BigAssRobot Sounds
Lots of guitars in this thing working a general theme (7+ tracks). There’s electric, acoustic, a custom electric fretless, old warped acoustic now-open-tuned for slide, real bass. Another one of those times where we can’t remember who played what.
… and of course, there’s gnomes.
So you have my wife on horseback with a bunch of middle-aged ladies in Jackson State Forest California wearing my GoPro on her helmet, galloping down this hairy trail. The hard part for us was finding the overriding rhythm – the mean speed. Well, it’s about 110 bpm, or so.
This is one of those songs where during mixing we could not remember which of us played certain parts. There’s lots of layers of guitar in there. But I consider it a compliment as I’m a crappy guitar player.
I got a single-take walkthrough of Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon 2012. Then we scored it essentially by the rooms, which are named by color. There are 10 different musical pieces, which are varying degrees of collaborative writing, recording, and solo efforts.
At about 3:02 you’ll hear a portion of “Elevator Music for Stairwells” which we are pushing as the perfect all-purpose elevator music that should be used in every movie from here on out where some cliche cheesy elevator music is needed. I had to really dig to find the crappy drums and strings.
And the HUD map was animated in because we like to make things more complicated than need be.
We were having fun with Morse Code and realized there is a specific rhythm with specific counts for dits and dahs and spaces. Where there is rhythm, there’s music (or poetry, I suppose). So we graphed out “I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.” in Morse Code (and no, I do not feel the need to source the quote, okay, fine), plugged it into a step sequencer, and then turned the notes into a bass line. Then we added some drums (that was the hard part) to the odd bit, I did this animation, and …
So Schlock’s running this Minecraft server. And Beatles’ I Dig a Pony kept popping into my head … and the lyrics oddly fit Minecraft. So we did this Beatles / Minecraft Theme mashup piano version and I cut this vid today. There’s ponies!
Oh, and this is my fairly new Blue Spark mic which is simply superb.
Needed some elevator music for a stairwell shot, so I made a nice all-purpose elevator music file. Bumped it hard at about 3k Hz for a nice tinny sound, then shot the studio on my tablet (aka The Slab) with it playing in the background for full effect. Oddly, took a while to find awful drum machine sounds. — recorded at Stoneybluff. // If you need elevator music, drop a line and I’ll share the .wav file with you, sans eq, so you can make it as tinny as you like…
Been a while, I know. But hey, life and stuff. So, this new song DumpTruck was actually completed a few weeks ago, and by “completed” I mean we just abandoned it as is. Made the mistake of really really liking it… obsession, that sort of thing … makes it hard to finish.
Anyway, DumpTruck is a swinging … er, lumbering tune that just begged for some noise, like old machinery, rusty metal, stuff like that. Guitars too. And of course, the first thing that comes to mind in that context is old-school square-wave synth … right? Well, this is a groovy tune that we like a lot, so after that … not much else.
And yes, that’s GTA San Andreas PS2, shot with handheld cam ’cause we were too lazy to walk the 30 feet to the tripod. And too lazy to find an actual dumptruck. But damn, shooting down a helicopter…
It’s a surf tune! It’s twangy mellorificness! It’s Serf Lourdes! It’s a homophone! It’s pronounced the same but has different meaning and spelling. It’s more new royalty-free music from the BaR. This would be a lovely recurring theme for a web show … a mellow one I suppose. Check it out.
And here’s S Knock mixing tonight… kudos.
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