Just Give Me a Voice

[Amberwolf]

Just Give Me a Voice

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/just-give-me-a-voice

This one was rescued from oblivion by chance--I'd some long time before recorded some noodling around on the guitar to a simple repetitititititve drumtrack (some Musiclab SlicyDrummer Lite default fed into DR-008 with some basic drumkit), but one day after having problems with a different project that kept crashing because of a plugin problem, and not wanting to keep dealing with that, i was fishing thru old projects to see what I could just play around with for fun.

I loaded up a piano synth, and the SI Strings, and played them both from the same keyboard, and started playing wiht the built in track arpeggiator.  Eventually I found an interesting simple pattern, edited it's settings to suit the playing I could manage (I often have poor fine control of my body so I don't play anything well), and discovered that the strings had a very different velocity response than the piano, so I used that to keep the piano going about the same volume in places where the strings would quieten down or get louder, without having to mess around with post-performance volume envelopes, velocity edits, etc...it's much more fun to do stuff when I can create on-the-fly, even if I have to do lots of mistake-edits later.  

Then I chopped up the guitar track (actually played in using the Ibanez 6-string bass, since the strings are far enough apart for me to fret without banging the wrong strings; I have to play all guitars laying in my lap face up with fingers from the top, not wrapped around the neck), nuked the very bad bass track and stuck in the SI Bass Guitar instead, and drew in a MIDI track to work with parts of the existing real guitar track.   Had to do some major corrections, timing, etc. for that guitar track, and used the clip-properties retuning functions to change which notes were played in several sections.   IIRC it's using Shred by AcmeBarGig for the amp and head fx. 

Then came replacing the crappy drummachine track with something sounding more like a real performance.  I'm sure it's not like a real drummer would play, since I can't do that either, but it fits the rest of the song.   

Much more detail work later, and you get what you hear.

 

All constructive criticism welcome.   

(I'm no professional; it's just a (very important to me) hobby, so improvement is always possible, and easier with help from others.  Heck, I'm not even a musician, or a real composer, etc.)

 

More of various styles at

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com

 

with older and more experimental / unfinished work at

http://soundclick.com/amberwolf

 

Edited September 2 by Amberwolf

[jack c.]

for not being a musician your a cut above the rest.nice.jack c

[mark skinner]

Totally agree with jack c.   All of your song cover art is quite impressive as well.   enjoyed several tunes.  mark

[Amberwolf]

  

On 9/1/2024 at 6:31 AM, jack c. said:

for not being a musician your a cut above the rest.nice.jack c

  

10 hours ago, mark skinner said:

Totally agree with jack c.   All of your song cover art is quite impressive as well.   enjoyed several tunes.  mark

 

Thanks!

This specific piece is one of the ones I'm more proud of than the others; it turned out a lot better than it's original, linked below.

https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=14566886

But that original abandoned idea did turn out to be usable to make this one from, which is why I save everything I play in, even if it feels like garbage.   Sometimes it won't become a song on it's own, but I may borrow bits out of it to complement a song that doesn't have enough to complete it or is missing that one thing somewhere.

 

 

The cover art, other than the lettering (done in MSpaint), was each a few hours of fighting with google's AI Test Kitchen to get it to do things that vaguely resemble what I was after.  None of them are what I really wanted, but it would take me at least a month (if I didn't have a dayjob) to create even one of the ones I did get, doing it myself in GIMP or similar programs.  AI doesn't "understand" anything, and the google stuff doesn't do iterative creation where you can tell it to make changes to an existing result and re-generate it.  Instead it completely generates a new thing even if you just change one tiny word (or often, none at all), even if you lock the "seed" number in it's settings.   (there is an edit function, but all you can do with that is give it a round spot to mark where you want change to happen, then tell it the change, then it really crappily shoves something else that's not what you told it in there, in a much worse editing style than even I had when I first started working with paint programs back in the 90s.   

 

But if you try long enough, eventually it can give you something close enough to what you want to be able to use, if you are not picky about details (like having five or six limbs, or three eyes, or instruments with 3 strings or keyboards pointing the wrong way to be able to be played, or cellos being played with drumsticks and vice-versa. 😆 

 

The stuff I used to do myself in paint programs was like this, but I just don't have time for it anymore. (the moon and columns I created in TrueSpace2, and the nebula and exploding star were separate images from Hubblesite, IIRC; all blended together in PaintShopPro4). 

Edited September 8 by Amberwolf