Blogpost: The Embloggening

It's been forever and a half since my last post, so here's a mess of things:

The show I've been working on, "Swampy's Underground Adventures," just aired its first episode.



I did a handful of shots throughout the whole thing.

In related news, this past Saturday, the first 3 episodes premiered in Disney Stores around the country, and even on Disney's big screen in Times Square.

Since I haven't posted this either, here's the second teaser thatI did a couple of shots for:



New episodes will be posted weekly

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Music related stuff:

Since my last post on here, I got a new guitar.  7-string Ibanez RGA7QM

 It's really awesome so far.  It's taking some getting used to, as the neck is a lot wider, and I have another string to keep under control while playing.  It sounds quite good though (especially since the other day, when I finally replaced the factory default strings)

Here's a few things I've recorded with it:

It's a cover of Steven Wilson's "Like Dust I Have Cleared From My Eye" (see ~2:30), but I'm really proud of this.  Learned the solo by ear in about 10 minutes, looked up the chords and learned them in like 3 minutes, and improvised a bass line with my 7th string, and improvised a little percussive thing by hitting the strings


Sloppy playing all over here, but I was just playing around with fingerpicking.  Fingerpicking hasn't really worked on my old guitars, as the pickups weren't good enough.  Getting some great sound out of this one though


Some metal to really put that 7th string to use.  The gallop rhythm at :43 took a while to get right, but now it's really easy to play.  Improvised solo at the end.


Cover of Haken's "Drowning in the Flood" (intro), to test out metal guitar sound.  Doesn't quite hit as hard as it should without drums, but oh well.  Learned this by ear.


Assorted covers.  The first one is a chord progression from T.R.A.M.'s "HAAS kicker" (see ~3:50) with improv over top.  Second is the refrain from Haken's "Celestial Elixir." (see ~4:50)  Third is a tapping part from Scale the Summit's "Great Plains"(see ~4:05)


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 Here's some doodles.  Need to go through my sketchbook and grab a bunch more I've done recently, but the scanner's power adapter is somewhere hidden right now.

Something To Do With The Moon - a dissection.

New song!


http://soundcloud.com/ryanimation/something-to-do-with-the-moon

Inane ramblings to be found below.



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Alright, I'm gonna do another long-winded breakdown of this son

General stuff about this song:

I wrote this song back at school about 4-5 years ago, all except the drums on the last 1 minute or so.  I had attempted recordings in the past, but they never went in the direction I wanted.  I've collected more experience and resources to record, so upon rediscovering the song the other day, I decided to try again.

This song was written about the time I was coming down off of a big Power Metal kick and delving more consistently into Progressive music.  The Power Metal influences are probably more particularly present in the later half of the song, but the first few minutes were very prog-rock oriented, even with a bit of a bluesy/almost classic-rock-style bit after the intro.

Specific stuff about this song:

This shouldn't be too long, as this song's a little simpler overall than most of my other songs




0:00 - 0:37 : This was actually one of the harder parts to record.  Both the main guitar part and the backing chords were really awkward to play.  The main guitar part very vaguely musically refers to some of the later lead lines in the second half of the song.

0:38 - 1:53 : One of the few times I've bothered to actually write out a solo.  Really tame and clean, but I think it fits the tone really well.  Starting at 1:22, the transition part is kinda neat.  I have a bit of counterpoint (I think that's what I'd call it) in the guitar parts

1:53 - 2:29 : Reversed guitar chords play to build up to this part, which is pretty simple, but works really well in contrast to the start of the song.  The lead guitars are panned left and right.  the left part is the one I had written for this song since the beginning, but the right one was improvised during recording.

2:30 - 3:05 : Probably the darkest-sounding riff in a fairly upbeat song.  The solo was improvised, turned out pretty decent.

3:06 - 3:41 : Back to the part before the last one, drums change up a bit.  Not much to say here.

3:42 - 4:17 : The transitional riff here is pretty fun to play.  The lead guitars continuing from the last part were improvised.  There's actually a moment of complete silence from everything in the rest before the whole band comes back it.  It took a lot of finagling to get that to sound right.  This part works pretty well as a transitional section to the Power Metal-y bits of the rest of the song.

4:18 - 4:53 : fairly basic Iron Maiden-y gallop rhythm, with piano and lead guitar paired playing the lead

4:54 - end : This is probably one of the most fun rhythm parts I've written.  I like having the piano playing the lead by itself at first, making the part when the guitar comes in with it much better.  The drums are intentionally sort of half-time at the start to avoid a bit of the power metal sound, at least until the lead guitar comes in.


Mixing:

Had a good bit of advice from Tim on mixing this one, but I did still do it all myself.  The guitar effects were all through Guitar Rig 4.  Most if not all were customized sounds, but pretty heavily based on some defaults.  I got good enough sounds that I didn't have to do a lot to the mixes outside of some volume mixing.  The most trouble I had was probably with the first 2 minutes.  I doubled a lot of the tracks, putting different effects on each until I got an overall sound that worked.

Most of the actual volume mixing went into the strings and piano.  Might not be incredibly noticeable, but that's the point of mixing, so I'd say that was a success.

Here's a giant picture of my screens when I'm working:

 The left half is Reaper, where all the recording is done (this screenshot was taken about 3/4 of the way through recording, there ended up being about 4 more tracks).  Most of the right half is Reason, where all of the drums, piano, bass, and strings are coming from.  This program is wired into Reaper on Track 1.  The left side of Reason is all the instruments and mixing, the upper right is the sequencer (where all the music is written).  The bottom right, half hidden by Reason is Guitar Rig, so I can hear what I'm playing live as I record.  Technically, there is another copy of this program open for each track in Reaper.  I'm a bit surprised nothing exploded.

Drawings and words.

First up, a drawing that I did for a thing on the SketchDaily subreddit.  I sort of totally ignored the goal once I got started.  The idea was to do 3 drawings of one subject at 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 30 minutes.  I rather did a 1 minute sketch, refined it for 10 minutes, refined it again for 30, and then spent way too long coloring it.

 Here's the progress drawings I submitted to the actual thread.

I didn't use any reference for this, which usually results in crap.  Granted, the proportions are a bit off in places, but for no reference I'm pretty satisfied with this.  Also, this is the first drawing that I can say has more life the more I refined it.  Most of the time, my sketches feel good, but once I clean it up, it sort of flattens out and dies a little.

A good example of that problem happening is with this fisherman I drew a while back:
Sketch
Final - Especially the eyes, they look a lot less alive in this version.

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And here's some sketches I did when I was trying to come up with a good figure to draw for the thread.  The barbarian kinda guy is a bit wonky.  I was going for cartoonish proportions but the end result wasn't too cartoony so it kinda ruins it.  Wizard's pose was just a bit bland.

Sketchbookery - Airport peoples

 Click here for MAXIMUM IMAGE SIZE ACTION

Spent a lot of time in airports this past week, and I did a bit of doodling random people.  I think one or two drawings are from before the airport, but not worth making a different post.

A song, and more text than is necessary to describe said song.

I made a song.

It goes like this:



Clicky link here.

Now for the text!

I'm going to explain the entire song in a brain-explodingly exciting manner.  There will be drama, intrigue, and action, but mostly wordy quasi-technical musical descriptions.

I guess I'll just list the parts and talk about each of them.

Part 1 // 0:00 - 0:22 :  Improvised lead part.  It's the same recording on 2 tracks.  They're run through the same effects, slightly different EQ.  The tracks were then spaced verrrrry slightly apart on the timeline and panned slightly left and right, to give a wider sound.  This was improvised and recorded in one take, and it was done after the body of the song was already finished.

I really like the gritty dissonance the 7 arpeggiated chord makes at the start.  That's not a mistake.  The rest follows my typical improv style; slow and deliberate, really spacy.  This is partly because I'm not really comfortable enough improvising fast parts, but I really feel less is more in leads in many cases.

Part 2 (A) // 0:22 -0:47 :  The main rhythm for the song comes in here.  It sounds deceptively simple.  Actually it is simple, but there's a bit of a twist on it.  It's a straight rhythm of (beat) (beat) (rest) played over 4 bars of 4/4 and a bar of 2/4 (making it sort of 18/4).  The drums are playing in the 4/4 feel, while the guitar (b) (b) (r) 3/8(?) feel creates an interesting counter to it.

The lead that comes in was somewhat improvised.  The low part was actually improvised when I was going to make the whole section an improv solo.  I liked the one part so much, I made it the repeating lead line.  I added a higher harmony line which is usually the relative 3rd except at the very end of the lick.  These were recorded on the same tracks as the opening lead, but only one track per part.

Part 2 (B) // 0:47 - 1:12 :  Another guitar part comes in at 0:47, matching the rhythm guitar, but playing the 5th.  The drums change up, getting the ride cymbal to give it some energy, some sporadic rapid snare fills to keep it interesting.  At 1:01 another guitar comes in, also matching the rhythm, but finishing out the chords for the progression used throughout the song (my usual 7th and sus2 chords that I use in basically everything.)  The drums change it up a bit in the fills to build energy for the next part.

Part 3 // 1:12 - 1:38 :  This is the "refrain" I suppose, and it was the first part written.  In the rhythm guitars, I have one playing low power chords in the (b) (b) (r) pattern.  The other one is playing the same rhythm, but is playing the full chords an octave up.  These are panned left and right, making the sound pretty expansive.  The lead part in this section was written to counter the rhythm.  While the rhythm hits (B) (B) (r), the lead hits (b) (b) (B), accenting the beat that the other guitars are resting.  making a sort of bouncing effect.  The bass drum and snare follow this pattern of 3s while the cymbals keep the 4/4 feel going.

Halfway through this part, the drums and bass throw in some extra notes (noticeable in the bass drum fills) and the cymbals change up a bit.  The lead splits into two parts.  Mostly 3rd and 4th intervals in the harmony.

I'm really satisfied with the sound here, usually it's hard to get a really hard-hitting and full sound that doesn't get too muddled.

Part 4 // 1:38 - 1:50 : Fairly straightforward transitional metal-style riff.  This part is in straight 4/4 (no extra measure of 2/4)  The lead part was improvised same as the opening lead line.


Part 5 // 1:50 - 2:08 :  Probably the most interesting and complicated part in the song.  There are 3 distinct patterns going on here, and they all weave through each other, creating a strange panning syncopation.

Example:
Bass drum / Low guitar:
//  (b) (b) (r) (b) (b) (r) (b) (b)  /  (b) (r) (b) (b) (b) (r) (b) (b) /...
Mid Guitar
//  (b) (b) (b) (r) (b) (b) (b) (r)  /  (b) (b) (b) (r) (b) (b) (b) (r) /...
High Guitar
//  (b) (r) (b) (r) (b) (r) (b) (r)   /   (b) (r) (b) (r) (b) (r) (b) (r) / ...

the part at 2:02 is relatively simple, using the main rhythm as a transition to the next part.

Part 6 // 2:02 - end :  The refrain part is repeated pretty much verbatim.  Part 4 is called back to for the end riff.  There's also the lead from part 2 playing again while the guitars fade, EQ'd so the highs and lows are mostly gone and it's all mids.  I just figured the end could use a little something aside from just the fade out.


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So that's a lot of text for a 3 minute song.

It probably sounds a bit pretentious, but this whole thing is sort of a postmortem exercise to get myself to look at what I did and why.  I'm not sure how much of that is decipherable to anyone else, but opinions on the actual song are welcome.  My perspective is one that is familiar with this type of music, so I might be interested in how other people hear the song.