LUNCH TIME: Mark Smith ‘14 takes a lunch break with girlfriend Cassie Howard ‘14 and friends Kelsey Smith ‘14 and Robin Chatterjee ‘14.

Mark Smith ’14 is a man of many talents, some of which are soccer and music, which he does during the school year as well as in the summertime.

“I don’t find it hard to balance all three. I usually do the most writing in the summer, when there’s no school and I don’t have to worry about staying up too late,” said Smith, “but during soccer season I slow way down on music.”

Smith loves making music, with his friends and sometimes alone.  When he started playing piano at age 7, he hated lessons because he would have to memorize the sheet music, which wasn’t a good experience for him.  The one part of music that always intrigued him was making little songs up in his free time, which is why he quit taking lessons at age 11.  In 8th grade he really started making his own music after he started watching videos of Billy Van, a musician that went to Smith’s church.

“We work well together. We’re good friends and share projects a lot, and he’s really good at house music so we blend styles,” said Jett Jones ’14.

Jones and Smith just released a song titled “Stage 2”, which has turned into Jones’ favorite song that the duo has made together.  But that might be surpassed as his favorite if they can create bigger and better songs over the rest of their senior year.

If you want to hear all of Mark’s music, the link to go to his site is: Http://soundcloud.com/marksmithmus6

Mark Smith’s Step-By-Step guide to making music

1. Mess around and experiment on the piano.

2. Put whatever the messing around came to into “Logic Pro”, the digital audio workstation.

3. Design some synthesizers that fit the style using sylenth1 and sometimes FM8.

4. Put drums into the chord progression and start working on the melody.

5. Work out the bass line to fit the chords and melody, do lots of equilization, which is the electronic balancing of sound frequencies on audio recording equipment and compress the synthesizers to the drums.

6. Master the tracks, the hardest part, where I tweak equilization and multiband compressors on the master channel until it sounds good on my headphones, then export the song and try it out.