TL sent me this totally rad video he did. I ripped out the music (although awesome as it was) and replaced it with my own thingy. Somehow, the timing worked out really great, like when the drums drop out on THE END. Awesome editing, awesome idea TL.
Just beat Windwaker. A weekend sprint to the finish. Of course, it was a fabulous ending. Up until recently, I wasn’t digging on it, it started to feel like Metroid Prime did (I just wanted to get through it). But Windwaker had a sweet aftertaste after it was all said and done.
Wow, really dark. I’ll spare the details but I was really thinking R rating for the ending bits. Geez. Very artistic though, the way Ganon goes. I think in the NES version he just blinks away or something. In Windwaker, my jaw was on the floor.
I guess the Japanese really know how to finish things (Akira).
There were a bunch of things I left undone. I didn’t do all the little sidequests to death. I did some. I could never sort the mail fast enough and the picture puzzle on the wall I just left alone (I hate those things even in real life — you know, the sliding puzzle things). I did however manage to clear the gauntlet thing. That was grueling. Hardest part in my opinion (and I mean down to the heart piece).
I had a row of hearts plus 2, however many that is.
Overall, the gameplay was really great. I had only played the NES zelda before, I know the series is so much more involved than these two. Regardless, it was great to see all the classic stuff back in action. You had the boomerrang, the triforce, recognizable enemies, bombs and arrows.
Some side things were really fun. Getting the trading routes with the shop was very lengthy but I liked the result. Catching the girl at night stealing from the safe was a very clever little side story. Good times. I found myself waiting a lot on animations and other things. I wanted to play a little bit faster than the game would let me. Very small detail.
Phew. Well, good relaxing weekend. Ready for Twilight Princess sometime next year.
Windwaker was not without inspiring me to record this. Opening credits, has been the theme since I can remember.
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More of a sampled sound, which is what I wanted. Maybe more will come out of this… enjoy.
Me: Necrophagist has some cool poly stuff going on man. But the genre is flawed in songwriting. It’s a bunch of fucking crap. Give me a few years to build up licks, learn the formula.
Edgar: how?
Me: Music = time + space. There’s no space
Edgar: maybe not to jazz or whatever. i’m not talking time. i’m talking melody. time isn’t that crazy i would agree. it’s a lot of blasts. which are technically 4/4
Me: necrophagist has some cool stuff going on. I probably can’t do exactly what they do. first off, I suck on guitar. but if I replaced it with keys … might be able to get some poly thing going.
Edgar: If you wanna wail on metal, use A.C. total lack of talent, in any facet … Musical, lyrical, etc
Me: Alright man. Tell ya what. I’ll do as close as I can to a Necro song. And I’ll just let that speak for itself.
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1 stone, a movie submission for the 72-hour film festival that TL and I worked on. See the end for the full list of credits. A lot of people helped out and they all did a fantastic job.
I learned a ton about editing, workflow, working with a team and tight deadlines. TL’s rig was absolutely amazing to work on. At one point we were using Final Cut Pro and starting up Logic. The disk was really crunching so TL made a backup of the movie project. About 10 seconds later his Mac froze up hard (probably because of my Virus’ driver we installed). We had to hard reset it and when it came back up, the project was corrupted. That was a near-miss. Had we not had a backup, the project would have failed. Crazy.
As usual, the quality for the web is slightly reduced. Although the quality to begin with isn’t some million dollar film stock, this isn’t some Hollywood flick. Hope you enjoy it, it was fun working on it and we may continue to work on it. The competition encourages groups to re-submit the same piece year after year.
In addition, I expanded on the title idea a bit.
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All music all the time! All! Music! All! The! Time!
I took everything that I have been playing around with in my CubaseTests folder (all these recent postings etc) and mixed them down to one file. Yes. 57 songs in one.
soxmix: Input file spotty foreheads.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file test.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file TL t3h gh3y.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file tl_is_jack_london.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file tl_is_jack_london_bridge.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file triangle puller.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file Ultrasonic Suck.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file undead-01.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file undead.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file vur.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Input file vur_reborn.mp3.wav: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding signed (2′s complement), 2 channels
soxmix: Output file EVERYTHING_PEW_VURREBORN.ogg: using sample rate 44100
size shorts, encoding Vorbis, 2 channels
soxmix: Output file: comment “Processed by SoX”
It looked something like that. It took a while. Lots of crunching. And, like I expected, what you get is noise. Combine all sounds and you get a hiss. Combine all colors and you get black. Combine all light and you get white. White noise, somehow related.
Anyway, enjoy this combination of nothing. It fades out because each song is falling off and every song is dropping off and every song is 1/57th of the volume. I also love how TL is jack is the longest one (very quietly).
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So in 1997 I did this CD of orginal music that I called Sand Made. I was in college and I recorded the whole in in my dorm room with a PC microphone, a keyboard that wasn’t even mine (really bad) and an acoustic guitar. Back then, I had a Cyrix based computer that couldn’t process Stereo .wav files very well. So I recorded everything in mono.
In addition, I used a free wav editor called Goldwave to do all my mixing and effects. If I wanted a drum beat over a guitar part, I’d open the drum loop wav and mix it in to the guitar wav. That meant that my guitar wav was “destroyed” with drums. It’s not like modern multitracking where you can mute channels and all that fancy non-destructive stuff. So needless to say, it was extremely horrible and painful.
However, despite my painful learning process and limited resources I recorded this tune called Exodus. It’s about the end of the world. I pictured people leaving major cities, commuting out to rural areas. It sounded spacey and “end-like”. So I put it as the 11th out of 11 tracks, at the very end of my album.
So humbly, here is the original. It kinda breaks down into this lame guitar solo at the end. But the coolest part was I played with the effects until I got that opening pad sound. That’s actually the guitar part that comes in later. It’s reverbed to hell over and over. Pretty cool.
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A favorite of mine but hey, I’m bias. So considering that the song just plain sucks as it stood, I decided I would re-record the whole thing. I had to figure out the voicing and the chords again. And I worked for a couple of hours on the Virus to get the pad effect sound. I cut out the lame guitar solo at the end and I cut out the long intro.
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It was fun. I’ve listened to this song for 9 years. It was no problem singing it, I knew how it should have sounded the first time.
Yeah, I wish I was Squarepusher. This one is called Triangle Puller. Comes off as pretty boring in the beginning. Please give it some time to develop. The last 50% is the hook. At about 2:29 it gets a solid idea. I need to trim it down. Like the idea from 02:05-02:29 is pretty lame, unnecessary and too long.
Such a sad melody at the end, really gets stuck in my head. It had a really nice 8 bar feel, the melody resolves itself every 8 bars. A departure from lazy loop stuff I usually do. Which is a good sign.
I need to lower the volume on the drums like in Seven to volumes like this, drums are just about right on this. Allows the music to come through. I still don’t know how to mix, get a mastered sound or get “out of the box”.
This was mostly done on my Korg MS2000, a while ago. It’s running through Guitar Rig 2 for the amped sound. I double recorded most things (record once, pan left; record again, pan right) as usual. In the end, it doesn’t sound like anything Squarepusher would do.
The title/name is hardly ever accurate (thus the meaningless titles). Because in Cubase, you name a project before you start recording. So you have no idea how it’s actually going to come out.
Update: major overhaul like I was saying. Got to the good part sooner, retracked some other stuff. Clear your cache and reload the page, otherwise the player plays the old one.
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More, more, more! Really good hook in the beginning (imho), kinda fades off in intensity. The solo bass line at the end of each section is ala “shake your rump” but I think it has a bit too much resonance (sounds too laser-y).
I’m still getting comfortable with the VirusTI but it’s a heck of a lot of fun going through the tutorials in the manual.
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A voice sample driven tune. Going for a better hook at the expense of originality. More Patti Smith samples in there, as well as a public speech thingy. I really need to find an electronic kit to make the drums sound less live.
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