John Bradley

If there is an eel near the reef

Eating fish with its teeth

That’s a moray!

Indeed! Who's got time for that, there's product to ship!

It’s also useful on occasion to take a lead line and slam it to on-pitch and on-time, and shift the blobs aroud a crazy amount (+/- 7 semitones?) in order to recompose the melody and make it more interesting.

Then resing a few more takes using that as a guide track before deleting it.

Also works for guitar solos and working out vocal harmonies.

Melodyne Studio is a very useful compositional tool, even if you need to rerecord the parts afterwards.

Yeah, you can get away with a lot on the backing vocals. Crushing them to on-grid pitch, shifting blobs more than a semitone up or down, etc. 

Things that’d sound completely fake and weird on a lead vocal, or in isolation, but mixed in with a couple extra backing vocal tracks plus the lead line and they glue together into something pleasant. 

Within reason, of course!

…they’re really not that great. Wholly inferior to that Prince of Foods, the Burrito.

I try not to get too political in these songs, but sometimes you’ve just got to tackle the important issues and speak uncomfortable truths.

Nearly all shots were generated with Adobe’s “text to image” AI mcjibble, so that’s why they’re all a liitle “off”. AI doesn’t understand the number of strings and tuners on a guitar, what human hands look like, whether taco stuff goes on the inside or outside of the shell, and so on. But they’re colorful things to look at while the song plays, and that’s largely the point of a music video.

Thanks, glad y'all liked it!

Couldn't have made the video without the help of all the wonderful lunatics who dress up their dogs and share pictures of same. It was once such photo that got me rolling the phrase "punk chihuahua" around in my head and thinking "that's got a good rhythm".

Originally was thinking of Psychostick's Girl Directions, but opted for Holiday in Cambodia as it was more musically my sort of thing. 

Wrote lyrics and recorded the song (in CbB, obviously. All processing (including amp sims) done in-box.), and then had to find images that kinda matched up with the lyrics.

The Internet did not disappoint!

“Peanut, in this house we sit in front of the pillows, not behind them.”

”AROOO?”

Here's a song (and video) I did this week.

The song is the Dead Kennedys' Holiday in Cambodia but with new lyrics about an anthropomorphic poseur dog with Short Man's Syndrome.

Obviously. Some songs just write themselves.

Also, there's some guitar nonsense.

Select the clip(s) in question.

Right click and go to Associated Audio Files in the context menu.

Click Recompute Picture(s) in the dialog box.

Hopefully 3.9 will happen soon. Nectar’s been my vocal strip of choice for years.

In the interim, I’ve been working around it by not using the Harmonizer module, only enabling Nectar when I’m in high latency mix mode (1024 samples at 44.1), and freezing the track as soon as possible. 

It’d be nice if it just worked again, like 3.7 did!

All the hip kids have switched to Notepad# at this point.

I just position the 'now' cursor where I want it to be, and drag-and-drop an MP3 file onto the track pane.

Creates a new track with the MP3 audio starting at 'now'.

3 hours ago, marled said:

Melodyne is a very useful, almost irreplaceable tool

Melodyne is the Secret Sauce that turns my tracks into something I'd be willing to play for other people!

While not quite the same, I contacted them a few months back about the questionable behavior of their horizontal scrolling.

A German assured me that it was perfect the way it is. 😀

Thought some of you might like to take a look at this one. It's like the original, but with like 800% more guitars...

5 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Different chick on the wake up, sure why not

The entire video was assembled from free stock footage, so I had to work with what I coukd find.

5 hours ago, PhonoBrainer said:

Check out John's "Dirty Laundry"

Yeah, funny thing. It’d been up on SoundCloud for a year and a half, and then out of the blue it was hit with a copyright strike and removed. “Cover” is not “fair use”, so there’s no defense beyond “don’t do covers”. Which is all I do.

Anyway, thanks for listening. Glad you liked it!

Thanks. To be fair, I'd never heard the song either, before the singer said "I want to do this obscure Cure song..."

Thanks, gladja like it!

2 hours ago, FreeEarCandy said:

I just can't make the connection between Lullaby and the spider theme.

You’ll have to take that up with The Cure. 😀

A cover of Lullaby I recorded in my bedroom (in Cakewalk, natch), in collaboration with two vocalists who live thousands of miles from me.

Features an extended guitar solo, because why wouldn't it?

Complete with a creepy video. NOT for arachnophobes!

Thorn for $20 is a bargain.

It's the first synth I reach for whenever I need something huge and modern sounding.

I'm pleased to present what is probably one of the top-3 covers of I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas – because unlike White Christmas, I could only find a handful of covers for this classic!

And does the original (or any of the other covers) feature an extended guitar solo AND a goofy animated hippo? Of course not. I rest my case!

FWIW, there's an entire 13-song Christmas album of this sort of thing here: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob2wyuQqKoo&list=PLtwxdNkCVKIcvub4tOCOFVJgGGCFMp9k4

You'll only see pitchwheel events in the Event List if they were recorded.

But if the pitchwheel on the controller is not returning to zero, it will make whatever live (unfrozen) soft synth you have currently selected go sharp or flat.

Disconnect or turn off the controller.

Thanks for giving it a listen!

All guitars were recorded direct and processed in-box via Blue Cat's Axiom. The vocals were recorded (dry) by the singers in their respective homes (Oklahoma and Spain) and emailed to me to glue together into a track. Melodyne Studio was crucial (as usual) in getting the vocal timings & pitches synced-up.

Guitars and vocals are the only 'real' things in the mix. Drums are SSD5.5, bass is Modo Bass, piano is probably Addictive Keys Studio Grand, with other things (Kontakt, Arturia V-Collection, Spitfire's Epic Strings, etc.) providing additional instruments as neeeded.