Music 220A Final Project: Hip Hop With Chuck
Alberto Guzman
Autumn Quarter 2009

My final project for Music 220a uses different pieces of code to generate the different elements of a hip hop song, which is then sequenced of FL Studio.

Description: To begin this musical journey I had to separate the elements of a common hip hop song and generate ChucK code to mimic those tones.
Below are those elements mentioned above and how I generated them.

Drums:
Percussion Track For the instrumental I made there are three layers of drums. Two are different recorded tracks of me beatboxing and the other layer is comprised of chuck generated percussion sounds. The actual percussion was generated by program called the skake-o-matic, which generates random sequences of percussion sounds including cymbals, rim shots, and hi hats. After recording a shred of this code playing through ChucK on Audacity, I isolated the random percussion sounds generated into single sounds.

This is what I acquired:
Jingle Bells
Muffled Bell
Rim Shot
Single Hat
And this is the complete ChucK generated percussion track:
Percussion Track

Beatbox Track For the beatbox track I recorded it while running a shred of ChucK which allows for live delay panning. This causes an effect where the beatbox pans from the one ear to another with a slight delay on this side. The initial, singular beatbox track you hear in the beat has only one instance of this shred running.
Beatbox Track 1
For the next beatbox track, which is slightly different than the first, the same delay panning effect is applied.
Beatbox Track 2
Then, in part of the song, I play the two delay panning beatbox parts together to create a surrounding effect for the listener as the two sequences pan to opposite ears and sweep to the other.
Beatbox Together

Synth:
For the synth sound playing alone in the intro, I used a sine wav using a Sin Oscillator on ChucK, cut the sweeping part out to preserve the main, single note, and passed it through a resonant filter on FL Studio which morphed it to a more grittier, synthier sounding tone. The shred which states 30 + ( Math.sin(t) + 1.0 ) * 10000.0 => s.sfreq; I changed to 30 + ( Math.sin(t) + 1.0 ) * 500.0 => s.sfreq; to lower the pitch.
The synth sounding product was then sequenced on FL Studio and had its note quality manipulated through a MIDI keyboard to produce the following two sequences:
Synth Sequence 1
Synth Sequence 2

Bass:
The bass was created in a similar method as the synth was. The same Sin Oscillator was used, but instead of 30 + ( Math.sin(t) + 1.0 ) * 500.0 => s.sfreq; , the shred of code was changed to 30 + ( Math.sin(t) + 1.0 ) * 50.0 => s.sfreq; to create a much deeper tone. The sweep was cut to preserve the single note and that tone was passed through a low-pass filter on FL Studio to provide for a much richer bass sound. It was then sequenced with a MIDI keyboard to create this riff:
Bass Sequence

Main Melody:
Last, but not least, the main melody, which you hear over the drums, bass, and synth, was created using samples of Greensleeves generated by the ChucK shred used for hw0.
Here is what the original sounds like:
Greensleeves
After recording that on audacity, I isolated each note and assigned them to my MIDI keyboard and sequenced them on FL Studio to get these four sequences.
First Sequence
Second Sequence
Third Sequence
Fourth Sequence

Final Product:
After generating the elements of the song, I sequenced them on FL Studio to create an instrumental:
Instrumental
And just for fun, I recorded some lyrics over the instrumental track:
Song