Music Mixing

Goals

This activity is designed for the students to get creative. Here they are given music files that they can mix together to create their own tunes.

Materials

- Sony’s ACIDMusic software

- Make sure you have access to at least one machine that has the Professional copy; this will be needed at the end to convert the tunes to .mp3 format

Lesson Intro


This lesson idea was adapted from previous materials provided by TechMission. I only planned on this taking two days, but the students seemed to really enjoy learning new features of PowerPoint, such as how the slides transitioned, and it ended up taking five 1.5 hour classes.

This is also a good project to come back to in the future, after a few more projects.

Lesson Preparation

You can download the free version of Sony ACID XPress from www.acidplanet.com. Again, if you want to publish the final projects in .mp3 format, you will have to have one machine with the necessary version ******** of ACID Music.

You also will want to get some loops. These used to be available online for free, but recently have only been offered free for one per week. You may have to pay to get all of the loops for the students to use. Make sure these loops are installed or accessible on each machine.


Lesson Procedure

Below is a screenshot of the anatomy of the ACID Music program.

A. This is your Explorer window. Just as in Windows OS, you will navigate to the folder(s) where you have your loops saved.

B. This is where your list of loops will show up. This is your preview window.

C. Make sure you have this selected, and then click on the file below to preview the loop. (Or click on the loop, then click play – 2 buttons to the left of this one.)

D. Once you have found a loop, or track, that you like, either double click it or drag it into this area. In the free version, you can have up to 10 tracks in one file.

E. Choose the pencil tool so that you can draw your loops on.

F. With the pencil tool selected, draw in this area to include that track.

G. You can fade in and fade out your tracks. Place your mouse near here and you will see your arrow change to include a slope. With this, click and drag into the track as far as you would like the fade to go.

H. You can use the regular play button, or press this play button to play your loops from the beginning.

I. You can record yourself and include it as a track. This is good for kids to try out beatboxing and such.

a. Press the Record button to start, then this will turn to a Stop button to end the recording. You also can change where you are saving the clip in Browse.

J. This shows the time you are at in your clip.

K. (not a feature in the free version) – Publish your music into another format, such as .mp3 or .wav

L. Zoom in and out on your frames. Zooming in allows you to zoom in on time, and zooming in zooms out on time.

M. This bar shows your loop region. If you want to play your entire file, make sure the length of the file is included in this loop region section.

N. Click on this (loop playback), and then click play. This will play your loop region repetitively.

You can do more with this program – explore. This is just an introductory look into it.

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