For this project, our driving question was, “How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?” And since this is Freestyle Academy, we also had to find a way to improve our 21st century tech skills.

The passion that I wanted to pursue for this project is music. I have written a couple of classical pieces before, but I wanted to try my hand at pop and video game music, since we learned how to use some music software in class.

“Ode to Costco”

I wanted to make a joke song about Costco, because I really like Costco. However, as I looked into the business as I was writing the lyrics, I learned that Costco is more than just cheap chicken. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but Costco is really good at getting people’s money. Customers are drawn to Costco thinking they will save money, but in actuality, people spend more per trip to Costco than many other stores. So, I added that message to my song too.

To make the audio, I used Reason by Propellerhead, one of the softwares that we learn in class. I learned a lot (that we didn’t learn in class) about using Reason while making this song. I learned how to do time signature and tempo changes, and I learned how to pitch-correct my singing, to the potential dismay of my anti-autotune Digital Media teacher. I also learned the beauty of adding effects like reverb to the whole song, because it helps to blend things together and solves an issue that I’ve had previously. I learned these things both by messing around and watching tutorials on Youtube, and I’m pretty proud of myself for learning on my own.

To make the video, I used Adobe Photoshop to draw the images and Adobe After Effects to animate and assemble. I’m also proud of the visuals because I made them flow with the song–when the mood is more lighthearted, the daytime environment is visible, and when it is more serious, the nighttime environment is visible.

“I CAN’T PLAY ANIMAL CROSSING”

This song is inspired by the game Animal Crossing, and the title is the way it is because I don’t own any Nintendo consoles, so I can’t play the game. I do listen to the soundtrack in my spare time, and I really like the calming and cute music. I also think that it’s really cool that each animal in the game has their own voice, and I implemented these ideas into this song. I think that I could have done much better, though. I think that the synths that I used just didn’t go well with each other and the song, and bass voice was too heavy. I actually made this before I made the Ode to Costco, so this was good practice using Reason before the bigger project.

This 1-minute song only took me a few hours to write and produce. I think that if I had spent more time working on it, it would have turned out more polished. In contrast, my Ode to Costco song took me a month of thinking about and multiple days of writing and producing, and I think it turned out much better.

One of my dreams is to compose music for video games, and I definitely have a long way to go. However, I learned a lot from making this, and I want to continue making music.