And Still I Rise

Welcome back! Hope you enjoyed your holiday. We're going to get started on a new assignment, which is something different than the previous assignments we've done before. Today we're going to work on producing music to a speech. The audio selected is from Maya Angelou's poem "And Still I Rise".


"Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist."


Let's have a listen to the audio of And Still I Rise.









Are there any parts in the poem that you feel deliver an especially strong message? What type of music do you think would be played under a poem like this? Well, let's work on creating our own music based around it!


1. Open Reason

2. Create an MClass Mastering Suite Combi

3. Create a Mixer 14:2

4. Create a NN19 Digital Sampler

5. Do NOT Load in a Patch!!! Instead, click the folder above the keyboard on the NN19. Go to the Yellow Audio A folder and open the WAV file that says And Still I Rise. Now click the button on the NN19 that says SOLO SAMPLE.

6. Open up the "piano roll" on the NN19 track on the sequencer of Reason. The sample is located at C3. Draw a line leading from the beginning of the song to about 3 minutes.

7. Set your tempo to a bpm of your choice. You may want to make adjustments to the tempo to better fit the speech.


8. Now with these steps completed, create an arranged beat that plays from the beginning of the speech to the end. Try to cater this arrangement to the speech and not necessarily to a song. This means that choruses and verses don't have to follow a specific guideline, but you'll want to make sure you have different parts to your beat.