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I wanted to do a more rocking song than I've been doing lately, and I also wanted to have a song that started off with a slow acoustic(ish) intro before going into the rock. I'm not super enthused about this one and spent a bit of time trying to bring it to life with various parts and such. It should have gone into another part at the end but I ended up just ending the song early, hence the bastardized spelling of "Truncation".

Edit: Okay, had dinner, met a DJ, let's try some more background:

1) I started watching this movie (リンダ リンダ リンダ) last night at work, which has a high school band learning the song "Linda Linda" by The Blue Hearts. That is where I got the idea to try to start with a slower part then go into a more rocking part. Of course my attempt to rip it off sounds little like what I'm ripping off, because I can't consciously rip off something completely if I want to have any hope of sleeping at night.

2) I like the texture of the chorus and all the parts, but I didn't record enough backing track for the 2nd verse to work, which is why that sounds sort of random and mumbly (well, more so than usual, this song as usual has no planned words).

3) To do the intro where it comes in sort of perfect in Ableton, I played the guitar whilest ignoring the click track that was tapping furiously away in the background, then played the guitar over the click when it gets fast and stuff. I could have just done it separately, but I wanted the fast part to sort of come in when it seemed "natural" to me. That's what worked for me, at least.

Rob said he was interested in hearing more about the creative process in the writeup, so...  I'm going to give that a shot.

This song probably started in the back of my head as an attempt to revisit some stuff from my 4 track days - limited parts, no bass, trying to do all the rhythm on the guitar. Concretely, though, it started (as most of what I write does) with a little bit of melody paired with a resonant phrase or two. In this case it was the first bit from the verse ending in "skip all the in between", which phrase sort of resonated with me because... well, laboring for anything can be boring in the here and now, it's got to get done to get some other long term goal done. So that's what I started with.

So the verse is just a melody I like with a simple guitar part. The chorus is pretty much the same except that it uses what I guess is a stock trick of mine at this point, which is to repeat a melodic theme twice with two different sets of chords beneath it. In this case it wasn't something I worked toward, it just came out that way and I liked it.

As far as recording goes, I started off expecting this to be a bit busier with clean guitars and arpeggios and the like. I found, though, that including the bass line in the main rhythm guitar part like that sounds very, very intimate and singer songwritery. Not much in the way of layering worked well on top of that. There's one bit on the recording that I was only barely able to be satisfied with by EQing the top and bottom off.

Enough of that talking, though... oh yeah, this is another self pity song. I can't stand that sentiment but it made sense, what can I do?

download (6.7 MB)

Long ago, I was walking on the beach with someone I loved very much, when she stopped and wrote "_____ loves you" in the sand. It made me happy and sad at the same time.

I was thinking about that when I wrote this a month or so ago. I didn't do it to a click, so it is even more sparse than the last one. Just a Brian Eno-ish pad and vocal which I did at the same time, with an overdubbed guitar at the end.

I was listening to Joy Electric at work and it got me interested in that Moog sound. I decided to look and see if there was some moog VST plugin on google. It turns out that there is even a free one called Minimogue.

http://www.home.no/gunnare/

I did this track in FL using nothing but this one plugin. I came up with some of the parts while messing with the arpeggiator. I never figured out how it worked, so the for parts I liked I simply transcccribed them into FL's piano roll. It's a pretty simple track.

warm_mogue

f-ing-danger

This is my Fucking Danger post. It is not complete, as you will notice. This is because I wanted some rap verses on it, so I figured I'd put it out there as is (basically a beat and a hook) and see if anyone is interested. If so, holler at me. As with my space rap song, there is some boomy bass that will likely not come through on laptop speakers. You have been warned.

PS: Don't try this stuff at home!

 

[caption id="attachment_1350" align="aligncenter" width="493" caption="This came up when I searched Fucking Danger."][/caption]