Sunday, November 18, 2012

Music of some sort

Recorded a song last night.  Wrote it over a year ago, but I didn't have the means to do a proper recording at the time.



The main reason I was hesitant to record before I had better equipment is that I was never able to get a decent clean guitar sound.  With the recording interface/new guitar/amp emulation software I have now, it's far better.  Most of the guitars are completely clean; the solos have a very small amount of overdrive, and the leads in the 2nd part have even less so.

Part 1: 0:00 - 0:57
            Rhythm part is kinda fun, but pretty tiring.  Luckily I recorded that first, and in relatively few takes.  The chord progression is interesting, because each chord has a C# in it somewhere, until the very last transitional chord at 0:56.
            The solo here was the last thing I recorded.  Did a bunch of takes to work out some motifs I wanted to have as the base of the solo and finally got something that worked. 

Part 2 : 0:57 - 1:44
            This is the part where I let myself get weird with time signatures.  First bit is alternating 5/8 and 6/8.  Second bit is 4/8, 7/8, 4/8 repeated.  The next part is 6/8, 4/4, then back to the first part.
            From 1:10 until the end of this part I have 4 guitars playing at once, either in unison, or two playing an octave up.  This was the most worrisome part recording, because I don't have distortion to hide mistakes so I needed to play it fairly accurately.

Part 3: 1:45 - end
            The 2 backing guitars are playing the same chords, but in different ways.  One is playing straight chords, the other is playing sort of improvised arpeggios of those chords.
            The solo here is improvised, although the first and last phrases are basically along the lines of the thing I usually started off my improvisations on this song with.  I'm particularly happy with the bit at ~2:13


Regarding the "bass guitar," parts 1 and 3 are my guitar pitched down an octave.  Part 2 is normal pitch, played on the lowest strings of my guitar.

Drums are exported from Guitar Pro 6, which is primarily a writing program, so they are understandably crappy.

Friday, November 2, 2012

WiddlyWiddlyWiddlyWaaaaahhhh



Wrote and recorded this last night, mostly just to test that it would come out right when recording.  I think it really did.

I tried a new metal distortion effect.  I'm pretty happy with it.  I use my old effect, which has a lot more gain, on the lead/higher parts at the beginning and end, but the rhythm parts throughout are the new lower-gain, mid-scooped sound.  Makes the low rhythm parts clearer.

For whatever future song I use this for, here's how I'd use everything.  First part would probably be a chorus, and everything else would be leading into the bridge.  Perhaps the last part would actually be the bridge.  Or at least what could be considered a bride with the wonky song structure I'll probably end up using.

Interesting factoids:  part at 0:35 is sort of in 37/8.  It's 3 bars of 10/8 and a bar of 7/8.  The 10/8 are a little off kilter and syncopated, which gives it an interesting feel.  The solo is stupidly shreddy, improvised in one take, and probably won't carry on to the final song, but I just added it in place of an actual written-out solo in the future.

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In other news, the show I've been working on has a new episode out, although I did not really work on this one (outside of a couple of fixes):