Day 2

The song has been moving along in bits and pieces, first figuring out the proper notes, then the right rhythms, and finally synchronizing the bass line, drum beats, and harmony for the second repeat. The quad notes have been harder to figure out, but Dev and I worked out most of the percussion section by beating it together in Physics. The majority of the notes for the bass line were figured out and tabbed by using the piano app on my iPod to find the tone, then scribbling it down on scratch paper. The final steps for our group will be to assign the different parts to each different instrument, and then recording the notes using finale on Mr. Matthy’s computer and keyboard.

-Phillip

Furthermore, we were able to figure out the bass drum and snare drum parts for the song. When we were listening to the actual song to figure out the drum lines we were having difficulty because there was so much going on. We found this awesome instrumental on YouTube that helped us a lot because the individual parts were a lot easier to listen for once the rapping was taken off. We even noticed some extra parts in the instrumental, such as sirens and a mind-blowing electric guitar part, so we are looking to incorporate those into our transposition!

-Irene

Today was a learning experience for the three of us. Coming up with the melody on the piano (Day One’s work) was easy, and we expected to be able to cruise through this project. As we found out today, this will absolutely NOT be the case. As we started to transpose the melodies we wrote out for each instrument, we were faced by several decisions. First of all, we had to decide which instrument plays which part. We decided to write 3 parts (a bass line, a tenor line and a “melody” line and then just divide them by instrument – ie: Trumpets/Flutes/Clarinets play melody line and so on. After inputting a melody line and a bass line into Finale 2011, we moved on to the drum line. To get a better sense of what we were trying to replicate, we looked up an instrumental version of “Power” on YouTube. We discovered several nuances that were not apparent to us in the song version (most notably a siren and an electric guitar solo). Transcribing these parts along with the drum beat is quite difficult and still a work in progress.

-Dev

Day 1.

Wilkommen! In our group we have Dev Bhargava, Phillip Kearns and me, Irene Lee (I'll be our main blogger for this project). Dev plays the French horn, while Phil and I are the bass clarinetists of the Wind Ensemble. After serious contemplation, we ruled out making a music video, forming a Peruvian pan flute band and exploring interpretive dance to arrive at an idea that would be interesting, enjoyable and musically enlightening. With our high school’s recent successes in football along with the fun times we have been having during football band, we were hoping to be able to add one more song to our great pep band line up: Kanye West’s Power.

None of us have had experience in the transposition of music, but we got off to a great start with the intro of the song today. With Phil’s knowledge of the melody, Dev’s sense of rhythm and my note drawing skills, we were able to write down a few bars from what we had figured out on the band room piano during the period.

Because we have three people in our group, at some point we will need to be more efficient and divide the song into parts that we can do individually. Though we might face challenges in doing so, because we will all have different interpretations of the song as we transpose by ear, with collaboration and sufficient communication we will be able to collectively join our parts and create an awesome piece that, hopefully, we can get our band to play before the end of our football season.