut out some of the bass frequencies.





Once I was happy with the sound of the drums I created new instrument parts to layer the track and help build suspense. I added a bass track followed by a harp track. The violins and cello help add suspense to the piece. 





Due to the film being five minutes long I composed the piece at five minutes, however our assignment had to be 3 minutes and 50 seconds long. I had to split the track at 3 mins 50 and had to fade out, during a dramatic scene. This helped build tension and suspense. Leaving the listeners wanting to listen to more. The music I composed was a reflection of the film. 


This is the finished song with part of the film:


Hidden London Composition