Back in December, our fellow Early High School friends faced the challenge of making a fun Christmas experience for our school community to enjoy. I saw this as an opportunity for me to share my expertise in audio engineering. I reached out to the EHS students and offered to make them a ‘sick’ Christmas playlist to use in their experience. We met and, after asking them questions and discussing ideas, I had a vivid idea of the music I needed to create. In this article, I will be describing the process I went through to create the music for the early high schools Christmas experience!
The Early High school Students and I agreed I would make five songs, each at least three minutes long. They also suggested that the songs be upbeat to keep adrenaline rushing. This would keep the atmosphere in the experience happy, fun, and a little intense. With their suggestions, I began the pre-production stage. For this stage, I started by compiling songs that I thought will fit the mood of the music and would work well together. The websites I used to find my music are Freesounds, National Archives, and just a little bit of Youtube. When I found a piece of music I liked, I put it into a folder that was named after the project I was working on. For example, ‘EHS Christmas Music.’ This made it easier for my editing software to find the music on my computer. After that, I imported all the music I wanted to use into my editing software, Adobe Audition, in a new project.
Once the music was in Adobe Audition, I began the production phase. In this phase, I started to pull from the different audios and pieced them together to see if they worked well together. Honestly, the majority of editing is just me tinkering with different music combinations. Usually I make up to five music combinations, all thirty seconds to a minute long. Then I generally break it down to three music combinations. Since I was making five songs I wanted to keep it simple. After I chose my top three music combinations, I put them in an order I thought flowed well.
Once they were in order, I began doing touch ups. This consists of making sure the transitions are smooth, the volume is fluent, and there are no awkward cuts in the music. Once that is done, I listened to the full thing at least three times, double checking to make sure everything is smooth. I then exported the song and began making the next one. It took me around two days to make all five songs.
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