Musical Scurvy

I was feeling creatively plugged up yesterday. You know the kind of feeling...when the projects you're working on just aren't moving, no ideas are forthcoming, and you're somewhat grumpy as a result. I just wasn't sure what my damage was.

Today, I was working on some design projects, and listening to some scratch tracks of my songwriting projects from 2008, primarily 80s-ish rock. To my surprise, I was suddenly getting ideas and inspiration left and right to finalize some of those songs....which I did tonight.

Which leads me to the title of this post. I've long known that I love writing in a wide variety of musical styles, so I would think that I'd remember that it's vital that I not focus too closely on one particular project in one particular style. To do so always causes stagnation and burnout, and ultimately makes me less creative as a whole. I liken it to food groups: yeah, you can survive for a while eating just beef jerky, but you'll end up getting scurvy. Likewise, I love the video projects I've been working on, but I have to remember to touch on the other genres I enjoy: musicals, 80s rock, noise, celtic...they all go into the mix to form what I write. To ignore a genre is to ignore a basic part of my creativity, and when that happens...yeah, musical scurvy. Blech.

So anyway, here's the track I was working on tonight. Very 80s-rock, but hey, it's like leafy greens to me. Rock on.

 
She's Running Away (2012 Mix)

Bear With Me

(This doesn't have much to do with music...but it stems from the research I've done in movies for music, and it amused me on a Monday morning. Thus, we go with it.)

Over the past month or two, I've been watching a lot of horror movies, particularly for the music. But it hasn't been an entirely technical adventure...I've really enjoyed the movies I've been watching. Except for maybe Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Part of the problem I had with it was it had essentially no plot. I summarized it this way:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: One by one, five teenagers wander into a cave and are eaten by bears.

I was discussing it with a friend (Mark the Movieman!), and mentioned how the last 15 minutes or so were just uncomfortable. He compared it to I Spit On Your Grave, another movie that can be uncomfortable to watch. So, I watched it. I liked it more than TCM, in that it had more of a conflict-driven plot. I summarized that as so:

I Spit On Your Grave: A woman survives a horrific bear attack, and decides to hunt them down and kill them. To do so, she pretends that she really, really likes bears.

I then realized that damn near any horror movie can be summarized as if it's about bears. (OK, yeah, I was getting silly here):

Halloween: A bear escapes the zoo, and terrorizes a suburb. It is shot six times, but still escapes.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Kids are eaten by bears in their dreams.

Child's Play: People are mauled by a teddy bear.

Fright Night: No one believes a teenager when he says that a bear is in the woods next to his house. He enlists Marlon Perkins to help him get rid of the bear.

Friday the 13^th: Mother bear goes on a rampage after teenagers inadvertently kill her cub.

Hellreaiser: A man plays with an ancient hunting call and inadvertently summons bears. 

Jaws: People go into the woods, and are eaten by bears.

Chopping Mall: Horny teenagers are locked in the zoo overnight, and are eaten by bears.

The Ring: Teenagers are eaten by bears seven days after watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

From my good friend Mark the Movieman:

"Alien: People on a camping trip end up chasing a bear cub into a cave and end up waking up a Hibernating bear who attacks them one by one."

I can't decide if the bear summary works once you get outside of horror:

Star Wars: Bears overrun the galaxy. A young man learns biology and blows up their cave.

Harry Potter: A young child inexplicably survives a bear attack that kills his parents. He goes to school to become a zookeeper, but his fights with bears are not over...

Titanic: A luxury ship is attacked by polar bears.

Those may be stretching it a bit, but I gotta say....I would watch the hell out of that version of Titanic.

What do you say? What else can be summarized with bears?

Just a bit of goofing around

Absolutely nothing deeper involved with this one....just a bit of goofing around. Honestly, is there anything better than a Saturday morning, a cup of coffee, and Logic? Largely built around sampled instruments, but the harmonica and jaw harp at the end are real. Far easier to just haul out a microphone than to try and get a sampler to sound anywhere near real, in spite of occasional wrong notes.

 

(My player is Flash, so it doesn't work on iOS. Here's a link to the mp3.)

Anyway, I'm relatively sure that the melody is from Somewhere Else. Anybody have any ideas?

This may involve a bit of chutzpah

But first, some background.

I've only recently started watching horror as a genre. After reading Bruce Campbell's If Chins Could Kill, I was curious to see the film techniques that he talked about from Evil Dead. I had seen clips of it before, of course, but I had never really watched a horror movie. My first surprise was that I enjoyed it, but what really took me off guard was the soundtrack: I was expecting music as low budget as the movie, and stinking of the 80s, but the music Joe LoDuca put together really got my attention. It also got me thinking about composting music for horror in general.

So, I dove in and did some serious research of the "classics": Halloween, Friday the 13th, Evil Dead, and many, many more (it was made all the more perfect because this was in the month of October). Naturally, I couldn't claim to have watched the giants of the genre if I didn't watch A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had seen bits of it in the 80s, and it seriously creeped me out, so I was looking forward to a revisit.

In sum, it was just as creepy as I remember, but what I found surprising was that, (with all respect due), the soundtrack really hadn't aged well. There were a few spots in the movie that I found it somewhat distracting...which leads me to my current project. Yep, I redid the music for a scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street (thus, this post's title).

There were two scenes that I was considering for trying to redo: the opening credits, and where Nancy falls asleep in class. The latter is far more...well, "synthtastic"...but also had more dialog; since I didn't necessarily want to draft my 12 year old daughter (or....shudder...attempt it myself), I went with the credits scene. Here's the scene with the original audio (SFW):

Let it be said, I do like the atmosphere that was created, but it's very 1980s. I wanted to go along with the dream atmosphere, and create something that was disorienting and metallic, to go along with the boiler room feel. I also generally stayed away from any straight synth sounds, aside from a couple gated  lines for a urgent pulse feel. Also, once again Freesound.org comes to the rescue for the environmental replacements. (I'll get a full credits list of the sounds up on YouTube.)

Here's the replaced audio:

I had fun with this project, if for no other reason than because I kept startling myself during the cat scare sequences. I put that sound there, how could it keep surprising me...especially when I'm watching the timeline during playback?

Reinvisioning Old Movies with New Music

A few months, ago, I found a horror movie compilation at Half Price Books called "Gorehouse Greats". Well, "greats" is probably overstating the matter a bit, and I have no idea what a "gorehouse" is supposed to be (gory grindhouse? maybe? I don't know.), but for $3, i couldn't pass it up. I have a fondness for so-bad-they're-good movies, and I've just recently started watching horror as a genre, so I decided to give it a try. It's hard to pass up 40¢ a movie.

The fils are roughly 60s-70s...and are definitely a product of the eras in which they're made. Funky music abounds. Up until that point, I had been watching 80s horror, so watching these older ones was a bit of a surprise. I've been primarily watching horror from a technical perspective, so it was also interesting for me to note how the feel of a scene was impacted by the tone of the music.

Which brings me to one of the flicks in the collection, Satan's Slave. It's an English horror movie from 1976...and definitely has the feel of that decade. The opening scene is of some dark gathering: bonfire, maiden for sacrifice, robes and masks, all present. However, the music is, as best as I can describe it, a free jazz tiki party. Lots of bongos and wokka-wokka guitars. The scene is dark and creepy, but the music completely took me out of it. (Clip is somewhat NSFW):

That gave me the idea of trying to reinvision the clip with a new soundtrack. WE HAVE THE TOOLS...WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. We shall rebuild it...newer...darker...creepier!

The clip in many ways lends itself to re-envisioning, as both primary characters don't move their lips...no sync problems. Since I was in the mood to work the clip over quickly, I used clips from the freesound project (www.freesound.org) for the environmental and dialog sounds (I have a full listing of the sounds used at YouTube). Fire, gasping, and a scream were pretty easy. The priest was voiced with clips of a file called" "evil incantation" (hey, that was easier than expected!). The rest of the ambient sound was from a clip of an outdoor church service that was in Latin (I'm not saying anything by using this....really!)

The primary goal was to darken up the scene significantly. Low drone notes, arhythmic composition, dissonance, the usual stuff. 

I'd call it a bit darker now. At any rate, my wife was sufficiently creeped out. Mission: successful. I have a feeling I'll be revisiting Gorehouse Greats for more material.

Breathing some life into MIDI compositions

I spend a lot of time using sample based instruments, and a constant issue is trying to get the music to not sound like...well, samples. Tonight I decided to revisit an older composition, and see about trying to get it to sound a bit more human....and decided the best way to do that was to hook up my microphone.

The piece I was looking over was my City Theme, a decidedly medieval piece that features several recorder parts, as well as basic handheld percussion. I like the piece, but it's always had a video game feel to it, largely in part because of the sampled instruments. Since I already had my MIDI information in the project, all I had to do was have Logic display the MIDI as notes, grab my instruements, and press record. (I know there's probably a way to get Logic to display the note information of a MIDI line while you record an audio line, but I couldn't find it. I just took a screenshot of the MIDI score, and kept it on top of the Logic window using the Afloat plugin). I added a little basic hand percussion in the form of a shaker and a low-end bodhran from Irishfest, and the transformation was complete.

Here's how it sounded originally...

City Theme

And here's the version with four tracks of real instruments amongst the samples. (I also added some EQ adjustments and some compression to thicken up the sound...so the difference isn't all because of live instruments).


City Theme - Real Recorders

I know that it seems like the take-home message here is, "well, duh...real instruments sound better than sampled ones!" I think the surprise is that somewhat badly recorded instruments (as in, no fancy room, recorded in my living room) can sound better than a decently sampled instrument. The randomness imbued into a performance by a human is still pretty hard to replicate!

Sometimes "Free" is too expensive.

Where in I muse upon the difference betwixt "price" and "cost".

My domain registration included free blog space and software, so I figured it would be a good place to start out when I set up my blog last year. I mean, hey, I had already paid for the domain, so why not take advantage of something that was being thrown in for nothing?

So, I worked on setting up the blog. The software wasn't exactly intuitive, but a certain amount of annoyance is to be expected with free. I struggled through it, and got things under way.

Meanwhile, life happens, and the blog lies fallow for a while. This downtime illustrated that the anti-spam software wasn't particularly useful: almost 700 spam comments on two posts over the past year. Ugh. The last straw was when I tried to embed a video in the page, and found that the feature was (and has been) broken for a good year or so. Double ugh.

In short: Hello, Blogger. I'm going to try and get my old content over here while I set up the new blog as I'm quite eager to shutter the old one and have my site point here.

Which brings me back around to my initial musing. I'm price-concious with regards to my equipment, but sometimes I lose sight of the fact that something that's cheap will end up costing me way more than just cash in the long run. A free blog host is nice and all, but not if the functionality is going to waste an even more valuable commodity, my time. Money is limited: time, moreso.

What's worse, a badly made service (or instrument, program, the list goes on and on) can add an abundance of frustration to the mix, which makes the possibility of dropping a project in disgust uncomfortably high. It's easier (and a lot more fun) to get around knowledge based limitations; if I don't know how to do something, I can learn it and return later. If my equipment itself is getting in the way, it can cause insurmountable problems down the road.

Anyway, that's more than enough about a silly blog host. Time to get rolling!