UPSB v3
Videos, Presentation and Music / [topic][3.1.3] Song Selection
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Date: Fri, Jun 15 2007 17:08:14
Selecting a good song is vital; if you don't have an appriopriate song to work with, don't even think about doing synchPS in the first place. Here are some pointers which will help you select a good song. Notice that these apply to making a collab or a showcase with several combos to one song, but can also be taken to just making one synchPS combo on a short section of the song.
-Regular and distinctive sense of rhythm: The song should have a regular easy rhythm of a 3/4 or 4/4 meter. If you select a song with an irregular rhythm, it will be extremely hard to follow it. And if the song doesn't have a marked beat (i.e. a drum keeping track of the rhythm) it will also be hard for you to synchronize your music. Thus, a romantic solo piano piece might not be a good idea because there is no distinctive sense of rhythm (mostly due to rubato), making it extremely hard to follow.
Some may argue that pen spinning should be smooth and flowing, which seems conflicting to the idea of having to match it to a beat, which would make it jerky. The idea is that while this may hold true for regular combos, the same does not apply to synchPS. You really away to throw away most of your notions of a good combo when working in synchPS. It may prove difficult to certain spinners to get used to synchPS if they can't abandon everything they've learned so far in PS when doing musical choregraphies.
Therefore, anything with a strong beat such as dance is probably a good choice.
-Moderate to fast speed: A song that is too slow is not appropriate for spinning because pen spinning is dynamic. A slow song would just drag down the combos and make for a very boring collab. However, this does not mean you should only choose very fast song. Midtempo songs are also very good because they're easier to follow. If you choose songs that are too fast, spinners will have a tendency to "slur" their tricks together and the result is that the synchronization will not become apparent. If you choose something moderate, you could always spin twice faster and "mark" the tricks at the beats. All the tricks in between will be ornaments and have to be executed less noticeably.
Also, even if the beat itself is moderate, you can follow something else, such as the voice or instruments, which may be playing at a faster pace.
-Not too many "dead" moments: If the song has too many pauses or interludes, you just lose momentum. If it only happens once or twice, you could technically get by by adding stalls and editing to show screencaps or whatever (this is already commonly done). But if the song is "pop and stop", you can take it off your list right now.
-Short length: Ideally, you want make a collab which uses the whole song. Since combos are drastically shorter than song length, you want something not too long. Somewhere 3 minutes should be good, otherwise you will need many combos to fill up the time.
-Easy to split into short sections: It's one thing to have a good sized song, but if the song has no clearly defined sections and it just goes on for minutes, you still can't use it because that forces you to have a combo of several minutes, lest you "break" the song by changing combo. To make it coherent, find songs which can be splitted into sections easily, where each section is about 15-30 seconds long, so that you can make a combo of that length.
-Have memorable cues: a song is nice to spin with if it has occasional "events" that happen in the song which are easily expressible through spinning. This is hard to describe, but when you listen a song you can imagine how you would spin to it.
-Variety: if the song is only one beat for minutes, you may bore your audience very quickly. Use something that has different kind of beats, so that you can mix it up with different kinds of combos.
-Lot of different instrumentation: What's interesting in synchPS is that even though you may have two combos which follow the same beat (are located in the same section of the song), they may look totally different because they're following different instrument/voice. It will then be up to the viewer to figure out which instrument exactly the spinner is following. This makes the video interactive and asks the viewer to actively look for the synchronization. It adds depth.
-Have an intro and an outro of moderate length: for purely aesthetic reasons, it would be good if the song had a small intro of 20 seconds or so and an outro of similar length so that the collab can have an intro or outro. This is not very important because you can just insert another song for your intro/outro. But if you want a seamless transition between those and the spinning, use a song with intro/outro.
Study Case:
The song I selected is "Touch Ya" by Rain. Here are the reasons why, based on the criterions above:
-Rhythm is 4/4 and very easy to follow. It's a dance song.
-Moderate speed: Good easy rhythm to follow. Some instruments play a bit faster, and the voice is also easy to follow.
-There's only 1 pause in the song, and it's very brief. This could be used to our advantage by stopping the spinning, and coming back into full force spontaneously to create an effect.
-Length of the song is 3:39. The intro is about 20 seconds long and the outro is about 21 seconds long. This leaves us with about 3 minutes of spinning, which is perfect.
-The biggest strength of this song is that it is very easy to split. You hear a low piano chord at every 4 measures. This occurs roughly at every 8-9 seconds. This means you could split it into chunks of 8, 16, 24 or 32 seconds, perfect for combos!
-The chorus of the song is very easy to transform into pen spinning. When the singer is saying "Let me, let me, let me, touch ya!", you can easily coordinate that to a neobakfall, or a bakfall with an aerial at the end. Lot of possibilities there. There's also several moments during verses where you hear gang shouts. You can make something interesting there too.
-Variety: The song has about 4 different kinds of themes. This is plenty for 3 minutes.
-Different instrumentations: during the verse, you have the main beat, the low piano chord, bass and the voice. During the chorus you have the synth lead, the beat, the voice and the background "tick". There's not that much, but it's enough to keep it interesting.
You can hear the song here:
http://media.putfile.com/Touch-Ya
Here's a live video of the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM3XPArhzZU
Download the song here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3HAZSVKK
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Original Thread -
Date: Sun, Jan 10 2010 21:57:06
right ... so ... this project is pretty much been dead for a while ...
not sure if this the proper place to post, or if it's even relevant, but i got bored and filmed a freestyle along with "Feel Good Inc" ... so yeah ... here it is: -
Date: Sun, Jan 24 2010 22:25:23
I don't think penspinning should be as limited in synchronism and song choice as the above describes, if other aspects of penspinning are used any song would accompany penspinning beautifully. If it is only general spinning tricks the above may apply however the use of 2p2h and other varieties such as "style" how you chose to preform the trick and your use of spinless and isolation tricks to depict the structure of the music that is presented to you.
Upon further development I could see spinners being presented with different genres of music and having to create the best depiction of it through spinning. -
Date: Mon, Jan 25 2010 00:34:26QUOTE (EssenceOfLife @ Jan 24 2010, 05:25 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>I don't think penspinning should be as limited in synchronism and song choice as the above describes, if other aspects of penspinning are used any song would accompany penspinning beautifully. If it is only general spinning tricks the above may apply however the use of 2p2h and other varieties such as "style" how you chose to preform the trick and your use of spinless and isolation tricks to depict the structure of the music that is presented to you.
Upon further development I could see spinners being presented with different genres of music and having to create the best depiction of it through spinning.
yes the above was mostly written with the current state of spinning in mind, our regular tricks, also it refers to a spectrum level between 3-4. you might not be able to achieve such high level of synchronicity of the song is not adequate.