Face.

 Sitting around doodling, decided to digitally paint this random face.

No reference for the head or color, even though it came out looking a lot like that one guy from Lost.

Here's the sketch it came from:

Various things and such.

You may notice a complete overhaul of the blog design.  I completely stole it from a failed side-project blog of mine that I had forgotten about.  As a note, I made the background from scratch in Photoshop some many years ago.  Don't remember how exactly, just know it's a bunch of layers with various blending modes.

Some artworks I did last night:

- Sketches from TV and various images:

 

- Digital painting based on a random picture (can't find the reference photo).  Pretty happy with this one:

Here's some music stuff I haven't posted on here yet:


An experiment to nail down the scale changes (5 changes in 8 bars, gets pretty confusing).  The lead line is improvised.  Backing part turned out pretty cool and spacey.



Experimenting with a new effect.  This is all one guitar in one take.  You might notice at one point the chord progression from the first song is played.  I think this would be a cool outro to an album.


Other stuff:



Most recent episode of the show I was working on.  Worked on shots randomly throughout the episode, but the biggest one is the one where they're racing each other down the hallway.

Also I realized I never posted this episode:

Again, bunch of random shots throughout.  I think my best shots are the very first one whith him jumping into the tunnel, and the one where he snaps his fingers after noticing the pipe.

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.

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):

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.