Edexcel Music Technology Unit 4 June 8th 2016

Seemed a lot harder than most of the past papers I had done...The chord progression question was a bit cheeky because they asked you to write the notes of the chord but to anyone not that musical doing music tech they may not have got it because they were inversions of those chords. I also didn't get the phase task, I could not for the life of me cancel out the sine wave, you could EQ it out but the exam specifically said to do it using the sample sine wave given to you. I tried putting it in literally every possible position, tried inverting the phase, but the best I could get was a little bit of reduction on it.

I had the phase problem and decided to EQ it out, it almost fully disappeared and the examiners cannot tell if it is EQ due to them only having your tracks via itunes etc

I know, I didn't think of it until after i'd left the exam room! I was too focused on trying to sort it out using phase haha...Which question did you answer in question 4?

haha i thought that i had no idea how to do the phase so i tried my next best option which is that so im gunning for 2-3 marks on it aha, i did 4B, it seemed a lot easier naming how it all works, whats the knobs do and who was famous for using them etc, anything worthy that could have been a mark you could just put down

Yeah, I did 4B as well, in a past paper I did on the same question but with an audio interface you could get a mark just for saying the power button turned it on/off, so easy to pick up extra marks with a question like that.

Dm and F

1) what key did you say it was in?
2) what did you set the quantise to on the first question?
3) did you manage to get the pitch shift in the bloody bass?
4) how intrusive was your beep?

1) Am
2) 1/8
3) used the piano editor to move it to the correct key then couldnt do much else
4) hardly audible

possibly not right but thats my answers

I thought the paper was quite a bit more 'techy' than we've had before, and I only knew how to do the sin wave question because I also do physics and have learnt about cancellation and stuff.
I struggled quite a bit with the sin wave on the vocals, but I put them out of phase and found the place where they cancel eachother the most, I didn't think of EQing it tbh :'( The amount that cancels out also depends on the volume you set the two waves (I turned the vocals up without thinking, and the sound came back again.) I could hear the sound on the individual track but not on the overall mix, so I hope it was ok??
4B was nice though
How did you do the bass synth? I made an ES2 synth, but didn't know how to do the enveloping, so I ended up automating something or other which took an age

for the pitch shifting I just used the piano roll to get the bass to the right octave and then used pitch shifter to shift the requested bars down 3 semitones (which i realise now i could have just done on piano roll as well)...then went on the plug in and changed the bend to +24 so the pitch bend went up 2 octaves (as it was all the way to +64 already on the controller)

The bass synth was pretty hard, I used the ES2 as well, did you mess around with envelope 2? because I found that putting up the attack on that helped get the beginning of my bass to sound similar, then making the rest sound the same was pretty tough but managed to get it fairly similar.

I thought the paper was quite a bit more 'techy' than we've had before, and I only knew how to do the sin wave question because I also do physics and have learnt about cancellation and stuff.
I struggled quite a bit with the sin wave on the vocals, but I put them out of phase and found the place where they cancel eachother the most, I didn't think of EQing it tbh :'( The amount that cancels out also depends on the volume you set the two waves (I turned the vocals up without thinking, and the sound came back again.) I could hear the sound on the individual track but not on the overall mix, so I hope it was ok??
4B was nice though
How did you do the bass synth? I made an ES2 synth, but didn't know how to do the enveloping, so I ended up automating something or other which took an age

The bass synth was pretty hard, I used the ES2 as well, did you mess around with envelope 2? because I found that putting up the attack on that helped get the beginning of my bass to sound similar, then making the rest sound the same was pretty tough but managed to get it fairly similar.