8 People
BY AMY S. HANSEN
McKinney's STEAMPowered Music The screen shows uninspired squiggles. But you don’t look away because the music pulls you in. The squiggles fall into the shape of a computer control key, the logo of the company appears and their message that they are in control flashes off screen. The graphics for the short are fine, but the music is memorable. It gives weight to the abstract and makes the strange lines on the screen feel alive. Composer, musician and Grammy-nominated producer James McKinney is in charge of that music. He lays down a melody line, then harmony, then another, adjusts the volumes and reverb until the music is as perfect as it can get. “When I am manipulating the music, I am doing the Arts part of STEAM,” he said. “Building the software is the science, technology,
engineering and math.” McKinney makes adjustments on the computer screen using a software package called Waves. Someone else coded the package, and he is grateful. “Coding,” he said, “is the glue between the physical and digital realms of music.” McKinney did a bit of coding when he was in high school, but the programs now are beyond anything he ever worked on. He also started his journey in engineering while he was still in high school. He first went into studios as a musician, recording onto tape as he chased the dream of being a rock superstar. Then he became a sound engineer himself. “I transitioned really quickly from analogue to digital,” he said. He learned the physics of recording sound and how the waves are represented on the
screens he uses. He learned the ease of duplicating sections of rhythms throughout a song. He learned to add or subtract tones from voices or instruments. Now, as a composer as well as a sound engineer, he knows that the real instruments sound much better than the digital ones. But he can use the fake strings and fake brass as a sketch within his scores. Once he gets other musicians to play, he can hear his sketch played. “You don’t know until you hear it if it’s going to work and if it’s going to be what you thought,” he said. When it works it is a moment of bliss. “I’m touching God or God is touching me. It’s amazing.” Caribbean Recordings Which brings him to another project, building studios so others can learn to do what he
