asgaard Song A Day https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/t/song-a-day Thu, 16 Apr 26 01:17:01 +0000 en 2 0 Song-a-day #2 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2012/10/06/song-a-day-2 Sat, 06 Oct 12 23:15:18 +0000 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2012/10/06/song-a-day-2 This one is more like half-a-day. It's heavily inspired by some of the ambient music in Fallout New Vegas, and the general experience too. New Vegas's music is hit and miss; well, to be honest, it's more miss than hit, apart from the tracks that were taken from Fallout 1 (like the excellent 'Children of the Cathedral'). It's mostly made of grandiose, carefully arranged orchestral scores, which are at odds with the post-apocalyptic wasteland it should be trying to depict.

But every so often, for example in 'How The West Was Lost', it hints at country guitar, and that is where it shines. The quiet, sparse, calm desert settlements are embodied wonderfully by lazily timed simplistic pentatonics, the hint of tension under the surface captured perfectly by the careless bends and the buzzing open strings of a beaten up old steel string acoustic guitar and the endearing nonchalance of "you know what, I don't even care if this note is wrong".

That is the kind [...]]]> This one is more like half-a-day. It's heavily inspired by some of the ambient music in Fallout New Vegas, and the general experience too. New Vegas's music is hit and miss; well, to be honest, it's more miss than hit, apart from the tracks that were taken from Fallout 1 (like the excellent 'Children of the Cathedral'). It's mostly made of grandiose, carefully arranged orchestral scores, which are at odds with the post-apocalyptic wasteland it should be trying to depict.

But every so often, for example in 'How The West Was Lost', it hints at country guitar, and that is where it shines. The quiet, sparse, calm desert settlements are embodied wonderfully by lazily timed simplistic pentatonics, the hint of tension under the surface captured perfectly by the careless bends and the buzzing open strings of a beaten up old steel string acoustic guitar and the endearing nonchalance of "you know what, I don't even care if this note is wrong".

That is the kind of vibe I was going for.

(Edit: sorry I have no idea why this isn't working on Internet Explorer. If you can't see the above audio controls then you need to be on Chrome or Firefox)


You're supposed to imagine yourself being here:

]]> Song-a-day https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2012/10/01/song-a-day Mon, 01 Oct 12 14:14:36 +0000 https://blog.asgaard.co.uk/2012/10/01/song-a-day Here's a music writing challenge I've done a few times, which I've found incredibly useful so far.

The challenge is this: you have 24 hours to write a piece of music. Completely. That's it. It can be as long or as short as you like (although completing a Wagnerian epic in 24 hours might be a little ambitious), just so long as it's a piece of music written to a level that it could reasonably be performed and not baffle the audience as to why you bothered, while you shout out "pretend there's a really cool bass solo for the next 8 bars". You can record it if you want and have the time/equipment, but that makes the 24 hour limit much more restrictive, and it's not really the point. It can have lyrics, it doesn't have to. It's up to you.

You can, of course, revisit it after 24 hours, that's not the point. That deadline is there to make sure you get something finished, and to a certain extent, polished. It's there to force you to develop your ide[...]]]> Here's a music writing challenge I've done a few times, which I've found incredibly useful so far.

The challenge is this: you have 24 hours to write a piece of music. Completely. That's it. It can be as long or as short as you like (although completing a Wagnerian epic in 24 hours might be a little ambitious), just so long as it's a piece of music written to a level that it could reasonably be performed and not baffle the audience as to why you bothered, while you shout out "pretend there's a really cool bass solo for the next 8 bars". You can record it if you want and have the time/equipment, but that makes the 24 hour limit much more restrictive, and it's not really the point. It can have lyrics, it doesn't have to. It's up to you.

You can, of course, revisit it after 24 hours, that's not the point. That deadline is there to make sure you get something finished, and to a certain extent, polished. It's there to force you to develop your ideas, not spend all your time searching for that perfect base idea. Even if it ends up rubbish, you learn far more from fully developing everything else around your core idea than you do from getting frustrated, putting your half-baked idea in a box and saying "I'll come back to this later...".

I use Guitar Pro for this as it makes it fairly easy to transcribe things, and, better, it plays them back for you with synthesised instruments of varying sound quality (it does clean and light distortion really well, heavy distortion not so much, but it's either that or MIDI. Drums sound great though).

Examples

Here's some stuff I've come up with doing this, which I'm pretty pleased with (you'll need a fairly modern browser to hear these and IE probably won't suffice):

Fairly straightforward metal. I'm happy with the flow on this, but the leads don't seem to quite work out quite as they could. Not sure if that's the note choice entirely or whether the really awful guitar tone gets in the way. The rhythm is very strong though.

Slightly Ennio Morriconeish, well okay, the middle part is more than slightly. I'm pleased with the time change towards the end while keeping in with the western theme.

Minimalistic bass driven bluesy-rock. Again with a hint of Morricone. It's entirely possible the snare drum makes no sense. Listening to it again now, I have no idea. I thought it was rubbish when I wrote it but it seems to grow on you.

This too was supposed to be minimalistic until I threw in all the spacey arpeggios. I think some of it could benefit from the sound being fleshed out more, it seems a bit sparse, but not too bad otherwise.

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