sound collage

As an "experimental" (emphasis on "mental") musician, I tend to do some really weird stuff. This little piece is basically the result of me sitting around "noodiling" on the (Reverend) Warhawk and the (Behringer) V-amp 2. It's 3 different improv tracks + 1 track where I just played chords -- single strum and let them ring. In my track editor, I basically pulled a photoshop-like collage of the parts -- erasing some areas and "blending the edges"... the music is so "flow of consciousness" that it lacks anything resembling a beat -- it's like drifting on the sea... so I added a percussion track at an approximate beat to fit the guitar tracks as a (not a musical) *counterpoint*, i.e., it adds contrast...and, I think, focus. I just wanted to see if I could make something out of, bascailly, random tracks. And I have this theory: you can get away with just about anything as long as you give people a visual stimulus to distract them ... LOL ... hence the animation ( -- "hence"... geez i'm getting old -- and yet another reason why you'll never see ME in any of my videos trying to perform this stuff... the flaws are bad enough without providing the proof.) Anyway, as I've said before, I am, 99.5% of the time, an acoustic guitarist... but I just love the subtle nuances I can get out of the Warhawk/V-amp combination... they're the best toys I currently have in my desktop music setup.

Oh -- the animation... I did that from scratch. I made an image of the 9 bands of LEDs and the audio controls a black masking layer (sprite) for each one revealing the intesity of that band... it's a fairly accurate representation, but the audio is not really that "hot" -- I fudged the limits so I would get to see some of the peaks during the rendering. It worked out well, but I'm not really that happy with it because I can't just drop in any audio, I'll have to reset it each band any time I want to reuse the effect (and next time I need to rework the graphics to spread them out more to fill the video frame.) For those of you who have the capable software to assemble this effect -- the secret is to quantize the sprite animation so that it reveals a complete "LED" as it moves (without quantizing, you get a very unrealistic revealing of partials LEDs -- still looks good, and it's smooth, but it's not realistic.)

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Reverend Warhawk
• Behringer V-amp
• animation

[kye321taylor]

that is pretty cool

[jamesskater]

kick ass!