Cloudwalkers

[Amberwolf]

Cloudwalkers

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/cloudwalkers

This is one of the very few that was made for a specific "story":  I made it to be about a zeppelin voyage and battle in the clouds of another planet's sky, from a story "Last Cruise of the Zeppelin Tempest" by JP Boyd.  

So, fly thru some clouds and enjoy.  

 

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.)

 

All the guitar on this one was played in by me (I think on the Ibanez 6string bass), edited for mistakes as much as possible, and timing where I could.  But that was five and a half years ago and I was still learning a lot about the many  audiosnap functions (and related ones), so it could be improved.  (also could be improved by having a real guitar player).  

 

EDIT: Looked up some notes, and it's not the Ibanez, its' a crappy First Act guitar. 

Pasted the notes in here in case they're useful or interesting. 

I have four guitar tracks.

The first is the one I laid the basics of teh song down in, where i just played until I had something useful, and cut several minutes of the beginning out entirely, reducing it to the 9 or so it is now. Recorded in dry via the Avid FastTrackProUSB.

In SONAR's effects bin for that track it has Wusikstation's FX, set to preset 16, with some of the levels of controls tweaked (don't remember what I adjusted, would have to compare the defaults to what I have to figure that out; I just tweaked till it sounded like I wanted). Next is SONAR's SonitusFX Delay, which is basically jsut a stereo delay, set to sync with the host with a left delay of 1 beat and a right delay of 3/4, which at the 99bpm of the project gives me 600ms/450ms. There's a crossfeed of about 10% between the two, and a feedback of about 13%, and a mix of 67% wet. THen there's SONAR's SonitusFX Delay, set to the Big Blue preset (kind of a big hall) tweaked up to be fairly diffuse.


This track's main audio clip is also cloned to the Bass track, which has the SonitusFX Delay in it's bin with basically the same settings as the above, except only about 10% feedback and 6% crossfeed. The bass has a sub-bus it goes to that has the Sonitus Multiband EQ in it, which is setup for Vintage Compression and the EQ maxing out the bass up to about 80hz, then the next band up to about 300hz a few dB above normal, then the rest of teh bands way down below normal or zeroed. Effectively this could just be put in the bass track itself, as this song has no ohter stuff routed thru it, but it's part of my template so I just use it this way.


The "fat" lead guitar track uses the same effect types as the first track, in it's own bin, except it has the VST BJ Overdrive between Wusik and Delay. Deptha and volume are maxed, with drive at about 45. The reverb settings are almost the same, but the early reflections are set much lower.


The overlay track (the high pitched bits here and there) has the WusikStation FX with teh same preset as the tohers, then teh SonitusFX Modulator set to "Creeping Feedback" which is a string phaser, I tweaked it but I think most of the settings are the same. Then the same delay, but with feedback at 25% and mix at 30%.


I didn't adjust the tone or volume controls on the guitar for any of them, both are at max clockwise, so full high tones and full volume.

All of those except bass track feed to an Audio sub buss, whihc has the SonitusFX Multiband EQ set to th Vintage Master preset, untouched.

All the busses go to a Main Buss that has another SFX MEQ, which I think was originally the VM preset, but I've tweaked it here and there enough that I don't recall where it started--but it is still very similar to that preset. It's pretty flat EQ, average compression, mostly just there to ensure the final mix doesn't distort but still "fills" the speakers. Without it, the audio is more dynamic, but must be turned down significantly to keep it from peaking out in a number of places in almost any project.

(note from today five years later; not sure if it is, but it's what I did then) The best way to use a final EQ/comp like this is to automate it so it's bypassed almost all the time, and then just adjust it's mix ratio (or knees) so durign the too-loud parts it is compressing sufficiently to prevent clipping, but that most of the time it leaves everything dynamic. 

 

 

It's one of those "someday I'd like to go back and...." songs, that's about good enough as is, but could certainly be better in quite a few ways. Tempo changes would probably help it a lot. 😳

 

Haven't made new track art so it still has the old logo art

 

Edited September 16 by Amberwolf

[Amberwolf]

Played around and convinced the program to give me something resembling what I wanted for track art:

[AndyB01]

Nice artwork. Has kind of a U2 feel, I guess I'd have liked a little more variation and maybe the drums need a little more weight?

Definitely worth revisiting in my view.

Andy

[Amberwolf]

@AndyB01

Thanks!  

Yeah, I'd probably totally redo the drums; I know a fair bit more about how to set them up for better effect now, such as in my WIP Ookami no Kari no Yume over here, 

or Just Give Me A Voice over here:

 

 

 

Edited September 18 by Amberwolf

[Amberwolf]

16 hours ago, AndyB01 said:

Nice artwork.

If I had the time, I'd do the artwork completely on my own...but since I don't, the artwork is AI generated via google's ai test kitchen imagefx program.  I takes quite a bit of work  and time (up to several hours of my time, and hundreds of iterations) to figure out the right words and phrases and order to get it to provide anything even close to what you want, but it is much less time than it would take me to actually draw it all up myself (weeks or more, which I don't have available). 

Half the time it does really weird stuff that totally messes up an iteration.  Might be fixable with hand-painting over it if I had the time, but that's why I'm using the program in the first place.    

Sometimes it does almost what you want, but has some obvious mistake a human wouldn't ever do. Or it ignores a significant thing you told it, or mixes some of them up, etc.  

It has no way to 'redo' a piece.  It does every one of them "from scratch" even if you tell it the very same thing it generates different outputs (sometimes way way different). It has an "edit" function but that just lets you crudely paint over a piece with a round patch of newly generated material that is not integrated in any way with the underlying thing.  You're better off generating just the part you need to be different, then manually blending the two in a paint program yourself--the ai really really really sucks at it. 

 

At the end of this post are some examples of wierd stuff it did in the session of creating the artwork for this. I had several concepts I tried, from inside the bridge of the zeppelin to outside in the sky to just behind one of the planes, to trying to make it obvious it's on some other planet (by using a ringed world or a superjovian in the sky).   I tried many ways to get it to show a POV from right outside the bridge windows (so you could also see into the bridge), under and across the side of the zeppelin, to show towering cloudbanks and the other zeppelin and the fighters in the distance.

For instance, here's the text i used for the last type:

"On a dark moonless night , seen from behind as they fly away from you, the small wolf pilot of a gray unmarked biplane flying formation with a single huge sleek zeppelin with a red wolfhead in a shield on the tailfins .   A different more distant zeppelin flying away from all of this has a black dragon painted on it.   Both are flying through tall dark Cumulonimbus incus clouds high over the dark ocean far below.     Distant tiny biplanes dogfight among the clouds.  The dim baleful blurred barely visible ghost of a dark red-glowing gigantic superjovian planet fills the entire sky as the only light source, and it's shadow cuts across the scene like a black sheet."

it always ignored that entire last phrase, and it usually ignored "moonless", and usually put all the markings on all the zeppelins together, and always put more zeps than it should.  Some were very spectacular failures; beautiful and even nearly inspired layouts, lighting, etc., but messed up in some seriously unusable way.   Even the one I chose is such a failure, in that the plane has no front end or engine, but since it's possible to have a pusher-prop plane, it's at least not impossible for it to exist like some of the stuff it created.  

The first example below has what looks like a Viper from Galactica in just about the center of the image.  Others have the wolf pilot of the closest biplane inside the parts of the plane, or gigantic compared to the plane, or even just sitting on the top wing, etc.  Some of the zeppelins have wolves sticking out of hte side of the fuselage, or stuck like 3d logos on there, or only partly existing sitting on some sort of platform sticking out of the zep, etc.   Some of the interior bridge images have wolves outside the zep, perhaps floating nearby?  One has them inside the window frames, another that I actually wanted to use because of it has a "bobble head" wolf on the "dashboard". :laugh:  Another has what looks like a saxophone in one of the wolves' "arms".  One has a plane *inside* the bridge cabin (this could be excused as a hanging model if asked, but I'm sure that's not what happened with the program  ).  One of them made the planet *into* a ring around the sky...another has the ring like a frisbee being thrown at (or by) the planet.... 

Some of them really are "good", if it weren't for the serious flaws because computers can't actually understand things or "know" what they are, etc.  Some are terrible.   

None of them has the aesthetic I was after, though. 

 

Another variation was "Seen from behind at a distance, one huge long narrow zeppelin with a royal crest on the tailfins of a red wolfhead in a shield is ponderously chasing another, through and inside broken puffy cloudbanks high over the distant dark ocean far below.     Above the clouds are distant tiny biplanes in a dogfight far away.  In the distance is another long skinny zeppelin coming out of a tall dark thunderhead."  and another was "Seen from behind at a distance, one huge long narrow zeppelin is ponderously chasing another , over broken puffy cloudbanks high over the distant dark ocean far below .   In the windows of the closest zeppelin 's gondola are photorealistic wolves seated at the controls .  Above the clouds are distant tiny biplanes in a dogfight far away.  In the distance is another long skinny zeppelin coming out of a tall dark thunderhead ." Tried that one on ChatGPT and I think I blew it up. 😆 

 

I think I had over four hundred variations, with none of them actually doing what I told it to.   

                    

Edited September 18 by Amberwolf