desert island

This beat was originally just an exercise with side chain compression, using Reason 4.  It samples the Microphones on the drum track, and also some Kraftwerk keyboards.

Dark As A Dungeon

This song was an experiment with acoustic recording, vocal harmony, and singing. It features a guitar, three voice tracks, and a ukulele. I didn't plan the vocal harmonies beforehand. Instead I punched in and out a lot until I found something that I liked. I'm glad I don't have to mine coal. Aren't you?

Come and listen you fellows, so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mines.
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul,
'Till the stream of your blood is as black as the coal.

CHORUS:
It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where danger is double and pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

It's a-many a man I have seen in my day,
Who lived just to labor his whole life away.
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mines.

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,
Is the same to the miner who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One fall of the slate and you're buried alive.

I hope when I'm gone and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal.
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And pity the miner a-diggin' my bones.

P.S. This song was written by Merle Travis.

hey everyone this is my new sound. I think it might be a rap beat. I hope you don't mind it's not in english. I think one of the most important asspects of this music blog is our workout stats. So, i hope you will be impressed by the fact that while you might think I only did 225 reps of this song, in fact, I did around 315. pretty cool huh.

action

Same story as the other video game pieces. I'll have to re-record some of the parts because there's some sloppy bits.

Poodleface - What a Shot - video (mp4 download)
Watch this video on YouTube

My attempts at cobbling together a song for this week's Hellagem were unsuccessful, so I decided instead to revisit a piece I originally composed for the 2007 Atlanta Laptop Battle preliminaries.

I waited so long to finally release this because it truly is a B-side as far as Poodleface videos go... I am really pleased with the sleazy saxophone feel of it combined with using the sound effects in an interesting way, but by and large there is far too much padding in this one as I tried to make it work in the 2:00 framework (this was the upper limit of performances in the preliminaries, which is why Custom Made is also almost exactly 2 minutes).

This was the video I played first, and there was a very clear reason I did so... in the 2006 Battles (where Custom Made was born) I had taken the notion of using the laptop as a performance instrument literally, making videos that utilized the screen. At the time, the judges felt I was violating the spirit of the event by not doing live manipulation, so I did not win a single round. I actually agree with this in retrospect, I gleefully remained ignorant in order to do precisely what I wanted to do, interpreting the rules as I saw fit. Sometimes you have to do that and accept the consequences that may follow.

So, getting back to the original point, rather than completely abandon video, I decided to thumb my nose at the event slightly, so to speak, by continuing to do videos while manipulating the instrumentation with a MIDI controller. The last line of the video being "They saw my power, no way they're gonna dog me this year" was meant to be a literal statement to how I felt about how my previous experience with the event had gone down. Again, in retrospect, I understand everyone's processes, and the 300,000 views for "Custom Made" on YouTube have been their own brand of vindication, but I figured you guys might want to know the background of this video.

My tools for making these videos is a combination of Sony Vegas and Ableton Live. Briefly, a temporary music track is first created in Ableton using the videos within the session as a guideline of how I will utilize them, then once the tempo and structure is set I export this to Vegas to do the actual video manipulation, finally returning to Live for the final audio mixdown. Then the whole thing is rendered in Vegas.

My manipulation of this video yesterday was limited to making the poodleface do crazy zooms at the end. I left it as flawed as it is, also knowing that if I started editing it again the whole thing might just fall to pieces.

Anyway, at some point in the future I'll go a little deeper into creative decisions that are made in the process of making these. For now enjoy this golden poodleface oldie.