Normally I’m not a fan of digging through the archives, but here’s something that I did long ago that fits in with the Hella Gems aesthetic that I would like to release. Back when I assembled my first home recording rig back in 2003, I wanted to try recording some stuff, but I didn’t have anyone else to record and I was hesitant to record my own music as I’m only now starting to get over my reservations on recording music. One day, apparently around that April (the timestamp on the original file is April 30, 2003), I recorded a single track out of pure frustration of nothing else to work on. It was an early experiment to test out some odd (one might say progressive) ideas I had about heavy metal production at the time, and I’ve felt that despite my being somewhat unknowledgable about the whole process, it has held up much better that I had initially suspected.

A quick breakdown of the component sounds and the ideas therin:
- The drum tracks were built with Buzz tracker before I picked up any instruments. they were totally a guess, and it explains the song’s structure. 3 parts, looped four times. The cymbals are noise with an ASDR envelope. The bass drum is….generated somehow. Forgot what the snare was (probably some sample). The details were lost years ago. This was exported from buzz as a wav and imported into Cubase (which I actually paid for, but no longer use.  Such is life.)
- All the other tracks essentially get progressively sloppier as they go along. This has the odd effect of making the song sound like it’s destabilizing, if not exactly falling apart. The robo-tracker drums hold it together, but the rest of the parts seem angry and erratic. I kind of like how that worked.
- There are two bass tracks, recorded separately. One is running through the bass octave pedal I have and provides the synth-ish lows that I adore so much. The second bass track was more a guitar double recorded through a Behringer POD knock off on the Boutique Overdrive setting, which sounded terrible by itself but interestingly filled out a crucial space in the track between the guitars and the sub bass. I cannot recall if I double tracked the grindy bass, but I don’t think so.
- There are two guitar tracks, panned hard left and right, played with a hollowbody 60’s guitar totally unsuitable to the task into the V-AMP on the dual rectifier setting. That guitar feeds back with any sort of distortion on it, so this sound is one of those “Can’t occur with real gear” things, but works alright. I think it’s the layers that save this one.
- The lead guitar is basically a combination of several of the most dissonant things I could figure out how to play on a guitar. There’s not much real skill involved, but there was a plan, and I don’t know if I could recreate it if I tried. For some reason, I love it.
- Finally, there was an FM synth. I picked up this Yamaha FB-01 years ago, and I went through patches until I found several that were either good, weird, or reminded me of stuff in Sega Genesis games. (that’s way, way to big an influence on me, I think) Anyhow, I found a few “distorted guitar” patches that reminded me of the distorted guitars in certain genesis games. The thought was to layer this on top of actual heavy guitars and basses for a meta heavy sound. with some careful EQ (man it wanted to stick out like a sore thumb) it kinda worked. It provides a strange overtone to the whole mix. It also fills out the beginning (along with the sub bass) and the ending (by itself). It’s something I’d love to revisit (I still have the FB-01 within arm’s reach) but it’s such a pain to do.

The track was hastily assembled in a day, and ever since I’ve wondered what I would have done to follow it up. With a few exceptions, I’m still wondering – I’ve never followed up or refined the ideas presented here (the laptop battles were much closer to traditional metal ideas shoehorned into Ableton Live) , and I’m not quite sure I could really rekindle the fire that this came from. But I think it says something about who I was back then, and the fervor to create something new. Enjoy.

metal_demo

My apologies for being late, but I’ve been both busy and flustered. Flustered, because I decided to program my own dance beats from scratch, and it took awhile for it to stop sucking completely. Even now, it’s kinda sad, but I’m posting anyhow. I’ve got my ducks in a row for fairly organic or heavy metal sounding drums, but lacking (frankly) the tools to make dance beats (I’m rounding up virtual roland beat boxes now) I went back to what I had. I did, long ago, rip the drums from a few games, and one of them was the gloriously dancy Streets of Rage 2. Mmmmmm….Yuzo Koshiro. So those drums, with a little filtering, are what make up the core of the dance beats for this song. They are loaded into live as a impact drumset and used to program all the beats for this. Though, to flesh out the sound a bit, I added some effects, some eq, and actually doubled the beats on one of the default Live impact drumsets at a lower level. Record some bass and guitar, add some effects to flavor (aside from guitar rig, everything has default Live 7 effects) and go.

I’ve also provided the Live set (sans guitars, for size and lack of annoyance with guitar rig and freezing tracks and such), for anyone who might want to use this for remixing. It also includes the sample sets involved, so anyone can build their own beats from the (admittedly limited) drum sound, or supply new drum sounds for the beats. Good luck to you all, and may more Live sets be forthcoming.

2009-03-26
2009-03-26 for Remix

Yes, I know the remix track is named differently, sorry.

Friday the 13th post! WOOOO!

Fortunately, I got this done over the last two days. I wanted something slow, spacy, and without a strong beat, and it ended up being neat. In terms of my skillset, this track has two points – to try to combine my improvisational piano skills (if interested see my LJ here which is just me playing piano with no effects) with Ableton Live, and to take a shot at recording my upright bass. I’m new at the upright bass, and I have no bow, but my tuning is okay if still needing practice.

A few tricks here – the keyboard parts are just four bar loops recorded ad-hoc and adjusted slightly for timing. Then I took the notes and played it over three tracks – an FM synth in the middle with chorus/delay on it and two NES-style synths (that I use on darn near everything) with arpeggiators, panned hard left and right, with the same timing but different note order. bass was then recorded, and then everything dropped from Ableton into Sonar for improved mixing, with a fuzz guitar overdub added (it’s pretty subtle, as it’s backgrounded fairly heavily). Everything except the bass is heavily reverbed (there’s even a little on the bass). I also did the trick where I do a slow fade out at the end but pull up the reverb so it sounds like the mix is getting misty and distant at the end before the volume finally drops. I only do it to the synths, which accounts for how the bass goes down first and causes this shimmery quality. Neat!

2009-03-13

This is a note for note cover of two songs from a video game.  If you’re the first person to guess the video game, I’ll buy you a frosty beverage of your choosing and moreover win my gratitude that I’m not the only person who’s played that particular game. The segues between parts is my invention, as I’m taking two songs with different feels and basically lumping them together. The point of this exersize was to use a bunch of the gear that I’ve accumulated recently and work on my guitar lead work, which isn’t terribly good and it’s pretty obvious when I cheat like heck. How I cheat is left as an exersize for the listener.

Also, my last track was a little weak due to lack of mastering. I’m working on fixing that now.

2009-02-08

PS: four days since the last hellagem? snap snap people. (says the guy who’s a week late)

2008-12-20